“WHEN she got into the studio to do music she was like a Yogi,” observes Stewart Avon Arnold. “She was completely lost to the world.” Bush had travelled deep within herself while making The Dreaming, emerging to find herself cut adrift from a life that needed some urgent attention. The studio had become an inclement micro-climate, a hostile, self-contained ecosystem fuelled by smoke, chocolate, fast food – she was “lasting three months on Chinese takeaways during the last part of the album,”1 she said – and far too little sleep, a place where she cultivated an absolute fixation with what she was doing to the detriment of almost everything else. The only reason she was able to maintain a relationship with Del, presumably, is because he was right there beside her in the eye of the storm.
In early June 1982, as soon as the album was mastered, she had gone to Jamaica for a break but failed to unwind. “It was a real culture shock,” she said. “I went from this dingy little London studio with no windows to absolute paradise. I could barely stand it. Even the sound of the birds was defeaning.”2 She returned to immediately undertake heavy promotion. Having conceived, rehearsed, performed, co-directed and shot the extremely complex video for ‘The Dreaming’, she was back on the bandwagon again, making personal appearances in Glasgow, Newcastle and Birmingham, miming to ‘Suspended In Gaffa’ and ‘The Dreaming’ on French, German and Italian TV. When she finally jumped off the treadmill in early November she disappeared from public view almost completely. Houdini strikes again.
During the next two-and-a-half years Bush registered only the faintest readings on the radar. Band Aid and Live Aid, the most visible and culturally significant music events of the decade, occurred in late 1984 and July 1985 respectively and found room for every star, megastar, has-been, once-was and might-be in the global rock and pop firmament; nevertheless, both occasions passed off without even the merest whiff of Bush’s involvement. She wasn’t invited to participate, although she claims that, had she been asked to perform at Wembley Stadium, “I would have said yes, I’m sure.”3 Perhaps. The fact that she didn’t even have to consider whether or not to sing in front of a live audience of 82,000 and a television audience of 400m viewers only goes to show how far from shore her ship had sailed.*
During her prolonged absence there were mischievous media rumours of nervous breakdowns, plastic surgery – “were those pin-tucks around those pixie ears?” asked Sounds, presumably safe in the knowledge that the answer was ‘no’ – and colossal weight gain, backed up by photographs of her “ballooned” to “18 stone”. The reality was less dramatic. At 5? 3? and a little over seven stone, any additional weight was always going to be hard to hide; after months of largely sedentary work and poor eating habits Bush did, indeed, occasionally appear a little heavier, with more than a hint of an extra chin and rounded cheeks.
There was similarly loose tittle-tattle about her attending drug rehabilitation clinics in either France or the Caribbean; the lyrics to parts of Hounds Of Love – “poppies heavy with seed … take me deeper and deeper”; “cutting out little lines”; “spitting snow”; “speeding” – were later cited as evidence that she had developed a serious habit. Hard drug addiction was the stock rumour in the Eighties when a pop star had the audacity to take longer than a year between albums: Elvis Costello endured similar treatment in 1985 when, according to press reports, he was either a junkie or an alcoholic. He was neither, and nor was Bush. Not one of the scores of sources interviewed during the research for this book has ever seen her consume a Class A drug, and she has never been much of a drinker. In the snowbound Seventies and Eighties, where cocaine use was routine and rife, her predilection for the occasional joint seemed almost quaint. Tea (up to 20 cups a day), chocolate and cigarettes have been her most enduring vices, but work has always been her addiction. It took her six months to recover from the experience of making The Dreaming. “I was just a complete wreck, physically and mentally,” she said. “I’d wake up in the morning and find I couldn’t move … eventually I went to see my Pa.”4
Dr Bush diagnosed stress and nervous fatigue and prescribed a rest cure. Body and mind needed her attention. She did as she was instructed, reconnected with her family and friends, many of whom she hadn’t seen in over a year, went to the movies, bought a VW Golf and began to drive herself, spent quality time with Del and her cats, caught up with her music listening, mostly classical, went for walks, and generally pottered about doing small, important things. Gardening and cooking became therapeutic pursuits. She stocked up on fresh fruit and vegetables and instead of takeaways she prepared at least one healthy meal a day. Even this simple task gave her life a domestic focus, a sense of calm routine.
During this period she implemented three major life changes, later recalled as some of her “best decisions”.5 One was to move out of London to the countryside; another was to take up serious dance instruction again and to overhaul her diet; and the third was to build her own studio, this time to professional specifications. As these changes took shape, life and music began to roll in tandem once again, creating a happy, healthy, almost idyllic context within which she set about creating her greatest work: Hounds Of Love.
* * *
Bush and Palmer moved into a seventeenth-century farmhouse in the Kent countryside in 1983, not far from Sevenoaks and within easy commute of Wickham Farm and central London. She described her new home in typically romantic terms. “One day we suddenly stumbled across it and a back door had been left open so we were able to go inside,” said Bush. “I’m sure there’s a kind of force, a magnetic energy saying, ‘Come in, we’re meant for each other.’”6
London had become a negative influence. She spoke of the “air of doom” hanging over 1981 and 1982,7 and although she turned the sometimes oppressive energy of a big city into a positive creative force on The Dreaming, she sought a fresher, cleaner source this time around. “The stimulus of the countryside is fantastic,” she said. “I sit at my piano and watch skies moving and trees blowing and that’s far more exciting than buildings and roads and millions of people.”8 In 1983 she spent a “summer out of the house, something I didn’t do for several years,”9 and began to appreciate simple pleasures. “She bought the cottage down in Kent, and suddenly you’d ring up and she’d be gardening,” recalls Brian Southall.
Slowly, she relaxed back into a rounded life, searching for a balance she had struggled to maintain since 1978. The changes coincided with a new resolve concerning her involvement with Del. While still firmly holding to the opinion that “I don’t feel our relationship is anything to do with anyone other than us,”10 she no longer actively sought to keep it secret. On one extremely rare occasion during this period she lifted her head above the parapet, during a radio phone-in on July 29, 1983, the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday. She was asked by the typically brash, brassnecked DJ why ‘we never hear any dirty gossip about you and fellas, Kate?’ “Well it’s probably ’cause I’ve got a very nice fella,” she replied with a laugh. “His name’s Del…. Del from Kent.”11
It was hardly on a par with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor breaking cover on some paparazzi-plagued Roman strada, but in the carefully calibrated world of Bush’s personal life it marked a quantum leap. When she launched Hounds Of Love at the London Planetarium in September 1985 she arrived hand-in-hand with Del, the first time they had ever appeared in public as a couple, and she opened up tentatively in interviews, revealing how she would cook an evening meal and they would watch trashy Saturday evening game shows or films taped off the television, or how he gifted her an antique pocketwatch for her birthday. Del, in turn, would talk touchingly about the fact that there were “two Kates: there is the girl at home I love and there is Kate the star. I must admit I sometimes wonder what she sees in me….”12
For those who could scarcely imagine the woman in the ‘Babooshka’ video or singing ‘Get Out Of My House’ as a happily domesticated creature, tending to her man and her marigolds, she was keen to (over) emphasise their status as “Mr and Mrs Boring! At home Del and I just potter about, being ordinary. We give cuddles and we have rows, all that. Del and I argue a great deal – over songs – but we consider it healthy. Who wins? Normally, I do. I’m not the shy, retiring, fragile butterfly creature I sometimes read about. My relationship with Del is very stable. We work together, we live together, it works so well for us. That can be a very intense set-up, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s all very close and direct.”13
Bush kept the house in Eltham as her London base, but she spent less and less time there. When she was in residence she was often to be found in her private dance studio, a large room suffused with natural light, fitted out with an elegant wooden floor and a mirrored wall for choreography. Taking up dance again was highly significant. After the ‘Tour Of Life’ she had stopped dancing to any disciplined degree, simply lacking the time. She would call up her dancers for videos or television appearances and they would hastily assemble a routine (on one memorable occasion, choreography for the ‘There Goes A Tenner’ video was thrashed out in the goods van of a train travelling between London and Manchester) but she missed the regular interaction, that discipline of taking classes with a tutor. Learning rather than simply doing always opened up something within Bush and her music. “Not only did I feel I needed to be fit again,” she said, “but I really wanted the stimulus and inspiration that comes from true teachers.”14
Her closest dance partner, Stewart Avon Arnold, was unavailable, busy with his own projects, and so she started taking private classes in London with Dyane Gray-Cullert, a Detroit born African-American with an impressive CV in many respected European dance companies. Like Robin Kovac, Gray-Cullert’s background was in Martha Graham technique and contemporary dance, although she also taught Bush ballet, something that led directly to the choreography for the ‘Running Up That Hill’ video.
