AT the end of September 1980 Bush and Palmer went to see Stevie Wonder perform during his week-long run of concerts at Wembley Arena. He played for over three hours and, inspired by the sheer energy of Wonder’s performance and by meeting him backstage, she returned home and wrote much of ‘Sat In Your Lap’ the following day. It marked the symbolic end of what was becoming a pattern of sorts: complete immersion in a project, then deflation. She described the period immediately after finishing Never For Ever as “sort of terrible introverted depression. The anti-climax after all that work really set in in a bad way, and that can be very damaging to an artist. I could sit down at the piano and want to write, and nothing would happen.”1
It was a salutary lesson that there was, after all, more to life than work, but it was a lesson she wasn’t quite ready to take on board. She had moved almost immediately from the ‘Tour Of Life’ into the making of the album and the batteries were drained. She took a short break, saw her friends and spent time with her family – and then proceeded to throw herself back into her music, with even greater conviction and an increasing obsession for attaining perfection.
Shortly after the release of Never For Ever Bush bought a property on Court Road in Eltham, south London, a large, detached Victorian house set back from the road, hidden behind imposing entrance gates and surrounded by trees. Located just across the road from the rather opulent greenery of Royal Blackheath Golf Club, it was hardly a flashy locale: low-key, suburban, calm, sober and middle class, tucked out of the way and still within easy striking distance of East Wickham Farm. It became another Bush base camp, a hub for all three siblings. Paddy moved in next door, while Jay frequently used the property. It was 44 Wickham Road on a grander scale, offering security in numbers.
It also gave her music more room. She installed an eight-track demo studio in the house and throughout the rest of 1980 and into early 1981, between promotional appearances, she dedicated herself to writing, trying to orientate her new sound using a combination of piano, Yamaha CS-80 and electronic Linn drums. She had developed ideas for ‘The Dreaming’ and ‘Houdini’ during the latter stages of Never For Ever, but, significantly, this was to be the first of her albums where no pre-1978 songs would be included or indeed even considered. The record’s starting point (indeed, arguably the point) was rhythm and texture – the song itself was only the first footfall in a long, arduous climb. On Never For Ever she had again been troubled by the difficulty of adding a kick, a real rhythmic thrust to songs written on the piano – the stripped down rock band approach of a song like ‘Violin’ was too conventional, too solid, too grounded. For many of the new songs she reversed the compositional process, starting with the beat and then afterwards painting in the chords, melodies and words. “I felt as if my writing needed some kind of shock,” she said.2
She remained infatuated with the possibilities of the Fairlight, and was determined to use its varied sound palette on almost all the songs on the next album. At first she hired one from Syco Systems before finally investing heavily in buying her own instrument towards the end of making The Dreaming, recognising it as an indispensable addition to her arsenal. Although she was towards the head of the pack, Bush was far from alone in embracing new possibilities. It’s near impossible to overstate the manner in which technology was influencing music at this time. In the early Eighties a growing obsession with the sound rather than the song made for some arresting, strange and highly innovative pop music. Listen back to records made during that era by everyone from Public Image Ltd, Killing Joke and Buggles to Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Eurythmics and you will hear some sonically extreme, rhythmically interesting and downright odd pop records. Pared down duos such as Soft Cell and Yazoo became intrigued by the idea of juxtaposing the clinical sound of cutting edge technology with the exposed nerve ends of raw human emotion, of combining a machine-like chilliness with a warm, human presence. Bush had the same idea; she simply insisted on taking it to the furthest extremes.
Stevie Wonder apparently cleared her writer’s block. ‘Sat In Your Lap’ appeared almost without her trying, a fitting arrival for a song partly concerned with the slippery nature of knowledge and creativity. A flood of new material followed. She quickly came up with 20 songs for the album, writing in her home studio more or less spontaneously, coming up with a new song or a strong idea for a song almost every night. “I sat down at the piano, got a rhythm and just literally wrote the songs!” she recalled. “The words probably weren’t there, but the idea was there and all the tunes were there.”3 It was to prove the only part of the album process that happened quickly. Once she moved into the studio, all “the speed and spontaneity seemed to evaporate.”4
First, she had to decide upon the practicalities: Who? Where? How? She had concluded that she no longer wanted to work with her friend Jon Kelly, deciding with a typically firm resolve that it was time to sever all ties with the old order and finally strike out on her own. “She phoned me up and said how much she’d loved the album but she was going to try something different on this next one,” says Kelly. “I can’t remember what the words were but she said it beautifully. She went on to do The Dreaming and called me up to have a listen as soon as it was finished.”
From there, she toyed with hiring a big name producer. Tony Visconti had worked with David Bowie on most of his landmark records of the Seventies and also his most recent, 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps); according to Visconti’s admittedly rather vague recollection, he and Bush affected a somewhat strange but agreeable meeting to discuss working together. “During the making of Lodger [released in May, 1979] I was listening to Lionheart in my Montreux hotel room,” he recalls. “I was so moved by the album I wrote her a fan letter on hotel stationery, which she received and read. About a year or so later I received a phone call from her asking me to meet up with her to discuss working on her new album. Before we met I made a very specific astrological chart for her. I had been a dabbler for a decade by then. I gave it to her over lunch in a restaurant near her studio in the West End, and we spoke a lot about Bowie and Aikido, her family’s preferred martial art.
