Kate Bush released Hounds Of Love 40 years ago. Her fifth studio record reinstated her position as one of the most innovative and creative artists of all time, yielding the future chart-topper Running Up That Hill. But she endured a challenging climb to the completion of one of her best-loved albums.
It’s 1983 and Kate Bush is, er, frankly, bushed. Five years previously, the symphonically spooky No.1 hit Wuthering Heights had been the south London singer-songwriter’s hugely successful breakthrough – making her, aged just 19, the first female artist in global chart history to do so with a self-written song. Next came the astonishing The Kick Inside and Lionheart LPs, both released in 1978; her first No.1 album, Never For Ever in 1980; and, in the autumn of 1982, The Dreaming.
On top of that there had been 16 singles, the six-week Tour Of Life in 1979, countless engagements around the world and a clutch of vocal collaborations – perhaps most notably for Peter Gabriel on his third self-titled record, aka Melt.
Each step had seen Bush bloom as a songwriter, vocalist, musician, performer, and then as a producer. In 1979 the 20-year-old had tested the water alongside Lionheart engineer Jon Kelly for the live On Stage EP, then dived in further as co-producer with Kelly for Never For Ever. She’d finally took the reins fully on The Dreaming – yet the dramatic and theatrical masterwork devoured its architect’s time, energy and recording advance as she moved between multiple London studios, racking up hours of time and many packs of cigarettes, bars of chocolate and Chinese takeaways.
Increasingly, EMI became worried about their golden child’s experimental bent. A&R head Brian Southall recalled it was the nearest they’d come to having a submission returned to the artist. engineer Hugh Padgham – booked because of his work with Gabriel – told Uncut: “I couldn’t bear it after a bit. She didn’t 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 Dreaming was praised for its bold approach, but important outlets such as Radio 1 shrank away from promoting its outré singles, aside from the gloriously unhinged Sat In Your Lap. “For the first time I was meeting resistance artistically,” Bush told Radio 1 in 1992. “People were saying, ‘She’s really gone mad now – listen to this really weird record!’”
Although immensely proud of the work, which moved closer to her artistic ethos, the experience resulted in burn-out. “I was just a complete wreck, physically and mentally. I’d wake up in the morning and find I couldn’t move,” she said. It was time to get out of London and regroup.
Relocating to a countryside cottage near Sevenoaks, Kent, with partner and bassist Del Palmer, Bush pottered around the garden and decompressed. They did normal stuff: listened to music, watched films, cooked healthy vegetarian food. She got back into a fitness groove with an inspirational new dance teacher, Diane Grey. From a music workroom window at the top of the house, she observed changes in the sky and atmospheric elements, as, that summer, ideas started to emerge for what was being termed “KB5.”
She drew inspiration from love, relationships, the natural world, esoteric literature, feminism, and old horror and war movies as the more pop-structured songs – Running Up That Hill (originally titled A Deal With God) and the titled track (with its eerie ‘It’s in the trees, it’s coming...’ soundbite from Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 horror classic Night Of The Demon) – were fleshed out.
The delicate, yearning And Dream Of Sheep started Bush on an intriguing conceptual trajectory that would become her Celtic and classical-inflected magnum opus, The Ninth Wave, named after a line in Tennyson’s poem Idylls Of The King (referring to the ocean swell that gave birth to folklore hero King Arthur) and influenced by Aivazovsky’s The Ninth Wave shipwreck painting from 1850. This ambitious composition had the point of view of a woman washed overboard in a lifejacket, waiting for rescue and at the mercy of her imagination as she slips into unconsciousness.
The ensuing dream would take her from seeing her own death (Under Ice) to being roused by friendly and not-so-friendly voices, then tried by a Witchfinder (Waking The Witch) and moving into an astral realm where she sees her loved ones fret about her absence (Watching You Without Me). “All my nightmares in one song,” Bush told Radio 1. The subject is saved by a helicopter crew and experiences spiritual renewal and new-found gratitude (The Morning Fog). Little wonder Prog readers voted The Ninth Wave her greatest piece of music in 2011.
At this point she knew the record would have distinct A- and B-sides, and that it would be named after the Hounds Of Love song – she was tickled by the idea of being hunted down by snarling dogs who, when they caught you, slathered you with playfulness and affection. Quite handily, when the time came to create visuals with photographer brother Jay, Bush had her two soppy Weimaraners, Bonnie and Clyde, as co-stars for the promo shoot.