Significantly, when she returned to sustained dance instruction her writing seemed to gain an extra dimension and her songs positively took flight. She had unearthed the sound and textures she wanted on The Dreaming but it was a subterranean album, dark and inward. It had been a necessary step, a purging of sorts and a powerful platform for further progression, as well as a triumph on its own terms, with a certain kind of twisted beauty, but the music – and its creator – had in the process lost some of its vivacity and spring. Bush has always found inspiration in the grotesque, the weird and unsettling, but out and out bleakness doesn’t suit her. Synaesthetically speaking, The Dreaming was an album of gloomy browns, deep dark reds, blacks and blinding whites, full of soil and sand and dust. Hounds Of Love, on the other hand, was to be decked out in greens, light blues, dusky purples and silvers. It was to be the bright mirror image of its shadowed predecessor, where the window to the natural world is wide open. “After the demanding lands that my last set of songs took me to, I had to think again about where to go,” she said. “Maybe somewhere a little sunnier.”15
The experience of finding a symbiosis of her creative pursuits and her home environment took her back to some of her happiest times. “For me it’s like 1976,” she wrote to her fan club in the summer of 1983. “It was a particularly special year, when things were full of adventure. I was dancing every day, and singing and writing all night. I feel in many ways that ‘76 and this year are linked together, for me.”16
The move to the countryside and return to dance helped to clear away much of the cloud-cover hovering over her music. The final breath of fresh air was a return to making music at East Wickham Farm. She was painfully aware that the degree of autonomy she was afforded by EMI came at a shockingly high price: £90 per hour, to be precise, the going rate for hiring Abbey Road. Given the frequent round-the-clock sessions for The Dreaming, this meant the outlay routinely weighed in at well over £1,000 per day. It was a crippling overhead, while an awareness of the clock ticking also tended to make her creative muscles seize up.
Once again taking a lead from Peter Gabriel, who had recently built his own studio, pre-Real World, at his home in Ashcombe House, near Bath, Bush invested heavily in fitting a professional 48-track studio in the barn at the farm, in the spot where she used to poke away at the old church organ after school and later bashed through the songs for Lionheart with the KT Bush Band. The decision had a pleasing synchronicity, another return to a solid, enduring love. She was involved in the design and conditioning, and Dr Bush played an active role, building parts himself, overseeing and advising. It wasn’t quite state of the art, but it was sufficiently well appointed, featuring a Soundcraft mixing desk – later replaced with an SSL board – two Studer A80 24-track machines, plus compressors, emulators, a Fairlight and a Quantec room simulator.
Del was beginning to develop aspirations as an engineer. Aided by Paul Hardiman’s generous mentoring, The Dreaming had marked the beginning of his move away from simply being a bass player towards becoming more involved in the technical aspects of Bush’s records, an ambition he would pursue further on Hounds Of Love. Bush, too, had become comfortable around technology, very much au fait with the terminology and the purpose of all the gadgets, although at this stage she was rarely hands on. “She’d know how to manipulate sound if not actually do the twiddling herself,” says Haydn Bendall, who engineered much of Hounds Of Love. “She’d come up with lots of suggestions like, ‘Maybe we should compress that, maybe we should expand that, maybe we should gate that or put a pre-delay on the reverb or use a Lexicon reverb.’ She knew what sounds were available, but I – or Del or somebody else – would kind of be the mechanics. And she had an incredible audio memory. She’d remember a take she did on a vocal where one particular word was great, or that on track 13 there was this great sound.”
The struggles with The Dreaming and its poor commercial performance had forced her to reflect on her aims: yes, she concluded, I want to produce my own albums and, no, I don’t really care about being famous or selling millions of records. I just want to be allowed to do the work. It did not happen without a fight. “It was felt that my producing Hounds Of Love wasn’t such a good idea,” she later recalled. “For the first time I felt I was actually meeting resistance artistically.”17 Once again David Munns was an invaluable ally who cleared her path and ensured she was left alone to deliver the finished product when she was ready. Beyond her contact with him, her relationship with EMI by this stage was cool and distant. There was a definite sense of raised stakes, that after The Dreaming she had to deliver something both commercially viable and artistically profound.
Completed in the autumn of 1983, her new studio became a private study, a place where she could write and create at will according to her own natural rhythms rather than the exaggerated pace of the record industry. The clock stopped ticking, the meter was no longer running. Most importantly, it was a happy and supportive place in which to work. Where Advision and Townhouse had been dark, dingy caves lacking any natural light or sense of time – places where the real world all too easily ceased to matter – the farm studio was physically and emotionally connected to the life she was singing about. Windows looked out to the grounds where she danced and dreamed as a child, while one of the recording booths was the old stable, with the flagstone floor intact. The family were always popping in and out.
“We’d be there doing a track and suddenly Jay would turn up to say hello, sit there for 15 minutes and nod,” says Charlie Morgan, who returned to the fold to drum on several songs on the album. “Then Pad would come in and start talking to Kate about some mandolin part he had an idea for, and Kate would say, ‘OK, let’s put that down tomorrow.’ And then suddenly Hannah would come in with a tray stacked high with teapots and cakes and we’d all have a cup of tea. And then Dad would come in and say, ‘What’re you going to eat tonight? I’ll go and get a take out, what do you fancy, do you want some Indian, or a Chinese?’ Someone would drive off and pick up a curry – it was all so conducive to creativity.”
This was how she had always wanted to work; you can see her striving for the ideal as far back as Lionheart, but it was beyond her reach at that time. As soon as she had built her home base and peopled it with her most loved and trusted supporters, the relationship between her life and her work became far more harmonious. And a great gust of fresh air blew through her music.
* * *
There was to be a marked shift in the recording process this time around. Working from home with a piano, a Fairlight, a Linn drum programme and her voice, recording onto an eight-track Soundcraft desk and tape machine, Bush and Palmer worked up much of the album in the Kent countryside between the summer and autumn of 1983. These were not traditional demos, early scratchings to be referenced but ultimately discarded in favour of re-recorded versions. Instead, they were kept and built upon at East Wickham Farm for the final versions. In this way, the demos from the home studio morphed into the masters, and the initial spark of emotion and inspiration in each song could be preserved. The writing and recording processes finally dissolved into one another, a much longed for development: using the Fairlight as her primary compositional tool, Bush was now creating in sound and had ceased to distinguish between the two.
The first song to arrive was ‘Running Up That Hill’, composed in the summer of 1983 in her music room, looking out through the window to the valley below. The track’s most instantly recognisable components – the riff, that searing Fairlight part, and the rumbling electronic drums, programmed by Del – were present from the very beginning, located right at the heart of the song.
Originally called ‘A Deal With God’, the song spoke passionately of Bush’s impossible wish to become her lover, and he her, in order that they could finally know what the other felt and desired. It was a sobering comment on misfiring communication and the impossibility of men and women ever really understanding one another, and yet – in capturing the basic human need to strive for compatibility – it was not without hope nor optimism. ‘Running Up That Hill’ was another artful and wholly original take on gender roles and relationships, but it also worked as a wider artistic statement. The reason Bush has always so vigorously resisted being defined by her looks, her background and her sex is because she craves a 360 degree perspective as an artist. She has sung as a child, a ghost, a man, a woman, a donkey…. She is eternally seeking to ‘swap places’ because she desperately wants to cover all possible angles of available experience.
‘Running Up That Hill’ took her an evening to write. The component parts of her next composition, ‘Hounds Of Love’, were also assembled quickly, inspired by one of her favourite films, the 1957 British horror flick Night Of The Demon, a lip-smacking tale of a Satanic occultist unleashing a demonic yet terrifyingly ill-defined beast on those he curses. Many of the other tracks – ‘And Dream Of Sheep’, ‘Under Ice’, ‘Watching You Without Me’ – also came relatively easily. Contrary to the evidence suggested by the yawning gaps between her records, Bush is not necessarily a slow writer; it is capturing the nuances of texture and mood that takes so much time. “I remember Paddy saying she often writes an entire album quite quickly, but then spends ten years recording it!” says Colin Lloyd-Tucker, who sung on The Red Shoes and has frequently collaborated with Paddy Bush. “It used to drive him mad – ‘Oh for God’s sake, Kate!’ I don’t think she has ever struggled with the songwriting process, it’s a natural thing for her.”
The alternative version of ‘Hounds Of Love’ featured on the This Woman’s Work box set offers a tantalising glimpse into her writing process. The significant elements are already present – the scything string figure (performed here on Fairlight, later replaced with cello), the deep, irresistible drum rhythm – yet the song is clearly in its infancy: the lyrics are sketchy and the melody isn’t yet fully formed, but it’s almost there. Between this version and the finished article, however, lay over a year’s intensive work; God, for Bush perhaps more than any other artist, lies buried deep among the details, in some strange pagan future where earth and EQ meet. Making a record is not a quest to achieve technical perfection; it’s far more mysterious and explorative than that. “It’s about selection rather than musicianship,” says Youth, the former Killing Joke bass player who appeared on the album. “She’s after the currency of ideas reflected in the music rather than academic virtuosity.”
“It’s experimental, but within that I don’t think she’s diverted or goes off on tangents,” says Haydn Bendall of her recording process. “Maybe she doesn’t know exactly what notes, or exactly what sounds or harmonies or melodic structures or dynamics she wants to use, but I believe she has an extremely clear impression of the atmosphere she wants to create. How she achieves that involves the experimentation, but she has an incredible, innate sense of what works for a song. [On Hounds Of Love] we were using Fairlight and Linn drums a lot, and they’d come out with these funny little sounds which you might think weren’t very interesting, and she’d say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful, isn’t that great?’ She’d make it great, and in a way that’s the mark of a genius, to make something fabulous out of a simple idea. She’ll just have a little kernel of an idea that would develop into a huge blossom.”
