FEATURE:
Loving Voices from an Answerphone
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush captured in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pierre Terrasson
Kate Bush’s All the Love
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IN the coming weeks…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performs The Dreaming on the German T.V. show, Na Sowas, in 1982
I am being less general with my Kate Bush features and I am focusing=g on specific songs and albums. For my next feature or two, I am going to look at specific songs and elements of Aerial – as the album turns fifteen next month. I am back with The Dreaming now because, last time out, I went deep with the song, Leave It Open, and why it is so remarkable. I am planning a Kate Bush podcast called All the Love, but I have not mentioned the song of the same name! Last time around, I talked about how brilliant The Dreaming is, and how it remains so underrated and intriguing. In 1982, some pushed the album away and felt it was too strange and overloaded. Bush truly incorporated so much into the album, and it was her most varied and fascinating set of songs to that date. Leave It Open ends the first side of The Dreaming, and All the Love is the antepenultimate track. It is strange that the title track opens the second side, but I guess it offered a similar bounce and energy to the opening track, Sat in Your Lap, and Bush wanted to have these two immediate and physical songs open each side. We finish with the rawest and most electric track, Get Out of My House, and the penultimate song, Houdini, mixes a gravel-throated chorus with tenderer elements and sweeping strings.
Providing the filling between The Dreaming, Houdini, and Get Out of My House are Night of the Swallow – which was released as a single in Ireland only -, and All the Love. The last three tracks on The Dreaming are remarkable: from the beauty of All the Love, to the wonderful Houdini, to that epic swansong, Get Out of My House! I wanted to spend a bit of time with All the Love, as it is a song that one does not hear played a lot. That is the curse Bush has faced as an artist, whereby her big hits are well represented on the radio, but one rarely hears many of her album tracks. All the Love is one of many diverse pearls from The Dreaming, and it is one of the more musically-sparse numbers. If songs like Suspended in Gaffa, and Night of the Swallow are a bit busier and boast quite a few different sounds in the composition, I think All the Love is more about the sense of space and raw emotion of the lead vocal. In a way, I think there are similarities between All the Love, and This Woman’s Work from The Sensual World. I think there is a sense of loneliness in both songs and a feeling of things that should have been said have been held back. I know Bush has said This Woman’s Work did not necessarily reflect her own regrets and feelings; All the Love seems very personal and revealing as to how she was feeling by the early-1980s. From a purely universal stance, I guess we all hold love back or are not as open as we should be but, as a major artist, it would have been hard to find much privacy or any sense of normality!
I want to bring in a section from the always-reliable Kate Bush Encyclopaedia, where we get an interview snippet where Bush discusses All the Love’s background.
“Although we are often surrounded by people and friends, we are all ultimately alone, and I feel sure everyone feels lonely at some time in their life. I wanted to write about feeling alone, and how having to hide emotions away or being too scared to show love can lead to being lonely as well. There are just some times when you can't cope and you just don't feel you can talk to anyone. I go and find a bathroom, a toilet or an empty room just to sit and let it out and try to put it all together in my mind. Then I go back and face it all again.
I think it's sad how we forget to tell people we love that we do love them. Often we think about these things when it's too late or when an extreme situation forces us to show those little things we're normally too shy or too lazy to reveal. One of the ideas for the song sparked when I came home from the studio late one night. I was using an answering machine to take the day's messages and it had been going wrong a lot, gradually growing worse with time. It would speed people's voices up beyond recognition, and I just used to hope they would ring back again one day at normal speed.
This particular night, I started to play back the tape, and the machine had neatly edited half a dozen messages together to leave "Goodbye", "See you!", "Cheers", "See you soon" .. It was a strange thing to sit and listen to your friends ringing up apparently just to say goodbye. I had several cassettes of peoples' messages all ending with authentic farewells, and by copying them onto 1/4'' tape and re-arranging the order, we managed to synchronize the 'callers' with the last verse of the song.
