The album was a critical success, but failed commercially; AllMusic called it "an unfortunately neglected masterpiece of '70s progressive rock.

After the two groups recorded their second album, In Praise of Learning in early 1975, the merger ended and Blegvad moved to New York City.

[4] There Blegvad spent the rest of the year earning a living as an illustrator, which included drawing backgrounds for Peanuts animated films.

[5] In March 1976 Greaves left Henry Cow and joined Blegvad in New York City to start work on Kew.

evolved from a piece Greaves wrote called "York" that was performed by Henry Cow in the early 1970s, but never recorded.

[8] Blegvad wrote "surreal" lyrics that were filled with "anagrams, palindromes and other verbal games",[2] and illustrated them with explanatory pictures and diagrams that later appeared on the album's record sleeve, "to be used in conjunction with the words".

[10] At the time Blegvad had begun experimenting with cartooning, an activity that later led to him doing a weekly comic strip for The Independent on Sunday called Leviathan, and he was fascinated with the relationship between text and image.

"[11] Blegvad also said in an interview that he created experimental and confusing lyrics as a way of coming to terms with Greaves's complicated music, which he found difficult to play.

was ready to record, jazz musicians Michael Mantler and Carla Bley offered the use of their Grog Kill Studio in Woodstock, New York.

[8] Mantler and Bley also played on the album, along with avant-garde jazz drummer Andrew Cyrille, vocalist Lisa Herman and others.

The album cover is a reproduction of a painting by Charles Willson Peale entitled Exhuming the First American Mastodon (1806–1808).

is divided into two parts: the first is composed entirely of anagrams of the title, while the second builds up to a palindrome, "Peel's foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep."

[18][additional citation(s) needed] Music critic Stewart Mason of AllMusic called Kew.

"[2] He described the album as "a brilliant amalgam of Slapp Happy's skewed pop sense, the collective improvisation approach of Henry Cow, the sly wit of the Canterbury prog rock scene" and said it is "a challenging but surprisingly accessible album that rewards as much attention as the listener offers it.

was performed live in its entirety for the first time in 31 years since its original release at Les Abattoirs in Bourgoin-Jallieu, France.

It includes contributions by Amy Beal, Carla Bley, Franklin Bruno, Sheridan Coakley, Jonathan Coe, Jane Colling, Andrew Cyrille, François Ducat, John Greaves, Doug Harvey, Lisa Herman, Jeff Hoke, Dana Johnson, Andrew Joron, Glenn Kenny, Frank Key, Simon Lucas, Karen Mantler, Harry Mathews, Tanya Peixoto, Benjamin Piekut, Margit Rosen, Philip Tagney, Robert Wyatt, Rafi Zabor and Siegfried Zielinski.

In the second part of the book, a consortium of writers and artists respond to the album in various ways, illuminating without dispelling the mystery of a work designed to resist interpretation even as it invites it.