FEATURE:
I’ve Always Been a Coward
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love
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I have been looking through my archives…
to see if I have done a feature specifically about Hounds of Love’s title track. I have covered so many Kate Bush tracks, but I don’t think I have detailed this one – I wrote about The Big Sky, Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), Mother Stands for Comfort, and Cloudbusting previously. If I have already featured Hounds of Love then forgive repetition. The Hounds of Love album turned thirty-five back in September, and I was eager to explore it from a number of different angles and get behind individual songs. The title track was the third single from the album. Released on 24th February, 1986, it reached number-eighteen in the U.K. With the single’s thirty-fifth anniversary occurring relatively soon, I may come back to the song and take a more specific look at it. Now, I want to give an overview of a truly moment in Kate Bush’s career. When people rank the songs on Hounds of Love’s first side – the second side, The Ninth Wave, is a conceptual suite -, they normally put Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) first, and then Cloudbusting might come next. I will discuss how various magazines and sites have ranked the song but, first, I want to draw from the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia, where we get some background to the song:
“['Hounds Of Love'] is really about someone who is afraid of being caught by the hounds that are chasing him. I wonder if everyone is perhaps ruled by fear, and afraid of getting into relationships on some level or another. They can involve pain, confusion and responsibilities, and I think a lot of people are particularly scared of responsibility. Maybe the being involved isn't as horrific as your imagination can build it up to being - perhaps these baying hounds are really friendly. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, 1985)
The ideas for 'Hounds Of Love', the title track, are very much to do with love itself and people being afraid of it, the idea of wanting to run away from love, not to let love catch them, and trap them, in case the hounds might want to tear them to pieces and it's very much using the imagery of love as something coming to get you and you've got to run away from it or you won't survive. (Conversation Disc Series, ABCD012, 1985)
When I was writing the song I sorta started coming across this line about hounds and I thought 'Hounds Of Love' and the whole idea of being chasing by this love that actually gonna... when it get you it just going to rip you to pieces, (Raises voice) you know, and have your guts all over the floor! So this very sort of... being hunted by love, I liked the imagery, I thought it was really good. (Richard Skinner, 'Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love'. BBC Radio 1 (UK), 26 January 1992)
In the song 'Hounds Of Love', what do you mean by the line 'I'll be two steps on the water', other than a way of throwing off the scent of hounds, or whatever, by running through water. But why 'two' steps?
Because two steps is a progression. One step could possibly mean you go forward and then you come back again. I think "two steps" suggests that you intend to go forward.
But why not "three steps"?
It could have been three steps - it could have been ten, but "two steps" sounds better, I thought, when I wrote the song. Okay. (Doug Alan interview, 20 November 1985)”.
In October 2004, Q magazine placed this song at number-twenty-one in its list of the fifty greatest British songs of all-time. In a recent MOJO Collectors’ Series about Kate Bush, they ranked the song at number-one. They observed the following:
“In its unstoppable forward thrust, it has the inaugural logic of a dream, although not the way meant by Rolling Stone magazine in its cold review of the album: “Still a precocious, coddled child at 27, Kate Bush loses herself in daydreams and then turns them into songs.” But it is a mature, womanly voice that ruins out of Hounds of Love, not a fey or elfin one, ands certainly not one that asks to be patronised. Neither is it a song that ignores the way of the world. (Coincidentally, the album pushed Madonna’s Like a Virgin from atop the UK charts, another record named after a single that wasn’t quite as otherworldly as it seemed.) The line “I’ve always been a coward/And I don’t know what’s good for me” speaks of experience, but not as much as the delirious cry of “Here I go…” uttered in full awareness that the ground is about to give way, that this is the very second before the falling begins”.
The Guardian named Hounds of Love as Kate Bush’s fifth-best single…and it is a song that means a lot to very many people. In the U.K., the single had the B-side of The Handsome Cabin Boy – a very good and underrated song -, and I hope that there is plenty of attention for Hounds of Love (the single) in February when it turns thirty-five.
On an album that has nothing but brilliance, I think the title track is one of the most extraordinary songs that Bush ever created. The video, which she directed, was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's film, The 39 Steps - and a Hitchcock lookalike also features in the video (a nod to the director's famous cameo appearances in his films). I think that Bush delivers one of her most remarkable vocals on Hounds of Love, and one can dive into the lyrics and pick them apart. Certainly, there are many lines that make you stand back and think. With so much emotion and urgency in her voice, I first get affected when Bush sings: “Hiding in the dark/Hiding in the street/And of what was following me...”. Whether one gets literal visions of her running and hiding in the street or takes it as a metaphor, these are powerful words that are delivered perfectly. The fact that Bush admits that she’s always been a coward – and doesn’t know what’s good for her – is such a bold and honest line that really does take your breath away. There are exclamations as she runs from the hounds of love and this darker spirit that is chasing her. “Take my shoes off/And throw them in the lake/And I'll be/Two steps on the water”. I love that imagery and how she emphasis and elongates ‘throw’ and then underlines the word ‘two’.
The entire song is a masterclass in delivery and storytelling. Every line is important and quote-worthy; the incredible maturity that Bush displays is moving indeed. My favourite section of the song comes near the end when Bush sings: “I found a fox/Caught by dogs/He let me take him in my hands/His little heart/It beats so fast/And I'm ashamed of running away/From nothing real/I just can't deal with this/But I'm still afraid to be there”. I sort of see the ‘fox’ as a wounded lover or a victim of a bad breakup (rather than a literal fox), but one cannot help but envisage Bush holding this dying fox and being affected. Hounds chase foxes, so I think it is more about a relationship and fighting; the way people are hurt without us meaning to or, as Bush (or a character in the song) has admitted to a sense of timidity, maybe there is this sense of miscommunication and reluctance. The idea of someone running away might indicate a love that is getting too real or too heavy to handle. One can spend hours investigating the lyrics and coming to their own conclusions. In a career of masterpieces, Hounds of Love’s title track is very near the top! Before the single celebrates thirty-five years, I wanted to shine a spotlight on it and uncover this remarkable work. From its beautiful and haunting lyrics to its remarkable video, Hounds of Love is a song that will be…
REMEMBERED forever.