‘Running Up That Hill’ was the gateway to the new record, and most of the rest of the material was written and in reasonable shape by the end of 1983. Aside from the 12 songs on the album, during the sessions she recorded ‘Burning Bridge’, ‘Under The Ivy’, ‘Not This Time’, as well as versions of the traditional tunes ‘My Lagan Love’ and ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’. There may have been several more that have never surfaced. “From what I remember I think we recorded at least twice as many tracks as ended up on the album,” says Charlie Morgan. “There was quite a rate of attrition, I know there’s a bunch of stuff I played on that never made it.”
There was no shortage of quality material, but Bush had a very clear idea of what she wanted. As soon as she had written the breathtakingly beautiful ballad ‘And Dream Of Sheep’ and its companion piece ‘Under Ice’, she envisioned a record split into two distinct sides, one of strong individual ‘up’ songs and one of darker, interwoven pieces recounting the cinematic tale of a girl cast adrift in the sea at night following some kind of catastrophe, awaiting rescue, slipping in and out of consciousness, trapped between a waking nightmare and dreams that are even worse.
She had been toying with the idea of writing an extended suite of music for some time, intrigued by the possibilities. “One of the first ideas I had [for the album] was to try a concept,” she said. “It was really the concept side that came first. I was a bit worried that it wouldn’t work, so until I’d written, say, four or five songs, I wouldn’t really know if it was going to be successful. I thought it was wise to just use one side of the album, so there would be half an hour to play with rather than going for an hour’s worth. And the other side, I thought it would be nice to balance with five or six completely different songs, not linked in any way, that were perhaps more positive and up-tempo, so there was a nice balance between the two sides.”18
Stretching across seven songs on the record’s second side, ‘The Ninth Wave’* was inspired by a lifelong attraction to the dark, deadly romance of water. She loved old black and white war movies, letting the countless images of soldiers being jettisoned from bombers into the sea below play on her imagination, while one of her favourite pieces of art – which she owns – is the Hogsmill Ophelia, a macabre, modernist satire on Millais’ more famous Ophelia featuring the disturbing image of a cracked doll drowned in sewage overspill. As early as 1978 in a teen magazine she had described her “strangest dream”: “I’m sitting on this raft in the middle of a gigantic ocean. There’s no land in sight – just limitless water – yet I have no fear and no desire to be rescued. Just a feeling of complete peace.” These stimuli, and no doubt many more, had been percolating for some time and fed subconsciously into the songs, though the final effect was far from peaceful.
As a coherent narrative, ‘The Ninth Wave’ can withstand only the gentlest of examinations. The girl in the water is visited in real time by events around her, but also by memories, future projections, hallucinations and possible past lives; like most extended conceptual works of popular music, to make sense it requires rather a lot of caveats along the lines of ‘and then she fell asleep and dreamed about witches …’ Bush’s own explanation, given during a lengthy analysis on Radio One’s Classic Albums in 1991, can be encapsulated as follows: the story starts with the girl bobbing in the sea, fighting off sleep and sensory deprivation (‘And Dream Of Sheep’) with only the emergency light on her lifejacket illuminating the pitch darkness; she falls into restive sleep (‘Under Ice’) and endures jagged, discordant, vivid dreams of being trapped under ice. Her subconscious then slips back in time, passing through the voices of her childhood, both scolding and gentle, returning eventually to a bygone age of female persecution (‘Waking The Witch’), her predicament in the water recalling the historic barbarity of witch-ducking, where guilt was determined by whether the woman sank or floated.
The girl’s imagination then drifts back to the present day, and she visualises her own home (‘Watching You Without Me’), her loved ones “watching the clock”, waiting for her return as she gazes unseen at her own life like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, invisible, cut off and powerless to communicate. “You can’t hear me,” whisper the backing vocals, in the album’s saddest, most bereft moment. The vigorous ‘Jig Of Life’ turns the mood of the narrative around, pounding along like a dose of spiritual CPR, letting in some hope. It’s another visitation, this time from the girl’s future self, an old lady begging her younger incarnation to “let me live”, showing her the riches that await: her two future children, her long, vigorous life. This is the place “where the crossroads meet”, where her destiny is decided.
On the magnificent, deeply moving ‘Hello Earth’ the camera – for this suite, notwithstanding its later adaptation for the stage, is essentially a cinematic conceit – pans away from the water and travels up into the sky, from where Bush gazes down on the scene and contemplates our planet, underscoring our individual insignificance in the face of the enormity of earth, and earth’s insignificance in the face of the universe, and through it all the terrible power of nature, storms gathering, the wind whipping, the sea a “murderer of calm”. Finally, ‘The Morning Fog’ details a new morning and an act of emotional rescue, the vaporous haze a benevolent force sweeping in from the waves and bringing the girl back to land, back into her life, thankfully alive and filled with reaffirmed love.
It need hardly be stated that, on record, ‘The Ninth Wave’ works much better as an allegory than a literal story-in-sound. We do not learn, for example, how the girl is rescued – there is no conventional conclusion to the narrative, little in the way of mechanics, only a profoundly satisfying emotional afterglow. Beyond the confines of its rather skittish storyline, ‘The Ninth Wave’ is a psychological travelogue through a supremely dark night of the soul, documenting a tiny figure adrift in a sea of powerful blackness. It’s a distillation of 25 years’ worth of Bush’s fascinations, nightmares and recurring obsessions: the sea, witchcraft, death, the supernatural, the dangerous power of the senses, feelings of exclusion, the thin line between reality and fantasy – if, indeed, there is any line at all, for don’t we all exist most completely and vividly within our own minds?
“I can’t be left to my imagination” is the key line, for above all ‘The Ninth Wave’ is a panicky swim through the murky waters of the human psyche. Bush creates a stark dramatic scenario – being lost at night at sea – to suggest that what lies within our heads and hearts is more terrifying than anything the world can throw our way; and yet therein also lies our most precious and creative resources. Even at her most elemental, the transformative power of our inner senses takes paramount place in her work. A veritable gift to the armchair psychologist and amateur analyst, it’s tempting to hear ‘The Ninth Wave’ as a highly stylised, oblique dramatisation of much of the difficulties Bush had undergone in 1981 and 1982 before emerging happier in 1983, moving out of isolation and back into the world. Tempting, but no doubt overly simplistic. Whatever the underlying motivation, capturing on tape its highly complex eddies and flows was by far the most demanding part of the recording process.
* * *
Bush played the new tracks to Paul Hardiman on October 6, 1983, on his first visit to the newly constructed farm studio. Hardiman, who had been working with The The and Lloyd Cole & The Commotions since The Dreaming, engineered the first stages of the album and was immediately impressed by how much progress had already been made. “The first time I heard ‘Running Up That Hill’ it wasn’t a demo, it was a working start,” he says. “We carried on working on Kate and Del’s original. Del had programmed the Linn drum part, the basis of which we kept. I know we spent time working on the Fairlight melody/hook but the idea was there and also I think the pad, the wind/train sound, was there plus guide vocals.”
Sessions began in earnest at Wickham Farm on November 4, starting with the transfer of the home studio eight-track recordings to the farm’s two 24-track masters. Between November 7 and December 6 they worked on the backing tracks. Stuart Elliott came in to add drums, either working ‘with’ the existing Linn drum – on ‘Running Up That Hill’ he overdubbed a snare part, for example – or replacing it but closely following the programmed pattern.