The Fairlight is what I’ve been waiting for… the potential for exploration is never-ending
Kate Bush
Her resolve to self-produce again had been met, understandably, with wariness by EMI after The Dreaming’s perceived lack of commercial success, but Bush persuaded them that she’d deliver something with pop appeal. Demos were built around LinnDrum percussion patterns programmed by Palmer (“Drum machines have changed my life,” she told the Kate Bush Club fan mag). Her trusty conduit, her piano, was augmented heavily by a recent-ish addition: a Fairlight CMI synthesiser, the world’s first digital sampler.
Captivated since synthpop pioneer Richard Burgess had demonstrated it for her, she’d brought it into play on Never For Ever and The Dreaming. Tinkering with the machine in studios was time-consuming since its sampling memory was just two seconds long. She wanted to acquire one to experiment further, and even though it cost £20,000 – the average price of a house at the time – the money was no barrier, with the help of a label advance.
“The Fairlight, in a way, is what I’ve been waiting for,” Bush told Electronics & Music Maker in 1982, later explaining to Keyboard magazine that it was “integral to what I want to do with my music – the potential for exploration is never-ending.”
The Fairlight presented the opportunity to use preset sounds (as heard with the breaking glass sample in the single Babooshka), and the agency to create original ones. “There’s something about the character of a sound,” she told Radio 1’s Classic Albums, “that immediately conjures up images, which can help you to think of ideas that lead you on to a song.”
This album is dealing with me being much more influenced and excited by consistent rhythm
Kate Bush
If she was getting her own Fairlight, how about her own studio too? Her childhood home of East Wickham Farm in Welling, south London, provided the ideal location (her parents’ voices would be included in recordings, as well as brother Jay’s). An unused barn – housing the old, mouse-bitten pump organ young Cathy been thrilled to extract sounds from – was converted, Cinderella-like, into a state-of-the-art 48-track facility, complete with a Q-lock synchroniser, ideal for video. Bush was already planning ahead for cinematic visuals.
Of course, the Fairlight and LinnDrum weren’t going to supplant sounds made by other humans. Bush would retain long-term collaborators such as drummer Stuart Elliott, and during early recording sessions he brought in his Simmons SDS7 – an analogue and digital kit that could store 100 percussion sounds – adhering to the brief of utilising different patterns for each track; although some had no percussion at all (the title track and Running Up That Hill contained no bass lines).
A ‘no cymbals’ rule was explored and brash gated/compressed drum sounds were embraced, à la Gabriel and Phil Collins, Bush allowing side one to be led by beats. “This album is dealing with me being much more influenced and excited by consistent rhythm,” she told Night Flight. “As soon as it’s danceable, people can relate to it.”
“Every moment in her songs is not what you’d expect,” Elliott told Produce Like A Pro, calling it “a real period of exploration.” He remembered using “massive, massive reverb… on one pad I had thunder, another an explosion.”
Bush’s brother Paddy was essential to Hounds Of Love, bringing a wealth of folk instrumentation as well as moral support and creative inspiration. For a lively Celtic section Jig Of Life in The Ninth Wave, she returned to the musicians from Irish folk band Planxty, who’d appeared on The Dreaming –Liam O’Flynn (uilleann pipes) and Dónal Lunny (bodhrán and bouzouki), marshalled by composer-pianist and future Riverdance maestro Bill Whelan.
Her date with them, at Windmill Studios in Dublin, occurred in spring 1984m while she was in Ireland with Palmer, working on her least-favourite job of writing lyrics. Using a Greek firewalking dance called Anastenaria that Paddy had sourced as its basis, Whelan brought in The Dubliners’ John Sheahan to play whistle and fiddle. “He was like Santa Claus,” Bush told her fan club mag. “It was so moving. I started to cry and felt silly, but what a nice experience.” She hugged her Irish Father Christmas at the end of the session.
Back in England, dates through 1984 would see trusted engineers, Advision’s Paul Hardiman and Abbey Road’s Haydn Bendall, arrive for bass sessions with Danny Thompson (who supplied what she called a “moody, jungle cat” feel for Watching You Without Me) and her ECM jazz favourite Eberhard Weber (the eerie, parent-protecting-a-killer Mother Stands For Comfort). Classical master guitarist John Williams added further beauty to The Morning Fog’s tenderness, and Alan Murphy performed what she described as “frighteningly raunchy” guitar for Running Up That Hill and the playful view-from-her-window anthem The Big Sky, which had evolved through three versions and months of work before getting over the line.