“After lunch we were driven to the studio and she played a track or two for me. Honestly, I can’t remember a note. She was bent over, leaning on the back of a chair in front of the console. I was sitting behind her on the couch, and all I can remember is the Bush bum swaying in my face. I’m sure I loved the music, too, and I told her I’d like to work with her. Afterwards we had two phone conversations. In the first she told me how accurate and amazing the astrological chart was – she used the word ‘amazing’ a lot. In the second phone call she said, ‘I’ve decided to produce the album myself. But, Tony, if there was a producer I’d work with it would be you!’ It was the sweetest rejection I’ve ever had.”
It is still possible to hear Bowie and Visconti’s influence on The Dreaming. The thrilling “I must admit …” section of ‘Sat In Your Lap’, in particular, is an astonishingly precise imitation of Lodger-period Bowie, a fine example of the style of singing he calls his ‘histrionics’. There are echoes, too, of the burbling Afro-beat of ‘African Night Flight’, while the song’s unconventional rhythm shares similarities with ‘Golden Brown’ by another of her favourite bands, The Stranglers, although this time Bush’s song came first.
It was to be another pioneering artist, however, who exerted a major influence on the record. The sleeve credits on Never For Ever were significant. Bush had thanked Roy Harper for ‘holding on to the poet in his music’ and Peter Gabriel for ‘opening the windows’. These artists, alongside Pink Floyd, who had just released The Wall, which she loved, had become her peers, exemplars of artistic excellence, intelligence, integrity and experimentation, though their detractors would just as quickly call them precious, pretentious, portentous and about as relevant as Copernicus. This was a line of criticism Bush, too, constantly courted.
Harper had been recording his Universal Soldier album in Abbey Road while she was making Never For Ever and he had come in to Studio Two to add backing vocals to ‘Breathing’; Bush happily returned the favour, singing a duet on his track ‘You (The Game Part II)’. It was the beginning of a lifelong and continuing friendship. Gabriel, meanwhile, was not only a personal friend, but his career path had provided Bush with the outline of a yellow brick road which she occasionally followed. The connection began at the Bill Duffield benefit and had been solidified through making the Kate Christmas special and subsequently popping into each other’s sessions. “He came in a few times when we were doing Never For Ever, listened to some stuff and was very quiet,” says Jon Kelly. “They were very similar. They were kindred spirits in the way they were experimental with their work and groundbreaking, not following the normal route.”
Some of those who worked closely with both artists at this time suggest that Bush was rather calculated in her befriending of Gabriel. “At the time she just wanted to be Peter Gabriel as far as I could work out – the female Peter Gabriel,” says producer Hugh Padgham, who engineered parts of The Dreaming. “That’s from me observing. When I worked with her on The Dreaming she was always trying to do things but she didn’t realise that it wasn’t as easy to be Peter Gabriel as she might have thought.”
“Kate, I think, had made a point of making Peter her friend,” adds Steve Lillywhite, Gabriel’s producer at the time. “I’m sure she was influenced a lot by Peter, and subsequently she went on and made art her career. That’s all you can ever hope for.”
Although Bush has several times displayed an uncanny knack of narrowing in on artists she admires and is far from reticent about approaching them to work with her, it’s unlikely to have been quite as calculated as it seems – after all, it was the tragedy of Duffield’s death that had initially brought them together. It’s certainly true, however, that in Gabriel she saw an artist whose sense of experimentation, use of new technology and ability to tackle non-traditional lyrical themes, all marshalled within a broad pop sensibility, matched her ambitions for her own music. “The only person I’ve met who is really into the same kind of approach to playing as I [have] is Peter,” she said. “He’s going for emotional content of the music and lyrics, and he changes his voice.”5
It was only a matter of time before they recorded with one another. During the Never For Ever sessions Bush was invited into the Townhouse studios to sing on Gabriel’s third album, often known as ‘melt’ due its distinctive cover image, adding atmospheric backing vocals to ‘I Don’t Remember’, ‘No Self Control’ and, most significantly, ‘Games Without Frontiers’, on which she was something of a last minute addition. “We had someone else sing the ‘Jeux Sans Frontieres’ line on ‘Games Without Frontiers’, and we realised that their accent wasn’t so great,” recalls Lillywhite, who refuses to name the singer who was replaced. “So Peter decided to ask Kate down. It was fantastic, [she was] this wonderful sort of hippie chick. She had that song, ‘Wow’, and I remember her saying “wow” all the time and I thought, ‘Well, that’s why she wrote that song, because that’s what she says!’ I just remember sitting around smoking joints with her and having a good time. It was easy, really, no more than half an hour in the studio.”
‘Games Without Frontiers’ became Gabriel’s biggest solo hit to date, released in February 1980 and rising to number four in March. Around the same time, EMI asked Bush and Kelly if they could hear some of the new Never For Ever material, and they travelled to the A&R department at Manchester Square – Bush was keen not to let the company suits into her domain – to play four songs, including ‘Babooshka’, ‘Breathing’ and ‘Army Dreamers’, all lined up as potential singles. “They were happy,” Kelly recalls. “And as they were making idle chat at the end, one of them said, ‘Have you heard that new Peter Gabriel song?’, and someone else said, ‘Yeah, that woman, I can’t understand what the hell she’s singing!’ Kate looked at me and we both struggled not to laugh. Poor bloke. Didn’t know it was her. I wonder how he felt when he found out.”