An acute awareness and understanding of rhythm drove the entire record, particularly the first side. “It was obvious to me that Kate had finally found a groove,” says Hardiman. “On ‘Running’ we worked a lot on the Fairlight part which, incredibly, reminded me of the synth line in [Seventies disco-funk classic] ‘Atmosphere Strut’ by Cloud One. I [was] very happy to push the groove.” Hounds Of Love was indeed the album where Bush, finally, successfully married rhythm to melody. The songs had “a constancy of rhythm [that] perhaps wasn’t always there in previous albums,” she allowed. “When I was initially coming up with the songs … I would actually get Del to manifest in the rhythm box the pattern that I wanted. As a bass player I think he has a very natural understanding of rhythms and working with drums, and he could also get the patterns that I could hear in my head and that I wanted. It’s … through him that we started off with the rhythmic basis that was then built upon.”19
Her piano was becoming less of a central feature, but when it was showcased – ‘And Dream Of Sheep’, ‘Hello Earth’, ‘Under The Ivy’ – it had a rich, resonant texture, deep and sad, very much in tune with Bush’s maturing voice. Replacing the upright Bechstein of her home studio with a Grotrian-Steinweg grand for recording, she wanted “a live sound, reminiscent of Erik Satie, Chopin: the empty ballroom after the party when everyone has gone home.”20
After Christmas rough mixes were assembled with provisional lead vocals and backing vocals, in order to take the album sessions over to Ireland. Following the success of ‘Night Of The Swallow’ Bush envisaged more Irish instrumentation on the new album. Planxty keyboardist Bill Whelan travelled to the studio to hear the tracks and they agreed she would travel to Dublin in the spring of 1984 for extended sessions at Windmill Lane, where bouzouki, pipes, fiddles and whistles were added to ‘And Dream Of Sheep’ and ‘Hello Earth’. She was typically exact and demanding: Donal Lunny later recalled how Bush asked him to play the single whistle note at the end of ‘And Dream Of Sleep’ over and over again for three hours, searching for just the right ‘bend’ in the note. The main item on the agenda was ‘Jig Of Life’, based on a Greek tune Paddy – ever the musical archaeologist – had unearthed. Bush only finished writing the song in Whelan’s house in Dublin the day before the session, and it was recorded over the next few days with the cream of Ireland’s traditional musicians – Lunny, Liam O’Flynn, John Sheahan – jamming for hours, spinning the track into a delirium. “They started playing along with it and just reduced both of us to gibbering wrecks,” Del recalled. “It was such a magic moment.”21
Ireland was also where Bush finished the lyrics, tightening, adding lines and verses. She tends to write words in bursts, whole chunks arriving fully formed, but often the most time consuming part is plugging the small gaps in the fabric of the lyric, maintaining the initial mood. Appropriately enough for songs that were mostly composed looking out at the Kent countryside, the words were completed within reach of the salt and spray of the Irish sea, holed up with Del. You can hear it, too: Hounds Of Love is an album positively propelled by nature, soaked to its bones with a “tremendous stimulus from the outside.”22 This elemental rush isn’t present only in the words, with their countless references to big skies, rain, sun, clouds, white horses, ice, forming storms, wind and waves (there was, as Bush pointed out, “a lot of weather on this album”23), but also in the sound. The songs are swept along by a primal force, at times almost bestial in its power; a thrilling, thudding, irresistible pulse runs through the heart of the record.
As well as fascinated by our inner nature, Hounds Of Love – like Aerial – is smitten by Mother Nature, bursting with the rhythm of life; it was no accident that the two albums came together to form the spine of ‘Before The Dawn’. On the other hand, it is also a truly modern record, a layered and artificial construct, using the best of Eighties technology and further removed from the standard ‘band in a room’ format than ever before. Often it was just Bush and Palmer working on sounds, with Hardiman and later Haydn Bendall coming in and out of the sessions. Into this tight-knit hub musicians arrived as and when required, according to what would “be good, karmatically,” as Del rather grandly put it.24 The Medici String Quartet became a sextet through the power of overdub on the session for ‘Cloudbusting’; John Williams added a beautiful guitar part – bright, shimmering dew drops of sound, like a bud bursting into a flower – to ‘The Morning Fog’; the Richard Hickox Singers filled the black holes in ‘Hello Earth’, their eerie voices slipping across the surface of the song like clouds scudding across the face of the moon.* She sent tapes of relevant tracks to her favourite electric guitarist, Alan Murphy, who came in and made a particularly effective contribution to ‘Waking The Witch’, and also added explosive counterpoints on ‘Running Up That Hill’.
Much fuss was made in 1984 over Prince’s hit single ‘When Doves Cry’, a dance record without a bass line. Hounds Of Love was in some ways even more groundbreaking; many of the songs have neither bass nor guitar. The pounding title track is built on the highly unconventional bones of two drum kits, cello, vocals and a snatch of dialogue – ‘It’s in the trees! It’s coming!’ – recreated from Night Of The Demon, a suitably stark setting for the definitive expression of one of Bush’s most consistent themes: the fear of being trapped by love, ripped to shreds by passion. Here, love is a prowling source of terror and the singer its quivering quarry, while the music is perfectly in sync with the subject matter. The rhythm track pounds like a heartbeat in the throes of panic-stricken ecstasy, while the scything strings add a manic, compulsive element to the chase. And after three minutes of enthralling will-she-won’t-she comes the magnificent climax: “I need la-la-la-la-la LOVE!” After all the hide-and-seeking with Del, it’s hard not to hear this as a very personal declaration. It remains one of her most moving, magnificently realised songs.
The bass, when it was featured, was democratically deployed, spread between Del, Eberhard Weber – “There’s God and then there’s Eberhard”25, according to Del – Danny Thompson and Youth. The latter, called in to play on ‘The Big Sky’, was particularly struck by Bush’s working methods. “Every individual musician would come down and play their parts separately: drums, and guitars, and bass,” he says. “It gives it a slightly futuristic atmosphere. It doesn’t have that natural dynamic arrangement and progression that you have with musicians playing together – it’s quite linear, quite flat, quite modern, in the way that a lot of people do today all the time. Then it was quite unusual, it was only people like Kraftwerk and Can who were doing stuff that was that linear. She’s a visionary, and she has a very clear idea of how she’d like to direct the scene at any time. She commands a great respect in the room and everybody is clearly looking at her to lead, and she’s very able to do that. She let me do what I liked, she gave me some direction, then she said, ‘Thanks very much, off you go’. Then she sort of chopped it up and arranged it in the Fairlight. I learned a lot from that, how to put a record together. Pete Waterman actually worked in a very similar way!”
* * *
Following Bush’s return from a month in Ireland, sessions continued with Paul Hardiman at East Wickham Farm between April 15 and May 24. Hardiman was booked to begin work on another project, so Haydn Bendall came in during the summer of 1984, working full weeks and half weeks over a period of six months. He recalls a fundamental difference in mood between these sessions and the ones he had engineered at Abbey Road for The Dreaming.
“We had lovely times,” he says. “You walked through the garden into the kitchen, and all the family’s business and conversations took place around this huge kitchen table. Paddy was always around, always involved, and the two dogs – Bonnie and Clyde, the hounds of love! There were pigeons and doves all over the place, and her dad smoking his pipe and her mum making sandwiches – it was idyllic. We spent a lot of the summer months there and I have very fond memories of that time together, but it was hard work as well. We weren’t just floating around, it was really hard, concentrated work, because when Kate works she’s incredibly focused. Nobody looks at the clock, and you find yourself doing the same thing for hours and hours and hours, but it was fun and exciting because you knew you were involved in something really special. I felt Hounds Of Love was something special then and I still do. Whenever I hear any one of those tracks I get a thrill.”
The tingling sensation that the music they were making was imbued with some kind of deep magic touched most of those working on the record. “It’s like a very old, almost Druidic thing,” says Youth of the album. “It has a mystical, Bardic quality, part of our Ancient British tradition. It’s not overt, it’s hidden, and I love that. That element synergised with cutting edge technology and a genius writer and you get a classic album. It was a great honour to work with her.”
The sessions were peppered with countless memorable moments. Bush wanted to add another layer of rhythm to ‘Jig Of Life’, and handed Charlie Morgan an array of Irish percussive instruments – the lambeg, the bodhran – and asked him to fill all 24-tracks with his clacking, beating and booming. “Each verse a bit more of me came in, until we ended up with an entire 24-track of me playing different drums,” says Morgan. “I came back from that thinking, ‘What have I done today?’ Just on cloud nine from being thrown the gauntlet and saying, ‘OK, we’re going to do something completely different here.’ I think Stuart [Elliott] and I did some of our best stuff we ever did with Kate, because there were no rules or barriers. It was pure creativity.”
Ensuring the vocals were right was, again, hugely time consuming. When the farm studio was built Bush had deliberately chosen not to install a glass window between the live room and the control room, instead relying on microphones for two-way communication. This was primarily to make her feel less self-conscious when she sang. She admitted to still needing to get “psyched up” to record vocals with the requisite emotional clout, and also to getting a “little drunk”26, which may have been a euphemism. “There was quite a lot of the ‘exotics’ going around,” says Youth. “She’s quite hippy-dippy, dreamy and ‘out there’ anyway, she’s a romantic for sure. She had quite a squeaky clean public persona and I was quite impressed that she was actually quite a ‘head’, she likes to get out of her body a bit.”
Youth lent his big, leggy bass sound to ‘The Big Sky’, a song that became the album’s unruly child. In the end, the finished version was light years away from the way the song had started. “It went through three different incarnations,” says Haydn Bendall. “It’s hard to know who did what, and it’s hard to know what we added or took away. Kate would work on a [track] for ages and ages and ages, it might cost a lot of money and a huge amount of time, but if she didn’t like it she’d scrap it but still retain faith in the song and record it in a completely different way with different people. She definitely controls it all, she’s in charge.”
‘The Big Sky’ encapsulated the twin forces that drove Hounds Of Love, diving headlong into the elements as well as building up a huge, rolling wave of rhythm. It’s an almost perfect pop song, as simple or as complex as you wish it to be, combining a beguiling childlike innocence, the aural equivalent of a big, bright crayon drawing* with an undercurrent of doom, hinting at an impending biblical flood (“Build me an Ark”). As Stewart Avon Arnold has noted, Bush has a fascination with the End Times. Here she suggests that, come Armageddon, the fools and the dreamers will be the ones who escape.
