100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)

02 Hounds of Love

03 The Big Sky

04 Mother Stands for Comfort

05 Cloudbusting

06 And Dream of Sheep

07 Under Ice

08 Waking the Witch

09 Watching You Without Me

10 Jig of Life

11 Hello Earth

12 The Morning Fog

Kate Bush was 27 years old when Hounds of Love was released, but for much of the album she sounds not so much wise beyond her years as simply timeless. The singersongwriter’s fifth album is a repository of deeply felt wisdom and extended artistic expression, allied to technical innovation and a very British sense of pop music as being the most pleasurable of creative experiments. The record, which typically appeared fully formed just at the point where critics and fans were wondering what had become of Bush, shared the spotlight in the close of 1985 with Madonna’s Like a Virgin, and more than a quarter of a century on it has totally eclipsed that rival.

On the opening ‘Running Up That Hill’, which sets the framework of prominent percussion, striking melodies and extensive use of the then new Fairlight synthesiser, Bush sings that, ‘If only I could, I’d make a deal with God’, but the album was borne of her need for control. Bush, with the help of Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour, had been signed to EMI in the mid-1970s while still attending a Catholic girls’ school in London. They gave her time to complete her studies and mature artistically. But soon after ‘Wuthering Heights’ and her debut album, The Kick Inside, announced her in 1978, she was asserting her independence.

By the time she began working on Hounds of Love, Bush controlled her publishing and management companies and had built her own studio in a barn behind her family’s farm house, where she was the producer. The singer wasn’t going to wear the threat of an oversized recording bill wielded by the record company as justification for prematurely releasing a record. She was just as in control on the songs that resulted in the two years of sessions that followed 1982’s The Dreaming. These songs are dazzling and fierce, knowing and mesmeric.

It’s an album made for vinyl with a Side A and a Side B (Bush has said she thinks of it as two separate records), although they still feel dovetailed. Hounds of Love ushered in a succession of gloriously rich pop tunes, most of which went on to be released as singles. ‘Cloudbusting’, a grown son’s memories of his father inspired by the renegade psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, while the title track, with Bush’s nuanced vocal, turns into a joyously defiant appeal for her lover’s support.

If the first side looks upwards, literally taking in the wonders above on ‘The Big Sky’ and equating it with creative necessity, then the flipside is immersed in water and the struggle to survive. Entitled The Ninth Wave, the suite of interconnected songs functions as a single, eclectic piece, 25 minutes in length with inspiration via Tennyson’s poem of the same name. A woman floats in the water, through day and night and, as she weakens, her mind wanders and the setting skips between intricately assembled passages – discordant art-rock on ‘Waking the Witch’, biting Celtic folk on ‘Jig of Life’, and ambient sound collages on ‘Watching You Without Me’. On the latter track she imagines life for those she loves without her, but it’s typical of Hounds of Love that the passing that comes to bear on ‘Hello Earth’ culminates with a sense of rebirth on the glistening ‘The Morning Fog’.

These 12 tracks suggest so much, including the circular nature of life. If there are intensely human traits at play, such as vulnerability and mortality, it’s still worth pondering whether Kate Bush, hoping to make a deal with God, isn’t some minor deity in her own right.