A little later they tried to write a song together called ‘Ibiza’, but it was not completed to their satisfaction. It’s difficult to imagine such a private, personal composer as Bush being a natural co-writer, but the process of befriending, observing and recording with Gabriel fed directly into her aspirations for her next album. She had been impressed by the Townhouse’s Solid State Logic (SSL) 4000 B console, a new development which integrated a studio computer system with an in-line audio console. “We had this SSL B desk, a prototype, with a lot of quirks to it,” says Nick Launay, an in-house engineer at the Townhouse. “It was very strange, it had compressors and gates on every channel, which had never been done before.”
More significantly, she had been blown away by the drums on Gabriel’s album. Although played by Jerry Marotta and Phil Collins, the sound was primarily the creation of Hugh Padgham, another house engineer at the Virgin-owned facility who is widely credited with creating the famous ‘gated’ drum effect at the Townhouse’s ‘stone room’ studio during his work with Steve Lillywhite. In simple terms, the drums are heavily compressed and then their natural reverb brutally cut-off using a ‘noise gate’ on the recording console, so that, in Padgham’s words, “when [the drummer] stopped playing it sucked the big sound of the room into nothing.”6 It can be heard to full effect on Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’.
This mixture of thunderous rhythm cannoning off the stone walls followed by an almost immediate, uneasy silence was the sound Bush craved. “Seeing Peter work in the Townhouse studio…. was the nearest thing I’d heard to real guts for a long, long time,” she said. “[It] was so exciting because the drums had so much power.”7 Tired of “a lazy acceptance of a drum kit”,8 she wanted something tribal, huge, with none of the conciliatory splash and sizzle of cymbal or hi-hat. This was to be the driving force behind her new music, onto which she could build structure and add detail.
Thus it was Padgham to whom Bush turned for the first sessions, and it was to the Townhouse that they decamped in May 1981. Most of the album’s backing tracks were recorded here over a period of three months using a small core of musicians, often just Preston Heyman or Stuart Elliott on drums and Del or Jimmy Bain, a former member of Rainbow turned session player, on bass. Bush played piano and Fairlight on almost every song. Brian Bath, Ian Bairnson and Alan Murphy played guitar, but most of what they added was never used; in the end, unusually, seven of the ten songs featured no guitar at all. The supreme – and supremely different – bass stylists Danny Thompson and Eberhard Weber later popped up on a track apiece. David Gilmour added backing vocals. Far more so than Never For Ever, it was to be an album defined by painterly overdubs, adding layers and layers of light and shade rather than relying on full-blown band performances.
It was not an auspicious start. Hugh Padgham is perhaps unique among humankind in that he doesn’t have terribly fond memories of working with Bush; the sessions lasted no more than three weeks before they parted company. “I couldn’t bear it after a bit, actually,” he says. “She didn’t really have any idea of the sonics, and didn’t understand why, if you put 150 layers of things all together, you couldn’t hear all of them. The whole thing with Gabriel is that everything had much more space around it. She would take 100 things and want them all to work together, and it didn’t. She didn’t really want to listen. As far as I was concerned, when we were doing those sessions it sounded shit. It pissed me off, actually.”
Bush, on the other hand, ever polite, recalled Padgham’s contributions as “positive” and “productive”.9 They worked together long enough to get a complete mix of ‘Sat In Your Lap’, which Bush hastily released as a stand-alone single on June 21, eager to preview her new sound. It was a song as complex lyrically as it was rhythmically, musing on the nature of enlightenment, cutting to the heart of her quest for spiritual advancement: is knowledge innate, instinctive and sexual (something literally “sat in your lap”), or can it only be gained through a lifetime of searching and striving (“The longest journey across the desert”), and even then possibly not at all? Heart or head; body or brain; nature or nurture; to look within or without? The single reached number 11, her last commercial success for some time, although its tribal statement was rather diluted by the impact of Adam & The Ants double-drum driven hits earlier the same year, ‘Stand And Deliver’ and ‘Prince Charming’, as well as the emergence of Bow Wow Wow and their highly stylised adoption of Burundi ritual music.
Padgham and Bush collaborated on two further songs, ‘Leave It Open’ and ‘Get Out Of My House’, but the engineer was busy and his enthusiasm for the project was, clearly, not engaged. Pencilled in to work on new albums by The Police, Phil Collins and Genesis, he was essentially engineering The Dreaming in his spare time and was happy to hand it over. “I had so much work going on at the time that I couldn’t really be bothered with it, it was just a pain in the arse,” he says. “I was doing it on my weekends off, and I think she wanted more attention, which was fair enough. I don’t remember every really having an argument with her – maybe a little one – but nothing major. The only other thing I can remember is that she used to say a helluva lot of, ‘Skin up, Hugh!’ I certainly didn’t lose any sleep when I passed the thing on.”
He suggested to Bush that his friend Paul Hardiman take over, but he was otherwise engaged, so Padgham’s assistant engineer Nick Launay held the reins; the pair met and clicked both personally and creatively. Launay had just finished producing Public Image Ltd’s Flowers Of Romance album at the Townhouse, another album showcasing the famed studio drum sound to fearsome effect, and another album of unbounded sonic experimentation. Bush listened and liked. She had always admired the Sex Pistols (she has since established a long-running mutual appreciation society with John Lydon), and for Launay the connection was not as strange as it might first have appeared. “She’d go out and play stuff on the piano and she was so, so brilliant,” he says. “The way she played didn’t sound like rock’n’roll at all. It sounded like classical music, but it didn’t come over as prog rock, which I didn’t like. I came from the punk rock thing, and to me she was punk rock. She was doing stuff that was going against the grain.”