From its very inception, ‘Cloudbusting’ was blessed with a synchronicity that Bush must have appreciated. The song was inspired by A Book Of Dreams, a memoir Bush had bought in 1976 – that pivotal year again – in Watkins occult bookshop in central London, written in 1973 by Peter Reich about his father, Wilhelm Reich, a well-known Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was a colleague of Freud in the Twenties and, in later years, Einstein. Reich attracted much controversy for his unconventional techniques (he would frequently ask patients to strip to their underwear) and his belief in a ‘primordial cosmic energy’ called Orgone, which he described as blue in colour and which, he claimed, could be seen by the naked eye. Reich believed Orgone was the essential life force that we often incorrectly identify as God, an all-powerful cosmic energy which streams through the universe and the body, particularly present during times of sexual stimulus and orgasm.*
Reich also posited the existence of Deadly Orgone, a negative force that counteracted Orgone, causing, among other life-sapping effects, dry weather and desertification, a catastrophic quenching of the life flow. In response, he developed a 10-foot-tall ‘cloudbuster’ machine, an ungainly marriage of metal tubes and pipes placed in a large drum of water which, he claimed, when pointed at the sky could form clouds and create rain, thus increasing the flow of Orgone. He bought 160 acres in Maine and named it Orgonon, a place where he could build a laboratory and continue his work. However, his public experiments with the ‘cloudbuster’ and his unorthodox methods drew increasingly hostile attention from the US authorities, particularly the Food & Drug Administration, and he was finally jailed for two years in 1957 for contempt of court. He died of a heart attack a few months into his sentence, aged 60.
The genius of ‘Cloudbusting’ is that it doesn’t even attempt to distil Reich’s bizarre, brilliant, esoteric and in some respects highly dubious life into a five-minute song. Instead, it focuses on the profoundly touching relationship between a child and his father. Peter Reich witnessed the ransacking of his father’s labs, watched the FDA take him away, and visited him in prison many times. He was 13 when Reich died, and A Book Of Dreams is written from the universally accessible perspective of a son celebrating the magic of a mysterious and powerful man, a man who can make rain, and his feelings of pride, helplessness, loss and confusion (Reich Jr. never can make up his mind about the legitimacy of Orgone and the ‘cloudbuster’) following his death.
Bush was haunted by A Book Of Dreams. She had contacted Peter Reich to explain her motives in writing ‘Cloudbusting’ and to express the wish that she hoped that he approved of the song; in a neat, serendipitous touch, she received his reply while they were working on the track at the farm. “When we were doing the vocal, she got a letter from Peter Reich saying he loved the idea of what she was doing,” says Haydn Bendall. “Doing the vocal on that was just fabulous, the power and the passion is stunning. When Kate stands in front of the microphone and sings, it’s fantastic, it takes your breath away. That’s a huge privilege. We’re used to effects in the studio and computer graphics in films, but when you’re faced with raw talent it’s still stunning. She’s quite softly spoken and laughs a lot and is very joyous, but she takes on these different personae when she is singing – she’s an actress as well as a singer.”
It’s a wonderfully balanced song, both sad and strangely ecstatic, and filled with a real understanding of a child’s love for a parent; for don’t we all, as children, want to believe that our parents can perform miracles and cosmic sleights of hand? It’s almost impossible not to hear ‘Cloudbusting’ as a hymn of love and gratitude for Bush’s own inspiring, kind and somewhat eccentric father, a man who always sought to open her eyes to the power of beauty and magic. By the time she gave the song its live debut in 2014, it had also become a hymn to her own son.
That her family remained her strength and joy was a truth communicated time and time again on Hounds Of Love. In ‘And Dream Of Sheep’ she slipped in one of her mother’s favourite expressions, the oddly touching – and very Irish – “Come here with me now”, while ‘Mother Stands For Comfort’ was a more complex, disturbing account of the all-encompassing nature of a maternal love that extends far beyond the bounds of moral and legal right and wrong. Elsewhere, Jay slipped into his best Irish accent to declaim poetically over the end of ‘Jig Of Life’, while the entire brood popped up in ‘Waking The Witch’, Paddy switching effortlessly from Geordie to a Yorkshire accent to implore the girl to wake up.
Perhaps mindful of the warning contained within ‘All The Love’ on The Dreaming, in which she contemplates the sorrow that comes from deep feelings left unexpressed, Hounds Of Love ended with ‘The Morning Fog’, a song pricked with glorious points of light, expressing the joy and gratitude felt by someone who has returned from far away – “I kiss the ground” – and is now determined to celebrate the things that truly matter: life, love and nature, and music. It can be read as a note to self: hold on to your happiness, sing it out, celebrate it. And indeed she does, ending the album with a promise to tell her mother, her father, her lover and her brothers “how much I love them.” Simple and heartfelt, it’s an extraordinary gift of a song.
Listen closely and you can hear that sentiment running through every note of the album. Joy is a fiendishly difficult emotion to capture in any art form. With Hounds Of Love Bush gathered up the positive forces of her childhood home, surrounded by her friends and family and her treasured collaborators, and returned to something fundamental in her music, an elemental vigour. The words are some of her best, containing her most inclusive, dramatic and beautiful thoughts; the music is a force of nature, all wind, weather, light and love; her voice is sublime, the potency she discovered on The Dreaming harnessed and perfectly rendered.
Familiar, less jubilant themes are also present: the difficultly of connecting, the impossibility of really knowing and loving another, the fear of surrender, the fear of not surrendering, the constant yearning. Several tracks are honest and imaginative examinations of human struggle, but nothing is insurmountable. Hounds Of Love is ultimately about maintaining hope and happiness against all the odds. ‘Running Up That Hill’, though not her choice of title, was a perfect analogy – life is hard, but we’re getting somewhere. Though bleak and often nightmarish, similarly ‘The Ninth Wave’ is a story about not dying, not going under, but instead riding the waves and, somehow, keeping going. Every moment of darkness and doubt is balanced and leavened by a ringing affirmation, an unfakeable joie de vivre – she had fun making this record. “It was one of the most content, happy periods of my life for quite a while, in that I actually had time to breathe and work creatively,” she said.27 Hounds Of Love is a thrilling portrait of the artist as a truly alive, fully connected human being.
* * *
She had been gone a long time. In her absence, Marvin Gaye had died and Madonna had arrived, ushering in an age of brash, blatant sexuality that made Bush’s purring eroticism seem positively demure; MTV was the new kingmaker, the compact disc had undergone its ‘Big Bang’ moment, and that ‘gated’ drum sound could be heard on records by everyone from David Bowie to Bruce Springsteen. The world had moved on apace. In their August 3, 1985 issue NME ran a feature placing Bush firmly in the ‘Where Are They Now?’ file. Yes, she had been gone a long time.
The response was swift. Two days after NME hit the shops Bush released ‘Running Up That Hill’ as a single and appeared on Wogan to sing it, her first public performance in the UK for almost three years, and in the final third of 1985 and for much of the following year she was everywhere, exposed to more interviews, television appearances and awards shows than at any time since the late Seventies.
‘Running Up That Hill’ had been called ‘A Deal With God’ until EMI expressed concerns that the title would damage its chances of success in staunchly Catholic territories, and probably also hinder its prospects in America, where Bush had been steadily building a profile. “We were told that if we kept this title that it wouldn’t be played in any of the religious countries,” she recalled. “We might get it blacked purely because it had ‘God’ in the title. This seemed completely ridiculous to me … but nonetheless, although I was very unhappy about it, I felt unless I compromised I was going to be cutting my own throat.”28
Bush hadn’t had a hit record since 1981, or a Top 10 single since 1980, a lifetime in pop’s accelerated chronology. She had already insisted that ‘Running Up That Hill’ be the first single rather than ‘Cloudbusting’, the company’s choice, so she reluctantly consented to the title change, reasoning that “after The Dreaming, I couldn’t be bloody minded.”29 She had learned when to pick her fights. Whereas the dust-up over ‘Wuthering Heights’ at the launch of her career was a defining battle she felt she simply had to win, the compromise on ‘Running Up That Hill’ was made from a position of strength. She could see the bigger picture, the wider victory. She even deigned to appear on Top Of The Pops, her first performance on the show since the ‘Wuthering Heights’ debacle over seven years earlier. This time she called the shots and her band came with her.
‘Running Up That Hill’ was greeted with almost universal acclaim. Even Melody Maker, whose reviewer Helen Fitzgerald initially gave it a desperately ill-considered brush-off, re-considered and printed a glowing write-up in a future issue. It quickly peaked at number three, her biggest hit since her first single, and proved a resounding success worldwide. It remains – alongside ‘Wuthering Heights’ – her most widely recognised song. Its accessibility wasn’t hurt by the fact that the insistent rhythmic pulse that drove the song was so effortlessly in synch with the times.
The B-side was ‘Under The Ivy’, a hushed, two-minute retreat into an internalised world of childhood that she had succeeded in carrying with her, recorded in an afternoon early in the album sessions. Here, she brings her past and present selves together in a lament for lost innocence, set in the farm’s rose garden, where “someone is recalling a moment when … they were children, something they used to do … that they won’t be able to do again.”30 It is a testament of the strength – not just of songwriting, but also of unity and form – of Hounds Of Love that such a magnificent song was left on the sidelines. ‘The Ninth Wave’ concept bustled some fine tracks into touch, but she seemed to retain a soft spot for ‘Under The Ivy’, performing the song live from Abbey Road in March 1986 for a special anniversary edition of the Channel 4 music show The Tube.