There are still quite a few of my friends who have not heard the album or who have not recognised themselves and are still wondering how they managed to appear in the album credits when they didn't even set foot into the studio. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, October 1982)”.
I think one of the things people overlook when they talk about The Dreaming is the different voices throughout. Pre-The Dreaming, Bush was creating a cast of characters and layering her own voice a lot but, from Never for Ever (1980) onwards, we were hearing more voices on subsequent albums – The Trio Bulgarka on The Sensual World, and The Red Shoes; a few contributors on 2011’s 50 Words for Snow, and a few different characters and new voices on Aerial. On The Dreaming, not only does Bush massively use technology like the Fairlight C.M.I., but there are a lot of interesting natural instruments like the fiddle and bullroaer: a perfect mix of the ultra-modern and something much historic and classic.
In vocal terms, we get some great backing vocals from Paddy Bush, Ian Bairnson, Stewart Arnold and Gary Hurst on Sat in Your Lap; Paddy Bush also does backing vocals on The Dreaming, and Get Out of My House; David Gilmour can be heard on Pull Out the Pin; Percy Edwards provides a cast of animal noises on The Dreaming; Gordon Farrell and Del Palmer are on Houdini, whilst Esmail Sheikh and Paul Hardiman are memorable on Get Out of My House. Tomorrow, I am publishing a feature exploring those who contributed to various Kate Bush albums and how Bush added so much to each album in terms of her vocals, but I especially love the contrasts on All the Love. There is a heart-wrenching and pure choir voice from Richard Thornton, who provides one of the most beautiful moments on the whole album. Oddly, something so ethereal and pure sits very well in same song as machine messages. This is a big reason why I wanted to cover this song. I guess there are songs through history where the songwriter brings in answerphone messages to give the song a sense of reality and emotion, but Bush does it like nobody else. I am reminded of Hounds of Love’s Waking the Witch in terms of people in Bush’s lives coming to life and providing this emotion hit. When discussing Waking the Witch with Richard Skinner in 1992, she talked about the voices in that song:
“These sort of visitors come to wake them up, to bring them out of this dream so that they don't drown. My mother's in there, my father, my brothers Paddy and John, Brian Tench - the guy that mixed the album with us - is in there, Del is in there, Robbie Coltrane does one of the voices”.
That series of goodbyes/cheerios/cheers/farewells we hear is haunting and strangely familiar. I really love All the Love and how the vocals are deployed. As I said, there is not a lot of the instrumental layers we hear in other songs on The Dreaming – greater reliance on creating a more harrowing and naked mood. In terms of lyrics, the song affects and moves you from the first verse: “The first time I died/Was in the arms of good friends of mine/They kiss me with tears/They hadn't been near me for years/Say, why do it now/When I won't be around, I'm going out?”. That is countered by Thornton’s choirboy vocal: "We needed you/To love us too/We wait for your move". As Graeme Thomson notes in his biography of Kate Bush, Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush, and the chapter on The Dreaming: “The Dreaming did not sound like the work of a happy person; indeed, it seemed to be the consequence of a woman intent on making herself suffer unnecessarily for her art, who mistrusted her natural optimism and her outwardly straightforward life”. Maybe All the Love is not the most overtly-unhappy song from Kate Bush on The Dreaming, but it is clear that, in her early-twenties, there was this fatigue and sense of longing for peace and younger days perhaps. I just love the song, as it is a gorgeous piece and it is not Bush hiding behind emotions and regrets like so many songwriters do and did – she is bearing her tears and regrets in a very authentic and moving way. There are no other songs like All the Love on The Dreaming, and I do like the fact that it is one of the less frenetic and layered tracks – offering a sense of her earlier work and a glimpse of what we would hear on Hounds of Love (many might disagree, but that is my thought). On an album stuffed with so many sides, stories, sounds and gems, I think All the Love is one of…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush and Felice Fumagalli in Italy in 1982 preparing to promote The Dreaming
THE real highlights from The Dreaming.