Launay was only 20, and she still just 22, and it “really was like the kids are in control – it was great!” he says. “There wasn’t a record producer, there was basically her, the musicians that she chose, and me. That was it. Making that record had no rules. We could try everything that came to mind, which worked well for me because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was hyper and imaginative, had all these ideas going round my head, and I think the combination was magical. We were both kind of in the same place: ‘I wonder what this does?’”
For the musicians, recording the backing tracks for the songs was a process somewhat akin to assembling furniture when the instructions are in Aramaic and written in disappearing ink. A typical session on a song such as ‘Suspended In Gaffa’ could be a long, strange affair. Bush would first play the song on the piano and the drummer and bass player would drop in and try to follow. Then the questions would start. The drummer might ask, ‘You know the second time we go to the fifth section, something strange happens there and I end up on the wrong beat.’ Where most musicians deal in conventional verse, chorus, bridge structures, Bush’s songs – though not always lacking choruses – were often split into several distinct sections, sometimes in different time signatures. The musicians would be constantly writing down where the changes fell and frantically matching them to the lyrics. Bush would play the song again and everyone would concentrate intensely, trying to find a way of playing such a choppy piece of music as seamlessly as Bush seemed able to sitting at the piano. Often the entire ensemble collapsed into exasperated hysterics.
“I did a lot of editing together of different takes and it got very confusing at times,” says Launay. “Eventually you’d get there but it would be really complicated. I don’t think she had any realisation of how complex her songs were – to her they were very simple. She would explain things to the different musicians who came down, not in terms of notes, but in terms of the feeling she wanted to get across.”
She sat in the control room, watching intently as they played parts over and over again, trying to capture what she wanted. For much of the album Bush, as producer, was fighting the creeping suspicion that many of the musicians were looking at her and thinking, ‘God, does she really know what she’s doing?’ Some of them were indeed having doubts along those lines. Hers was neither a conventional nor terribly ‘musical’ way of working, and it was hard work for the session players, even those who had played with her for several years. “I did a lot of the routining for the songs on that album, but I just stepped aside in the end, I think I walked away,” says Brian Bath. “I felt a bit superfluous to what was going on. After five hours of playing the same bit you think, ‘What do I do? Am I going anywhere, is anything happening?’ Some of the stuff was just overdone. The Dreaming, to me, was just a massive noise, I couldn’t really listen to it.”
Other loyal servants agreed that too much choice might just as well have been no choice at all. “She was thinking more in terms of production and using unusual sounds,” says Ian Bairnson, who appeared on ‘Sat In Your Lap’ and ‘Leave It Open’. “That’s what people did when the technology thing went off like a bomb: ‘They’ll never guess what this is!’ There was Midi stuff, drum machines, Fairlights, and if you’ve got the money there it is. She had all these tools to play with and in some ways it was too much.”
The fact that she was not quite in mastery of the technology was both thrilling and time consuming. Once the basic tracks were laid down it was a question of digging away at the songs and letting her imagination loose on the machines, exploring the freedom that allowed her and Launay to indulge every single idea she had, often chasing their tails and ending up back where they started. Bush’s stated desire was for the music to be “experimental and quite cinematic”,10 and Launay felt that his job was to capture the essence of the films playing over and over again in her mind.
“We were always sat in front of this desk, just me and her, and at the end of the desk there were two huge bars of Cadbury’s milk chocolate and this huge bag of weed,” he recalls. “I think it helped make her imagination real. On ‘Houdini’, the lyrics to that were all very clear and when you’re working on those songs you’re there. It’s like working on a film, it’s extraordinary. I saw Sweeney Todd recently and that film made me think of Kate Bush: Olde Worlde London and England, a lot of superstition, gruesome tales, and tales of love. Musically you could tell she was in this world. The way she would communicate was very much like an excited kid: ‘How do we make those characters and the feelings they have into the music?’ ‘Can we do this, can we do that?’”
On a cover of Donovan’s ‘Lord Of The Reedy River’, one of the first things she and Launay recorded, specifically intended for the B-side to ‘Sat In Your Lap’, she wanted to sound like she was floating down a river as she sang, like some doomed heroine trapped in a pre-Raphaelite painting, so she descended to the disused swimming pool in the basement of the Townhouse in order that her voice could be recorded reflecting off the water.
To create the spacey metallic background sound on ‘The Dreaming’ she plugged a guitar and a piano into a harmoniser which was set an octave higher and connected to a reverb plate fed back into the harmoniser, resulting in the note going up and up and up in octaves until it went so high you couldn’t hear it. This effect was used on several songs. “It was an approach of: plug things in, play a few notes, see what it does, work out how you can manipulate the instrument you’re playing to work with those effects, and you end up with something unusual and different,” says Launay. For the drums they miked up 12-foot long strips of corrugated iron to make them sound like cannons firing from across a valley.