The album had been completed in June, Bush having added all the necessary atmospheric flourishes, which included whirring helicopter noises borrowed from Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Palmer simulating a steam train to help disguise the slo-mo collapse at the conclusion of ‘Cloudbusting’, and her old friend Morris Pert dropping in for some percussive fun on ‘The Big Sky’: “Ah yes, we do get going, don’t we!” he fondly recalls. No donkeys this time, no emus. The mix, overseen by Brian Tench, was once again suitably complex, and even mastering the record was something of a trauma. Ian Cooper, who cut all Bush’s records from The Dreaming to The Red Shoes, recalls, “Hounds Of Love took the longest. I won’t say it was a nightmare, but I remember the list of what I had to do rolling onto the floor, it was jumping around all over the place. I have a funny feeling we were still doing it when it was released. I remember asking her when it was coming out, and she said, ‘It’s out!’ I said, ‘Then why are we doing it?’ and she said, ‘I think we could do this and that right.’” It’s tempting to surmise that nothing is ever quite finished to her satisfaction.
Hounds Of Love was yet another autumn baby, launched at the London Planetarium on September 9, 1985 and released a week later. Bush and Palmer attended the launch together, arriving hand in hand amid an eruption of flashbulbs as the papers finally got the shot they’d been waiting for. Inside, the entire album was played to the accompaniment of a light show in the Laserium, but the event was rather overshadowed by some of the subsequent press coverage in which Bush was bitchily portrayed – still – as some air-headed ingénue, while the gossip sheets took great delight in the fact that a well refreshed Youth had called Del a “wally”.
“I got drunk at the launch of Hounds and made some serious indiscretions,” says the bass man. “All I can say is that I was extremely jealous. I wanted to be Del! But I don’t want to talk about that, really.” It can certainly prove hazardous for the heartstrings recording with Bush. One musician deliberately stopped working with her for many years because he “was absolutely desperately and totally in love, just besotted with her. She and Del were together and I wasn’t going to do anything to change that, and in the end I kind of absented myself. It was very tricky. I was getting emotionally involved and I lost all objectivity, so I bowed out.”
Nick Launay admits that while working with Bush on The Dreaming he became “very confused by the whole thing. She bought me towards the end this big box of chocolates with this wonderful note in it, and wrote lovely cards saying ‘Thank you for making my music come alive’ and all this. It was all very lovely. I was, like, ‘Wow, what does she mean by this?’ But she had a boyfriend, Del Palmer, and he was there all the time, and that was obviously ongoing. She’s just a very, very loving person and I think she puts this feeling of love and appreciation out there when you work with her, and you tend to get a little confused about what it all means! Some people put out an incredible energy of love, and I think she was just like that. I was really young. I was 20 but more like a 12-year-old, so it was pretty amazing just being in the room with this amazing looking person. To me it was like being with a cartoon character, almost, like a Japanese anime character. And the way she talked! This incredibly high voice, quite bizarre and very seductive. None of it was put on at all, she was just like that.”
Daniel Lanois describes her as down to earth, “apart from the fact that every man in the room falls in love with her! If you call that down to earth….” On the set of The Line, The Cross And The Curve, the entire crew scrambled over each other to do her bidding. It’s a widespread affliction, and one not merely confined to men. “Her gentleness, you just can’t help but fall in love with her,” says Borimira Nedeva, who worked with Bush during her sessions with the Trio Bulgarka. “The trio adored Kate as everyone else did.”
Scores of interviews with Bush over the years have ended as fawning paeans to her ‘sensuality’, every male journalist fancying himself as a potential suitor, eulogising everything from her dimples to her toes. Among her closest friends and collaborators, however, she inspires a deeper loyalty and sense of protectiveness, not only in deference to her artistry, but also her privacy. “People who work with her tend not to talk out of school,” says the author David Mitchell, who worked with Bush on ‘Before The Dawn’. Bush’s natural warmth, genuineness, lack of prudishness, tactility, sincerity and artistic integrity, combined with her obvious beauty and great gifts, is a large part of the reason people love working with her to the point where they become almost devotional. She surrounds herself with musicians and technicians and creative people of all ages, stripes and experience who will go the extra mile for her because not only does she treat them with respect, but they understand more than anyone that what she does is extraordinary. “No disrespect to anyone I’ve worked with since, but I’ve not met anyone else who is in the same league,” says Jon Kelly, echoing an oft-repeated mantra. “She was so different, and just the sweetest lady.”
* * *
Building on the success of ‘Running Up That Hill’, Hounds Of Love went straight to number one in the UK charts, knocking Madonna’s Like A Virgin off the top perch. Not only was the album a superb artistic statement but it was cleverly constructed, front-loaded with the most accessible songs before introducing the more demanding material that comprised ‘The Ninth Wave’. The Dreaming had been somewhat uneasily ahead of its time and portrayed Bush in a light so far removed from how she had appeared previously that great chunks of her audience couldn’t, or wouldn’t, connect with it. On Hounds Of Love, conversely, she succeeded in looking and sounding utterly true to herself and yet also conveniently in tune with the mood music of the mid-Eighties: big hair, shoulder pads, great melodic hooks. Technology, too, had caught up with her. During her studio hibernation the Fairlight had become ubiquitous, and any number of songs were flying around the ether featuring its bright, synthetic string sound rubbing against bubbling Linn rhythms; The Blue Nile’s 1984 single ‘Tinseltown In The Rain’, for instance, bears a striking resemblance to ‘Running Up That Hill’. And let us not forget that 1985 was the year the charts succumbed to the power of love: Huey Lewis, Jennifer Rush, the afterglow of Frankie Goes To Hollywood. What better time for a cry of, ‘It’s in the trees, it’s coming!’
The colossal success of Hounds Of Love had a certain inevitability about it. EMI were excited and pushed the album hard. It sold over 600,000 copies in the first nine months, ten times more than The Dreaming, and became the fourth best selling compact disc released in Britain, lining up behind the coffee table classics, Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms and Love Over Gold and Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required.
The critics were also impressed. Sounds gave it the full five stars, declaring simply that “Hounds Of Love is fucking brilliant. All human life [is] contained herein. Dramatic, moving and wildly, unashamedly, beautifully romantic.” NME, the volatile weather front charged with shaping the nation’s musical temperature on a weekly basis, pronounced that Bush was, at last, cool. “Kate’s a genius, the rarest solo artist this country’s ever produced,” wrote Jane Solanas. “She makes sceptics dance to her tune. The company’s daughter has truly screwed the system and produced the best album of the year doing it.” Smash Hits gave it a nine out of 10 rating and made it pick of the month; No 1 called it “a haunting collection of musical images” and then spoiled it all by declaring it “one for Marillion fans everywhere.” Melody Maker liked it but had an unpleasant Pavlovian reaction to ‘The Ninth Wave’; anything with a ‘concept’ was deemed profoundly suspicious.
The last months of 1985 were almost entirely given over to dedicated promotion, not only throughout Europe but also further afield. In mid-November she visited the United States for the first time since 1978. Her stock had steadily been growing across the Atlantic since The Dreaming, the first of her albums since The Kick Inside to get a release in the US. Its oddness and originality had earned some highly favourable reviews and also considerable exposure on college radio, her designated home on the airwaves; in the States, Bush has always been considered unequivocally ‘alternative’. Michael Davis characterised her in his 1982 Creem review as “a cross between Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchell, Nina Hagen and [The Motels’ lead singer] Martha Davis.” In latter years she has often been bunched in with other ‘sensitive’ female musicians like Jane Siberry and Sarah McLachlan, the Lilith Fair set. In a musical landscape obsessed with categories, she was always going to have a problem finding her niche.
Nick Burton in Record called The Dreaming a “masterpiece … she’s the only female rocker out there doing anything original (or experimental) in contemporary pop. What’s pending? Stardom, one hopes.” Building on these positive reactions and a subsequent foothold in the nursery slopes of the Billboard 200, EMI-America had finally mobilised behind Bush’s career, organising the release of a five track mini-LP in June 1983 featuring ‘Sat In Your Lap’, ‘James And The Cold Gun’, ‘Babooshka’, ‘Suspended In Gaffa’ and a French vocal version of ‘The Infant Kiss’ called ‘Un Baiser D’Enfant’. In Canada, the mini-LP included an extra track, ‘Ne T’Enfuis Pas’, specially aimed at the French-speaking Canadian market and recorded and mixed – alongside the new vocal for ‘Un Baiser D’Enfant’ – by Bush, Palmer and Paul Hardiman in a single day at the house in Eltham on October 16, 1982. A personal promotional tour was planned to coincide with the release of the mini-album, but last minute engine failure on the QE2 – one of the least hackneyed of all rock star excuses, but Bush was still not a happy flyer – put paid to her trip, and in the end she publicised it via telephone interviews.