There was limitless experimentation with the Fairlight by Bush and Palmer, and she also aimed to get a majority of her vocals down. On Waking The Witch, where she plays witch, witchfinder and jury, she’d nearly fallen out with Palmer over her demand to toggle the tape recorder’s on-off switch to achieve its unnerving drowning-woman effect.
Real strings were another essential element. Admiring his work on Pink Floyd’s The Wall, she brought in James Guthrie in to engineer on Cloudbusting, and hired former Greenslade keyboardist Dave Lawson – n artist with myriad session, TV and film credits. Since his string arrangements on The Dreaming’s Houdini had pleased her so much, she entrusted him with a part for Cloudbusting, a song based on a book she’d been drawn to years earlier at Charing Cross’s esoteric bookshop, Watkins.
Over 10 bars it would fall apart,” she told Radio 1. “The drummer would stop, people would start talking... decoy tactics
Kate Bush
Entitled A Book Of Dreams, it was a memoir written by Peter Reich, son of Wilhelm, the Austrian psychoanalyst who’d originated tremendously controversial therapies based around sex and critical diseases. Peter had viewed him as a magical hero for his experiments on weather and energy with a cloudbuster machine (before his father became disgraced, imprisoned and died). Bush put the emotional story to music, and Lawson booked the supremely respected string ensemble Medici Sextet.
Her cinematic vision was burgeoning – she later said she’d seen The Ninth Wave as a short film and had written a storyboard and script. With Cloudbusting, she created a remarkable film-of-the-song starring herself as the son and her Hollywood hero Donald Sutherland as the father, with one of her most affecting compositions, and videos, to date.
She also had an inventive solution to the track’s initial lack of an ending. “Over 10 bars it would fall apart,” she told Radio 1. “The drummer would stop, people would start talking... decoy tactics. We covered the whole thing with the sound of a steam engine slowing down, the sense of a journey coming to an end.” But even that sound effect was tricky to track down; in the end Bush and Palmer made it up. “Del was the steam and we got a whistle sound on the Fairlight.”
The Ninth Wave – the side-long track on Hounds Of Love’s flip – also benefited from beautiful orchestration around Hello Earth, thanks to Pink Floyd’s cinematic composer-arranger and conductor, Michael Kamen. Floyd would be of help when Bush and Palmer couldn’t locate a good quality search-and-rescue helicopter sample and received permission to use theirs from The Wall.
Bush had yet another musical idea, inspired by Tsintskaro (a piece of Georgian folk music used in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre) to intensify the effect of Hello Earth’s spiritual homecoming, for which she contacted Richard Hickox, the capo di tutti capi of choral masters. He, in turn, asked British composer Michael Berkeley – for many years the presenter of Radio 3’s Private Passions – to assist the his Hickox Singers in creating the spine-tingling lead-out of The Morning Fog.
Berkeley was impressed by her meticulous direction and her “colourful notes,” telling The Guardian she hoped that the result “could arrive as something foreign, harmonically a surprise, as though from another world... She was thrilled when I suggested we create our own new language for this chorus of the spheres,” Engineered by Del at East Wickham, the choristers did take after take until Bush’s target was hit, and Berkeley later recognised her endeavours as “iconic and hugely influential” in modern music.
I’d just spent three years making an album and we wouldn’t get this song played on the radio if I was stubborn. I had to be grown up
Kate Bush
Hounds Of Love took around a year to refine and complete before the label began readying it for release in mid 1985. Bush pushed back against the idea to release Cloudbusting as the lead track, insisting on Running Up That Hill. She was still labelling it A Deal With God, but acquiesced when it was pointed out that every religious country in the world would blacklist it. “I’d just spent two to three years making an album and we wouldn’t get this song played on the radio if I was stubborn. I had to be grown up about this,” she told Radio 1.
The track prominently featured the cello, one of her favourite Fairlight presets, plus a yelping dog-like kind of sound that would be reprised on the title track. The story of a couple in love, swapping roles to better understand one another, was set to an urgent pitter-pat gallop with orgiastic mass-layered vocal style.
Released just after her 27th birthday, Running Up That Hill reached No.3 in the UK chart three weeks later – much to EMI’s relief – and spent 11 weeks in the Top 75. On September 16, the Hounds Of Love album sprinted to No.1 and stayed in the chart for a year. Four decades on, those hounds bounded up that hill again to chart victory thanks to a new generation tuning in to Bush’s ageless masterpiece. Stranger things have happened...