Partly inspired by Bush’s trip to Australia as a child (she ‘met’ a kangaroo and Paddy ‘met’ an emu, she recalled, both referenced in the song) and again in late 1978, ‘The Dreaming’ focused on the plight of Australian Aboriginals, their land exploited for ore to make plutonium and their people abandoned to the ravages of alcohol (“Devils in a bottle”), although her assertion in an interview that there were only “about two thousand aborigines left”11 suggested a certain lack of factual rigour. The song was built on the bones of a hard rhythmic tattoo, and marked her first collaboration with the Australian singer, painter and TV personality Rolf Harris. Bush had loved Harris’ ‘Sun Arise’ since she was a youngster and still cites it today as a seminal piece of ‘world music’. The song was a key inspiration for ‘The Dreaming’, prompting her to write a part for didjeridu on Fairlight and invite Harris into the studio to play it. She was hoping to have a blow herself, but was denied. “I went up [to the studio] the day the didjeridu arrived, and she wasn’t allowed to play the thing, which was deeply upsetting for her,” says Brian Southall, by now director of corporate PR at EMI. “Women aren’t allowed to play didjeridu, it’s Aboriginal law, and she wanted to emancipate the didjeridu for all women around the world, God bless her! It was great fun.” Harris taught Paddy how to play it instead.
At one point Robert Palmer, working next door, came in to say hello and throw a few kind words her way. “Every time somebody made a compliment about her music she would look like a deer caught in the headlights,” says Launay. “She’d literally say, ‘Wow!’ and blush. I don’t think she was aware of her talent. She is a genius, but it’s a kind of innocent genius.”
Because she was using a commercial studio owned by Virgin Records, Bush was at the mercy of their schedules. The Townhouse had other bookings and Launay was needed elsewhere, so the sessions moved to Abbey Road for several weeks in July and August, where she worked with house engineer Haydn Bendall, whom she first met when he was working on Roy Harper’s Universal Soldier. They recorded ‘Pull Out The Pin’ and ‘Night Of The Swallow’ during the sessions, which Bendall recalls as being “fragmented, difficult, very long hours. Everyone worked very hard.”
At one point during the recording of ‘Night Of The Swallow’ the musicians utilised all three Abbey Road studios at once: as Stuart Elliott’s played drums in Studio Three, the sound was fed through speakers into Studio One, where the ambience echoing through the cavernous hall was also taped, while the results were simultaneously recorded on the console in Studio Two. Afterwards she flew to Dublin and spent a day in Windmill Lane, working all night to record members of traditional Irish band Planxty (a long-cherished favourite of Jay and Paddy) and The Chieftains playing Bill Whelan’s exquisite arrangement for the song. And then straight back to the studio in London.
Perhaps unsurprisingly there followed a kind of crisis where Bush felt she was becoming lost in the woods of her own imagination, and struggled to locate the trail of breadcrumbs leading back to her initial inspiration. “I seemed to be losing sight of my direction, I wasn’t really sure what to do next,” she said.12 As the sole arbiter of the album’s progress, the responsibility sometimes weighed heavily but “she [was] very stoical about that,” says Bendall. “She doesn’t give up and she’s extremely tenacious.” A spontaneous visit to Loch Ness on the sleeper seemed to clear her mind, and she returned after a spot of monster-hunting with renewed focus. In the period leading up to Christmas 1981 she worked at home, concentrating on the songs, changing lyrics, creating backing vocals, making sure this wasn’t simply going to be an exercise in style over substance.
The final, interminable sessions were completed with engineer Paul Hardiman, now available, beginning at Odyssey Studios in the autumn of 1981 and completed at Advision Studios on Gosfield Street (hence the ‘Gosfield Goers’ credited on ‘The Dreaming’) between January and May 1981. Hardiman had pre-punk experience with groups such as Yes, ELP, Slade and Fleetwood Mac, but he had also worked recently with experimental punk band Wire on their first three albums, Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154. He was an innovative, somewhat eccentric presence with a highly attuned sense of the ridiculous, and his patience and understanding were a vital part of getting the album finished. “I understood the long haul,” says Hardiman. “As Kate is a snail-paced perfectionist, you [knew you] were in for the long run, which was OK.” Bush and Palmer both had a great deal of affection for him.
Although perhaps three quarters of what can be heard on the album had already been completed, these long sessions provided the all important top line: finalising lyrics, adding instrumentation, textures, new players, miking up a car door for the opening ‘Bang!’ on ‘The Dreaming’, stripping away, adding, subtracting.
In particular, she worked relentlessly on the vocals. Still lazily stereotyped as ‘hee-hee’ high and squeaky, Bush felt the way she had previously used her voice lent her music an association of sweetness and light that undermined much of her more serious lyrical intent. She wanted, she said, to give her voice “some balls”.13 Having recorded guide vocals at the Townhouse and Abbey Road, she now re-recorded the master vocals in sections, a highly intricate process considering that many of the songs utilised five or six completely different voices which required not only a different physical approach from her as a singer, but also different textures and production techniques. “It took weeks to do the vocals,” she said. “Especially because we were having to find the right effects and ambience for each voice.”14
Finding the precise timbre to communicate the emotions of the lyrics was an imperative. For ‘Houdini’ she did all the things singers aren’t supposed to do – drank a pint of milk, ate two bars of chocolate – to build up mucus in her throat and make her voice match the “spit and gravel in the thought.”15 A similarly exact marriage of vocal sound and song subject can be heard on the sobbing chorus of ‘All The Love’; in the desperate roar of “I love life!” on ‘Pull Out The Pin’; in the soaring tension of ‘Night Of The Swallow’ and the primal scream of ‘Get Out Of My House.’ Deeper, stronger, abandoned yet supremely controlled, it is the range and shifting textures of her voice, amid all the surrounding techno-fuss, that is the album’s greatest triumph. It was almost like hearing a girl becoming a woman.