In an amusing acknowledgement of Bush’s continued stage absence, the release was supported by a 32-date college ‘tour’ undertaken by the Live At Hammersmith Odeon video, followed by the belated but highly promoted release of Lionheart and Never For Ever in January 1984. The net effect was as desired. By the time ‘Running Up That Hill’ was released in the US in August 1985, snazzy 12-inch and all, followed by Hounds Of Love a month later, Bush’s profile Stateside had grown appreciably. It didn’t hurt that the US reviews for the album were superb. “Bush compellingly stakes her claim as a major voice in pop music,” said Pam Lambert in the Wall Street Journal. The Los Angeles Times deemed the album a “dark and dreamy masterpiece” while Spin called her a “genius [who] creates music that observes no boundaries of musical structure or inner expression.” The Boston Globe declared the album “an upbeat affirmation of life and love; Bush has come a long way from her early days as a soft-rocking singer-songwriter.”
For the first time, she agreed to undertake serious promotion in North America, following up a handful of preliminary phone interviews with a visit (Concorde, naturally) to New York in November, where she taped several TV and press interviews and visited the MTV studios. She also hit the streets, signing copies of Hounds Of Love at Tower Records in Greenwich Village, where the queue snaked hundreds of metres around the block, and she stayed – happily, amazed by her popularity – many hours longer than arranged. There is no question that her promotional input made a palpable difference. ‘Running Up That Hill’, supported in the US by the film clip of her performance on the Wogan show (the video she made with David Garfath, with its ballet moves, low-key colouring and lack of lip-synching, was deemed by MTV to be too esoteric for US audiences; surely a backhanded compliment), climbed to number 30 on the Billboard chart in late November. Had she also released one of the album’s outtakes, ‘Not This Time’, as a single rather than relegated it to the B-side of ‘The Big Sky’ she might even have scored a genuinely huge US hit. One of her most conventional songs, built along the lines of a standard rock ballad with a well-worn chord pattern and big, reverbed drums, ‘Not This Time’ seemed absolutely tailor-made for Stateside success. The thought, no doubt, didn’t even occur to her.
* * *
Hounds Of Love had legs, stamina. In the US the album peaked just before Christmas at 30 on the Billboard album chart, but in Britain the record’s initial success triggered a series of aftershocks that lasted long into the following year. She won three BPI nominations – Best Album, Best Single, Best Female Vocalist – and lip-synched to ‘Hounds Of Love’ at the ceremony in February 1986, looking suitably vampiric, her hair jet black, her eyes lined with deep purple, her lips a vicious dark red. She also performed the song on Top Of The Pops and, from certain angles, came almost to resemble a conventional pop star, popping up in the unlikeliest places. She sang backing vocals for Big Country and Go West (her guitarist, Alan Murphy, also played with them) and was bitten by the charity bug which, post-Live Aid, had infiltrated much of popular culture. Over three nights in April 1986 she performed ‘Breathing’ solo at the piano for a Comic Relief benefit at the Shaftesbury Theatre and, effortlessly flitting from the truly sublime to the patently ridiculous, duetted with comedian Rowan Atkinson – looking like a cross between Lou Reed and a prototype Jarvis Cocker, and clearly channelling his inner Neil Diamond – on a fine slice of comic capery called ‘Do Bears …?’, in which she played the fragrant if slatternly love interest to Atkinson’s smarmy loser: “He was rich and I was down on my luck,” she purred. “So I charged him a fortune for a flying fu-” at which point Atkinson hastily interjects with “for crying out loud.” Later in the year she turned up with other Comic Relief stars at the Claude Gill book shop in Oxford Street to launch the charity’s Christmas book and she also did her bit for Sport Aid, running on Blackheath to raise funds for famine relief in Africa.
Three more singles were released from Hounds Of Love, each accompanied by expensive, hi-spec videos which – again, in keeping with current trends, but also reflecting Bush’s move away from dance as a medium of visual expression towards film – were less pieces of performance art and more like mini-movies. The ‘Cloudbusting’ film, in particular, was a hugely ambitious undertaking, incorporating a Hollywood star (Donald Sutherland), a member of Monty Python’s creative team (Julian Doyle) and Bush acting the part of a young Peter Reich. Filmed over three intense days in September on White Horse Hill in Uffington on the Berkshire Downs, it fuelled her desire to become even more involved in film-making. Even on such a huge project, however, she always kept her eye on details elsewhere.
Her instinct was to lead from the front and, where possible, to oversee personally every last detail. She rushed from the set of ‘Cloudbusting’ to attend the pressing of the single to ensure that the correct message [‘For Peeps’, the nickname of Peter Reich] was cut into the run-out grooves. Bush does not have a natural flair for delegation. She favours the kind of obsessive attention to detail which has led to charges of control freakery, but which also ensures the results of her endeavours are frequently flawless.
‘Cloudbusting’ reached number 20 in October 1985, followed by ‘Hounds Of Love’, which peaked at number 18 in March 1986, and ‘The Big Sky’, which scraped into the Top 40 in the summer, almost a full year after the album was released.*
Even when the Hounds Of Love singles dried up, Bush was still a fixture in the charts; in the autumn of 1986 she had two further hit singles. The first – and biggest – was ‘Don’t Give Up’, a duet with Peter Gabriel, another art-rock individualist undergoing a commercial gold rush with his ‘Sledgehammer’ single and So album. Bush had recorded her part of the song back in February at Gabriel’s home studio at Ashcombe House, where she would have felt fully at home amongst the rural informality. “The cattle barn was Peter’s PA room, and then we had a side room for the control room, with cows peering in through the window,” recalls Daniel Lanois, the Canadian who co-produced So. “Pretty makeshift, very West Country!”
A beautiful, burbling ballad with gospel overtones, ‘Don’t Give Up’ is a song of battered pride, sung by a man who has lost his job and, in the process, has also lost his faith and sense of identity. Yet it also reinforces the essentially comforting idea that a bond between two people can overcome the most grievous setback. “Peter wanted it to be a conversation between a man and a woman,” says Lanois. “This completely came from Peter and was there early on, so Kate was volunteered to play the role.” The pair did not sing together in the studio; Gabriel had already recorded his vocals, and Bush followed his lead on her parts. The first time she reacted spontaneously to the song, feeling her way into it. Ashcombe House was a tiny space, and she sang from the control room wearing headphones, squeezed in beside Gabriel, Lanois and the engineers. Not her ideal creative environment.
There was a raw intimacy in her vocal that matched the lyric, but she felt she had “messed it up”31 and, having been sent a cassette copy of the song with her vocals dubbed on, she returned later to sing it again. In the end, some of the doubt and fragility of her initial vocal was retained in the final version. “She was a sweetheart to work with,” says Lanois. “It’s a bit of a funny song to sing, because the time signature is really odd, and until you wrap your head around it it’s quite complex, but she managed to pull it off nicely. If I can be blunt about it, she is just a great emotional singer, and that really came across in that performance.”
‘Don’t Give Up’ rose to number nine in the UK and entered the Billboard 100, an unlikely hit single for a song of its length, subject matter and unusual time signature. It has become a beloved and much-covered standard – Lady Gaga and Midway State being the most recent – and for many listeners, particularly in the US, it remains their first point of reference for Bush. The simple, highly effective video featured Bush and Gabriel in a long, loving clinch – both emotional and erotic, this was an embrace full of pain, comfort and reassurance – which fuelled further speculation that the two were, in time-honoured tabloid parlance, ‘more than friends’. The same suggestion had often been made about Bush and Gilmour. Gabriel had a deserved reputation as something of a swordsman, but “there was certainly [nothing between her] and Peter at that time,” says Lanois. Sinead O’Connor, one of his past romantic partners and never one for playing the diplomatic card, later said, “I’ve got to admire Kate Bush because Peter Gabriel tried to shag her and she wasn’t having any. She’s the only woman on earth who ever resisted him, including me.”32
As ‘Don’t Give Up’ was sliding down the charts it waved hello to Bush’s new single, ‘Experiment IV’, which peaked at 23. It was a curiously flat song, B-grade Bush, and another tale of weird science and shadowy figures from the government. This time the plot concerned a military plan to create music that can secretly kill people, a further twist on a familiar Bush concept, the notion of a hidden evil lurking within beauty: it could be love, music, or the lure of water lulling her to fall and then ripping her to shreds. The video, featuring an array of alternative comics such as Hugh Laurie and Dawn French, was another cinematic showpiece; her performance of the song on Wogan, the band decked out in lab coats as Bush sang from behind a large desk, proved more compelling.
She had recorded ‘Experiment IV’ to accompany The Whole Story, a selective compilation of 12 of her singles released in November 1986 and, to date, her first and only greatest hits collection.* She re-recorded a new vocal and added a very Eighties beefed up drum sound to ‘Wuthering Heights’, suggesting both a lack of love for the original and a reluctance to be side-swiped by the fatal embrace of nostalgia. “It sounded dated,” she said. “I think if we’d had more time I probably would have done the same with a couple of songs.”33 The seeds of a desire to do something practical with her creative dissatisfaction were sown here, and would eventually lead to Director’s Cut.