Advision became a hermetically sealed environment, running to it own strange yet inevitable sense of time and logic. “Every night we ate take-away food, watched the evening news and returned to the dingy little treasure trove to dig for jewels,” Bush recalled.16 Del later talked about “coming up”17 from the windowless basement studio as though they were on a submarine. “Musicians were not around most of the time,” says Hardiman. “After their particular overdub was finished that was it until next time. The only constant was Del. One came with the other.”
During these long final sessions the fabric of reality started to warp and fray. The last two months coincided with the Falklands War, and they would surface occasionally to be greeted with a downward spiral of grim news. Del would look over at Hardiman and tell him they were both going to be called up for action. Towards the end Bush “was exhausted, and on nothing but a grape diet,” says Hardiman. She would work a minimum of 15-hour days at the studio then go home and listen to rough takes of the day’s work to establish what she needed to do tomorrow, and even during meal breaks at the studio she would be tinkering with the Fairlight in the control room. It was all consuming, leaving room for nothing else. “When I come out of the studio,” she said, “I feel like a Martian.”18
The sessions became “hours of crippling tedium with occasional bursts of extreme excitement,”19 and they resorted to unusual methods to keep spirits afloat. Hardiman created the character ‘My Dad’, which involved wearing a bald ginger wig he had bought in Wall’s Carnival Stores on Caversham Road in Reading. At moments of crisis, ‘My Dad’ would arrive and don a pair of polystyrene cups with the bottoms removed (or, as Hardiman calls them, ‘sound enhancing ear attachments’) which, when fitted over the wig, helped delineate the sound. “In times of ear fatigue these helped enormously,” says Hardiman, adding. “I am not making this up. They added focus to the session.”
Another unlikely source of inspiration for ‘My Dad’ was the Star Turn On 45 Pints series of records, a Geordie pub singer spoof of the Stars On 45 medleys that were all the rage at the time. The closing minutes of ‘Get Out Of My House’, where Bush and Hardiman take on the role of ‘Eeyore’ and begin braying like donkeys was, says Hardiman “based on the ‘You Are The Sunshine Of My Life’ segment of Star Turn Pints On 45, in itself a parody of the Stars On 45 single ‘Stars On Stevie’, a gallop through the hits of Stevie Wonder which was a hit in February 1982. “It was obviously ‘My Dad’ singing the part of Eeyore,” says Hardiman. “Thinking back, Eeyore was an early version of the lead vocal sound we refined for some of Hounds Of Love.” From tiny acorns, indeed.
In other words, it was a long, strange, thoroughly exhausting trip. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done,” according to Bush at the time, “Even harder than touring. It was worrying, very frightening.”20 Even mixing took months. She had decided on a digital mix using Advision’s console, but “we had a lot of problems…. editing was the main one, it was so time consuming.”21
The Dreaming was finally completed on May 21, 1982, cut by Ian Cooper at the Townhouse on June 4 and released on September 13, 1982, almost exactly two years to the day after Never For Ever. It’s a bewitching album, Bush’s first truly unified record in intent if not always in sound, a shedding of several skins and a punishing process of reinvention. The lyrics return again and again to conflict and claustrophobia, destruction and flight, battling inhibitions and barriers. “It was about how terribly cruel people could be, what we do to ourselves, what amount of loneliness we expose ourselves to,” she said of the album. “It was a searching, questioning album and the music did tear you from one point to the next.”22 The troubling ‘Leave It Open’ – another “hee haw” moment, another gun song – encapsulated the album’s bleak message: “Harm is in us.”
The Dreaming did not sound like the work of a happy person; indeed, it seemed to be the consequence of a woman intent on making herself suffer unnecessarily for her art, who mistrusted her natural optimism and her outwardly straightforward life. “I’ve always felt … that in order to write something, you know, that has meaning … that you should be unhappy, that you should be in some kind of torment,” she said.23 There was a definite whiff of the determinedly tortured about The Dreaming. Even a relatively lightweight track like ‘There Goes A Tenner’, a comedy crime caper narrated in Bush’s soft, sing-song cockney, had a murky subtext. The Ealingesque story of amateur robbers plotting their ‘big job’ but being stricken with paranoia when the time comes to execute their plans, it requires only a small interpretive leap to hear it as a subconscious comment on Bush’s own feelings of fear and insecurity as she sets about producing her own record. Beyond a quest for spiritual knowledge, the opening roll of ‘Sat In Your Lap’ also speaks of creative frustration, veering rapidly from pleasure at the incremental gains she has made (“My goal is moving near”) to a gloomy realisation of how far she remains from achieving fulfilment (“Then it disappears”).
‘Get Out Of My House’, inspired by reading Stephen King’s novel, The Shining, about a building that is possessed, brings the inanimate to life and in doing so lends a shocking solidity to Bush’s hidden anger, giving full voice to a woman who has been intruded upon and has had her privacy and sanctuary violated. It works as an indirect comment on the invasive nature of fame, and remains one of the most effective and disturbing examples of Bush dramatising her Id, giving living expression to her darkest fears and latent instincts. Then again, many people simply laughed when they heard it.