Even if she thought it was “a crap idea”34, releasing a compilation of old material was an atypically regressive and obviously commercially motivated move, followed by a video collection of similar songs, issued despite her own misgivings about the quality (she felt she was only really beginning to get to grips with the form) of much of the material
She felt she owed EMI – in particular, David Munns – some payback, and thus allowed them to cash in on her catalogue at a time when her commercial profile was at its highest. There would never be a better time, and she may have realised that if she did it now she wouldn’t ever have to do it again. The Whole Story was released on the back of a promotional drive of almost military precision, heavily advertised in the press and on radio and television, and proved by far her most successful record. It has sold over six million copies to date, and has taken her music into households she might never have otherwise reached.
She undoubtedly worked hard for the extraordinary successes of 1985 and 1986, and in many ways allowing the release of The Whole Story was her final concession to playing the industry game, while pushing Hounds Of Love would be the last time she promoted an album with such a wide ranging, conventional campaign. The clash between the banal flippancy of a TV studio and the style and substance of her music had become increasingly pronounced, just as the disparity between the isolation of her working methods – much of the time now it was just her, Del and an engineer, squirreled away in the studio for months – and the fanfare with which she was expected to announce and promote her work made for increasingly discordant mood music. “I do get a bit scared of the exposure,” she said. “Coming out of work and saying, ‘Here’s the new album!’ It’s a bit frightening how exposed you are suddenly everywhere, being on the side of a bus when it goes past. I hate that!35 I think sometimes the work speaks much better than the person does. I certainly feel mine does. I think sometimes it can go against the work; the personality can almost taint it.”36
Promoting in America may have sealed the deal. The interview she taped in November 1985 with cable show Night Flight was too ghastly to be entirely typical, but it summed up the hard sell, say-this, say-that, say-it-again conveyor belt of US media promotion. Faced with an under-briefed female interviewer who insists on calling The Dreaming ‘Dreaming’ and a technical crew who keep interrupting her, Bush keeps her cool – just – but you can tell the entire charade is sapping her soul. It was clearly an excruciating experience.
Back home, she still often felt misunderstood and misrepresented. In critical terms, the progress Bush had made on The Dreaming was largely cemented by Hounds Of Love. Bush certainly had her supporters within the music press prior to 1985, but they were swimming against the tide; she was just as likely to be dismissed as irredeemably naff, someone guaranteed to add a weird and titillating novelty factor to achingly uncool pillars of the ‘entertainment’ establishment such as Pebble Mill and BBC Radio One. After Hounds Of Love she was generally viewed as hip, sexy and in control, but even the glowing testimonies came with a degree of age-old baggage. Her art might be dismissed or grudgingly praised, but rarely without an obligatory remark about her breasts and a derogatory dig about her dancing thrown in for good measure. Even eight years after the Mankowitz portrait, in a positive review of Hounds Of Love, NME, then a bastion of left-leaning political correctness, was still fixated with her “famous tits”, while there was a condescending tone lurking in several other reviews, a kind of apologetic undertow, as though liking Bush remained a guilty pleasure.
Today there is a climate within popular culture of instant assimilation and mass consensus, and it’s easy to forget how fiercely delineated the battlelines were two decades ago. It was a time of rigid side-taking, heightened class awareness, ruthless scrutiny of motives and methods. For some commentators there was still something not-quite-right about Bush, the ‘girl’ who had swanned her way to the top, twirling and caterwauling and getting the middle-aged TV execs all steamed up with her ‘artistic’ dancing. She was regarded by many as part of the Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, Annie Lennox and Pink Floyd axis of orthodoxy, the Prince’s Trust and BPI set: comfortable, privileged, somewhere ‘over there’, a bit of odd pop for mums and dads and girls in Laura Ashley dresses, but nothing more. “Most of her records smell of tarot cards, kitchen curtains, and lavender pillows,” wrote the Stud Brothers in Melody Maker which, as a fundamental misreading of her art, is hard to improve upon. Yet this perception of her work as something twee and prettified served with a side order of entrance-level kookiness still lingered.
When Bush appeared on Whistle Test in 1985 host Richard Skinner erected an immortal monument of condescension in her honour, beginning the interview by smiling, “Now, you’re a very determined girl….” She greeted his idiotic gambit and others like it with the smirking, silent contempt it deserved, but it was little wonder she resolved to subject herself to this process with increasing infrequency, and that when she did there was a palpable change of tack. She had become a very different interviewee from the unguarded, gushing, enthusiastic young woman who emerged in 1978. Having long since recognised that the press pursued their own agenda no matter what, she duly adopted a more formal demeanour, backing away from any discussions of a more outré, hippy-dippy nature. This was business, not therapy. Any questions concerning Gurdjieff or ‘communing with nature’, for instance, were met with firm stonewalling. You could almost see her running through her answers in her head before she spoke. She was prepared to be there, at least, and to talk politely about her music, but no more.
“I find it very difficult to express myself in interviews,” she said. “Often people have so many preconceptions that I spend most of the interview trying to defend myself from the image that was created by the media eight years ago. That is understandable to a certain extent – that’s when I did most of my interviews, and I think the image was created by what the press felt the public wanted, how they interpreted me as I was then, and how I projected myself at that time. I was very young, idealistic and enthusiastic about so much then, but I felt they exaggerated these qualities. And I was – and am even more so now – a private person.”37
* * *
Hounds Of Love was enormously significant in determining the path of Bush’s future career and her subsequent media profile. It was both her best-selling blockbuster and her escape route, amassing the kind of sales and critical hosannas that allow an artist to do whatever they want, whenever they want. “They [EMI] left me alone from that point,” she said. “It shut them up.”38 Had she so desired, she could have grasped the nettle of global stardom by quickly recording a follow-up album, going on tour, writing an autobiography, acting in a dubious film, and generally teaching Madonna a trick or two about how to be an emotionally and intellectually engaged female pop phenomenon. Instead, she gratefully recognised its success as an opportunity to bolt in the opposite direction. “Absolutely good luck to her because – talk about being on the front line!” she later said, gazing in Ms Ciccone’s direction. “She’s such an exposed person. I would find that so difficult to live with.”39
The success of the record, combined with the fact that she now had her own private studio, was her one-way ticket out of the rat race. She never really came back, at least not fully.
Making and recording Hounds Of Love was not just a creative peak, but the first practical application of Bush’s working ethos: her career hereafter has become a self-sufficient cottage industry conducted in real time, at home, alone or among her friends, keeping the industry and most other observers at several arms’ lengths. It meant, after the ripples surrounding the album’s extraordinary triumphs subsided in late 1986, that we would see much less of her. “When I come out into the world, it’s only to say, ‘Here’s the album’, so I can get on with the next one,” she said.40
In terms of her cultural status, Hounds Of Love marked the birth of the Kate Bush we all now take for granted: an unimpeachable goddess, the critic’s darling, iconic, influential, a national treasure. Before 1985, the jury was divided. Hounds Of Love eventually settled the matter once and for all. It was a high watermark of artistic and aesthetic excellence – those songs, those videos, that languidly erotic sleeve, the mastery of technology – which she has found almost impossible to better. In 1991 she called it the “most complete work I’ve ever done. In some ways it was the best and I was the happiest that I’d been compared to making other albums.”41 It has proved a prophetic statement. In Aerial, she has made at least one further album of comparable range, quality and distilled emotional impact, but she has never again sounded quite so imperious, or displayed such absolute mastery of all her numerous talents, as she did on Hounds Of Love.
* She did, however, participate in Ferry Aid in 1987, one of less memorable of the Eighties’ obsession with charity singles, singing on a new version of ‘Let It Be’ released in aid of the victims of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster. Organised by The Sun and featuring an array of D-list celebrities, among which Bush and Paul McCartney, and also Mark Knopfler, stood out like a royal cortege strolling along Blackpool promenade, she agreed to do it but banished all press photographers from her presence and reportedly had the studio cleared while she recorded her vocal.
* The title, taken from a passage of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s 1869 poem The Coming of Arthur, was applied retrospectively. The poem did not directly influence Bush’s work.
* The choral section of ‘Hello Earth’ is taken from a Georgian folk song called ‘Zinzkaro’, which Bush heard performed by the Vocal Ensemble Gordela on the soundtrack of Werner Herzog’s 1979 German vampire film Nosferatu The Vampyre, one of her more esoteric borrowings.
* On the 12-inch Bush gently mocks the song’s hippyish vibe by arranging an impromptu ‘That Cloud Looks Like …’ competition mid-song, featuring friends and family and a parade of very Pythonesque silly voices.
* Bush’s work contains many examples where the moment of creative breakthrough is portrayed as essentially orgasmic. Given that she had read the book in 1976, it’s distinctly possible that ‘Symphony In Blue’ – with its triple threat of God, sex, and the colour blue – was partly inspired by reading about Reich’s theory.
* The progress of ‘The Big Sky’ wasn’t helped by the fact it was released only days after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union; not everyone was gleefully looking up at the clouds, although it did rather underline the song’s less obvious, less positive message of impending disaster.
* It is not her only collection of previously released material. The Single File video and box-set of singles were released as a stop-gap between The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love, while This Woman’s Work was a lavish compendium of her entire output plus B-sides and rarities, released in 1990.