Every song was in some way extraordinary. ‘All The Love’ opens with the casually brilliant, almost quintessential Bush line, “The first time that I died …” and laments the difficulty of expressing love and letting others in. It ends with a heartbreaking litany of warm, familiar voices saying ‘goodbye’ on the telephone – these are the voices of Bush’s friends and family, taken from real phone messages – while the singer hides behind her answering machine, contemplating “all the love we should have given.”
On ‘Pull Out The Pin’ – musique concrete meets Jimmy Bryant in the Asian jungle – Bush proved yet again that she is truly a poet of the senses, vividly capturing the darker forces that animate humanity and the stark terror of warfare in a song about Vietnamese soldiers who can literally sniff out their American opponents because they reek of the west: sweat, cologne, tobacco and “Yankee hash.” You can almost feel the heat and taste the humid stench spilling from the speakers as the song scythes through the undergrowth. “I think that the essence of all art is sensuality,” she said,24 and she has spent her working life proving it. Moving. Breathing. Humming. Dreaming. Feeling: the sensual world.
Several songs touched on broadly political themes – land rights, terrorism – but the album always returned to the predicament of the individual. The tongue-twisting ‘Suspended In Gaffa’ was another quest for personal fulfilment, speaking intriguingly of the girl lurking in the mirror “between you and me,” a vivid image of self-doubt and alienation.
Three tracks in particular plotted a path towards the sounds and techniques she would explore further on Hounds Of Love. ‘Night Of The Swallow’ is full of foreboding and shadows, an exquisite match of light and dark, and the deliriously beautiful mix of Baroque balladry and traditional Irish instrumentation is something she would return to several times in the future. Inspired by Paddy’s deep interest and her own background, Bush was well ahead of the game in incorporating Celtic textures into her music. The likes of the Waterboys and Elvis Costello wouldn’t follow suit until several years later.
The combination on ‘All The Love’ of crisp technology and the very pure, human sound of a choral voice pre-empted a similar juxtaposition on ‘Hello Earth’, while ‘Get Out Of My House’ was the one song on The Dreaming where Bush really got hold of a propulsive rhythm by the scruff of the neck and rode it over simple chord changes. In contrast to the choppy, see-sawing rhythms elsewhere on the album, where the groove is rarely sustained for longer than a minute, this track in particular pointed towards her next bold move. Indeed, her original idea of creating a pounding rhythmic record was only partially realised. Paul Hardiman points out that, pre-CD, “sequencing Side A and Side B was hugely important.” Musically, The Dreaming starts with brisk brio but slows to something close to a lament, the closing clatter of ‘Get Out Of My House’ notwithstanding.
The trio of songs at the centre of Side B formed the album’s deep emotional heart. The last of these, ‘Houdini’, was another spectacular song of the supernatural, based on the true tale of Bess, the wife and assistant of renowned escapologist and illusionist Harry Houdini, attempting to communicate with her husband following his death in 1926. Houdini was a committed debunker of spiritualist frauds and séance-scamming hucksters, so he and Bess had devised a code – ‘Rosabelle, believe’, recounted in the song – to ensure she knew that it really was him. In January 1929, the Detroit News reported that Bess had succeeded in contacting Houdini via a séance, but she later came to believe that their code had been betrayed and it was a trick. This barely credible tale of loss, love, sorrow and super-naturalism could hardly not have appealed to Bush, and she battled with the song throughout the album sessions. In the end it still required comprehensive footnotes to explain itself, but the power and feeling in the music – Is love really stronger than death? Perhaps there are some things we can never escape from? – was unmistakeable. The sepia-tinted album cover, shot by Jay and credited to his studio, Kindlight, was also inspired by the song. Bush portrays Bess hiding a tiny gold key in her mouth to slip to her husband as she kisses him before his show, in order to facilitate his escape.
On The Dreaming Bush pulled off her own feat of escapology, slipping loose from the chains of her past. It is a remarkable document in which she at times achieves her long desired feat of becoming the music, as though all we are hearing are not drums, or bass lines, or guitars, but different parts of Bush herself fragmenting into sound, an aural depiction of all her varied (and, in this case, largely negative) emotions. Hugely exciting, but by no means an easy listen. There is a barely contained hysteria in the music that isn’t merely attributable to the dark matter of the songs, but also comes from the vast amount of information, a sense of sonic overload. For all her desire to build space around her songs there is a – compelling – claustrophobia hanging over the proceedings. It is not, as many critics have claimed, over produced; it is simply overloaded. “The trouble with that album is, I think, that in a lot of ways she was using everything she recorded,” said Del Palmer. “Over the years she learned to know what can work and what won’t, and be a bit more discerning.”25
It’s a relatively straightforward process to listen to The Dreaming today and, working backwards, hear how it slots into the great continuum of Bush’s music. At the time, however, it was a truly radical departure. Listen to ‘Blow Away’ and ‘Get Out Of My House’ back-to-back and you get some idea of the strides she made in under two years. She wanted it to be an album that took time to sink in, for the beauty and intricate detail of the songs to emerge slowly. She saw it as a “long lasting album. My favourite records are the ones that grow on you, that you play lots of times and hear something different.”26 That process took more time than she may have thought. To the casual listener, The Dreaming sometimes sounded less like a collection of songs than a series of experiments.
Much of the press reaction was positive, if often baffled, awarding Bush a critical kudos she had previously lacked. Colin Irwin’s review in Melody Maker was perhaps the most thoughtful, capturing the mixture of awe and confusion many felt about the record. ‘Mind boggling,’ he wrote. ‘Always an artist of extremes, Bush has allowed her highly theatrical imagination to run riot, indulging all her musical fantasies, following her rampant instincts, and layering this album with an astonishing array of shrieks and shudders. Initially it is bewildering and not a little preposterous, but try to hang on through the twisted overkill and the histrionic fits and there’s much reward, if only in the sense of danger she constantly courts.’
Within EMI the mood was far less sympathetic or forgiving. You could see their point. There was a hint of petulance about The Dreaming, a bit of, ‘Look, I told you I was an artist’ about its determination to go to extremes. There was no ‘Babooshka’, no ‘Wow’, nothing even close in terms of commercial accessibility. It was dense and demanding, with no easy entry point. Not only did the single feature Rolf Harris on didjeridu and Percy Edwards pretending to be a sheep, but the album ended with a cacophony of braying donkeys. “I think it got to the point of the nearest album we ever returned to the artist,” says Brian Southall. “There is a clause in all contracts that gives the record company the right to refuse, or return, or object. From conversations I had, that was the closest EMI got to returning an album in my time.”
Bob Mercer had left his position in 1980 to become an executive at EMI Films, depriving Bush of a key ally within the company. Luckily she found another in David Munns, a former product manager who had left EMI UK in 1979 to work for EMI-Canada, but returned in 1982 as head of A&R and marketing for EMI UK, a position with a far-reaching remit. According to Southall, it was Munns who effectively made the unilateral decision to accept, if not actively support, The Dreaming. “Without question he was very powerful,” says Southall. “If he got behind something he had the authority to make it work. He was always an advocate of Kate’s and made an enormous difference to her career, because there was a danger of her falling off the radar.”
His loyalty to Bush was unequivocal and very useful. From a commercial point of view EMI had every reason to be concerned. Radio play for any of The Dreaming material was sadly lacking, with EMI undertaking an almost apologetic attitude to their campaign. Bush’s personal profile, however, remained high. She undertook a sizeable amount of press for the record, partly because she believed in it and partly because she knew it needed her backing, and was still willing to turn up on children’s television programmes and lukewarm talk shows, even consenting to a Radio One roadshow appearance, the Holy Grail of banality, but to little material effect. The Dreaming debuted at number three in the album charts but fell swiftly, selling only some 60,000 copies compared to The Kick Inside’s million plus, a steep and significant commercial decline between albums one and four. Following the success of ‘Sat In Your Lap’, released a year previously, the UK singles from the record also flopped dramatically. ‘The Dreaming’ limped to 48, receiving largely negative reviews and struggling to secure airplay, while the expensive video, co-directed by Bush, was all but ignored. It was, in truth, a supremely odd and bloody-minded choice of lead single, turning Bush’s calling card, her remarkable voice, into a nasal Australian twang and containing, by conventional standards, no clear hook. The follow-up, ‘There Goes A Tenner’, disappeared into the brine without leaving even a ripple. “It’s questionable that EMI ever sold the amount of Kate Bush records that they could have done and should have done,” says Bob Mercer. “But that was because of her, not because of EMI.”
Had it been a question of simple number-crunching Bush may have begun to find life a little more difficult but Munns, to his credit, could see the bigger picture. This was not so much a decline in fortunes as an indication of what an anomaly ‘Wuthering Heights’ had been in the first place. As Brian Southall points out, “If you’re dealing with Duran Duran you’re talking about commercial records, [and] you can go back and say we need a couple of hits on this. You can’t argue that with Kate because it wasn’t part of her make up to start with. You can’t go back and say there’s no 3½ minute pop single on here. She’d say, ‘I know. I didn’t write one.’”
She was an artist, not a pop star. Sometimes the two concepts would meet in the middle, more often they wouldn’t. Munns accepted this as fact. “This is my favourite artist in the world,” he said. “But for someone like her it’s sometimes a lonely road and that can be difficult for people to understand. Make a record that’s a bit obscure and some people in the company may start to say things to the artist that aren’t sensible. Well, EMI and Kate just lost the plot for a while.”27
With The Dreaming the genie was well and truly out of the bottle. Bush had staked her claim, marked her territory. If she was a little bruised and disappointed by reactions to the record, it didn’t alter her opinion of the work. She had revelled in the freedom. Although at times undoubtedly she had missed the steadying influence of Jon Kelly, she declared The Dreaming to be her favourite album by far, the first occasion where she had come close to hearing her own ambitions reflected back at her. It was the record where she delivered on the promises she had made to herself while making Never For Ever, the moment where she absolutely disappeared into the limitless possibilities of the studio, and the music.
Everything she had went into it. It had cost her a fortune, way beyond the advance she received, took her a year of almost solid recording, hopping around studios and between engineers, and it had pushed her to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. The record company hated it and it killed her as a singles artists for four years. It was the album that nearly sank the ship, her “she’s gone mad”28 record, but the experience simply made her more convinced and determined than ever about the need to conduct her career in her own way. It was a decisive moment. Hereafter, all attempts at identifying signs of the performer Bush had been on the ‘Tour Of Life’ and the albums that preceded it are akin to staring at another country. The Dreaming was a definitive act of secession from all that had gone before.