FEATURE:
An Immaculate Masterpiece
Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Thirty-Five
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I cannot add much new stuff…
PHOTO CREDIT: Denis Oregan
to the articles I have written over the past few years regarding Hounds of Love. It turns thirty-five on Wednesday (16th), and even I cannot debate that it is Kate Bush’s greatest album! Whilst my favourite album of hers is always going to be The Kick Inside, I salute the majesty of Hounds of Love. I want to highlight a couple of tracks from the album, as I have written in-depth about The Ninth Wave, The Big Sky, Running Up That Hill, and Cloudbusting before – I have yet to look at the title track or Mother Stands for Comfort. A lot of article will be published over the next few days, and I think Hounds of Love is one of the greatest albums of the 1980s. There are so many reasons why Hounds of Love is such a special album. Although it is not a double album, it feels like Hounds of Love is a double. You have the flawless first half where there are big singles like Running Up That Hill and, whilst there is not a connective narrative, I think the tracks are ordered perfectly so that we open with Running Up That Hill and that beautifully propulsive Fairlight CMI and percussion (I prefer to call the song Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) but I will refer to its original title for the benefit of this feature).
After 1982’s The Dreaming, it was clear that changes needed to happen.! That album is remarkable – and it turned thirty-eight yesterday -, and it was a huge step and necessarily evolution for Bush, where she produced solo for the first time and could let her imagination run free. I think the sheer time and energy she put into making The Dreaming sound like she wanted took so much out of her. By 1983, Bush was making those changes: she improved her diet so that she was eating more healthily; she took up dance again and getting back to full fitness (it sounds like her dance lessons were stricter that they would have been years before!); Bush also moved away from the bustle and stress of London and out to the countryside, whilst still very close to the capital. Rather than plough straight into work, Bush enjoyed time with her family and boyfriend, and she constructed her own studio. Creating a space that was idyllic and to her own specifications, I think the combination of the countryside setting and studio inspired her best material. It is fascinating putting The Dreaming, and Hounds of Love together. The former has moments of beauty, but I think it is an edgy and dark album at times; there is a sense of anxiety that runs through, and I don’t think EMI were thrilled about the prospect of Bush producing alone after that album.
Not that The Dreaming was a failure or sold poorly, but EMI considered the length of time she took to make the album too much – even if it was two years after Never for Ever! -, and it wasn’t as commercial of some of her other albums. With renewed energy and motivation, no other producer could have got out of Bush and her musicians than the woman herself! Songs came together from 1983, and she started recording the demos the following January - rather than re-record music, she took the demos and enhanced them during the recording sessions. After five months, she began overdubbing and mixing the album in a process that took a year. I am going to end by bringing in reviews/features about Hounds of Love, but I can only imagine the atmosphere from 1983 to 1985 when Bush was writing and recording the album. The first half of the album is quite conventional in a sense, but the five tracks are among her very finest. Everyone has a favourite track from that first half, but I think The Big Sky is the track that impresses me most – it was a problem child of a song that took a long time to get right and come together. I will look at The Ninth Wave and the impact of Hounds of Love in a second, but I have not dived into Hounds of Love’s title track, and the remarkably and eerie Mother Stands for Comfort.
From Hounds of Love, Bush started to direct her own videos. I think she could have directed the videos on The Dreaming, but one suspects that she had little energy and desire then; maybe EMI were not willing to give her that sort of responsibility. By the time Hounds of Love came around, this long-held desire to direct and take greater control of her videos emerged. The first single, Running Up That Hill, was beautifully directed by David Garfath, and the interpretive dance with dancer Michael Hervieu is such a wonderful thing! The huge and ambitious Cloudbusting – with Donald Sutherland in a rare music video appearance – was directed by Julian Doyle, and I think that experience and Bush working alongside Sutherland rubbed off. He gave her a lot of advice and I think that was the moment where Bush felt that she could direct. She would go to direct Hounds of Love’s fourth single, The Big Sky, which is awash with different characters and it is such an effusive, bright and imaginative video! Although there is a lot of contentment and happiness through the album, Bush also addresses struggles and the desire to find safety and comfort (interviews like this are quite revealing and useful when contextualising Hounds of Love). The song, Hounds of Love, is about being afraid to fall in love; in the song this feeling is compared to being chased by a pack of hounds. The video was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, and a Hitchcock lookalike also features in the video (a nod to the director's famous cameo appearances in his movies).
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush photographed in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from the book, Kate: Inside the Rainbow)
Bush’s first video as a director is stunning, and I can see why she took to it so readily and effectively – even if she would have had a little help from others when it came to shooting and shot composition. As I will do for Mother Stands for Comfort, I want to bring in some information from the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia, where Bush discusses the track:
“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)”.
Although the track only just got into the top-twenty, I think it is one of the best cuts from the album. By far the most-underrated track on Hounds of Love is Mother Stands for Comfort. Maybe it is less accessible and warming than a song like Running Up That Hill, and Cloudbusting, but Mother Stands for Comfort provided necessarily sonic and emotional balance. Although the other four tracks on the first side tackle deep emotions and conflicts, there is an undeniable energy and motivation in each track. Mother Stands for Comfort is a very different song, and it is a lot more sparse and colder than the other tracks – perhaps prefacing some of the feeling and fear we would hear in The Ninth Wave. Mother Stands for Comfort has a flat drum pattern of kick and snare; there are piano chords and some sounds from the Fairlight CMI. A song concerning a mother shielding and protecting her murderous child might not sound like a song that would instantly grab you and linger in the heart, but Bush has always covered subjects that other artists do not touch. I really love the song and how different it sounds.
I have mooted how Under the Ivy, a B-side on the Running Up That Hill single could have replaced this song, but I think Mother Stands for Comfort is an incredible track that would have made a really interesting single. The Kate Bush Encyclopaedia gives us an interview extract where Bush discussed the song:
“Well, the personality that sings this track is very unfeeling in a way. And the cold qualities of synths and machines were appropriate here. There are many different kinds of love and the track's really talking about the love of a mother, and in this case she's the mother of a murderer, in that she's basically prepared to protect her son against anything. 'Cause in a way it's also suggesting that the son is using the mother, as much as the mother is protecting him. It's a bit of a strange matter, isn't it really? [laughs] (Richard Skinner, 'Classic Albums Interview: Hounds Of Love'. BBC Radio 1 (UK), 26 January 1992)”.
I recently wrote about The Ninth Wave - and what a remarkable thing it is. This very different second half of the album must have taken people by surprise in 1985, as Bush had done nothing like this before. The story of a woman being lost at sea and battling to stay alive and sane through the night sounds like a great concept to get your teeth into, but writing the story and songs would have been challenging!
From the first track on that side, And Dream of Sheep, where the heroine wants to be able to be at home but, unfortunately she falls asleep (Waking the Witch is a song of voices that try to keep her awake; the use and importance of the Fairlight CMI throughout The Ninth Wave is huge), hopelessly knowing that there was a tough road ahead of her, to the closing track, The Morning Fog, we are following our protagonist as she thinks of home and those waiting for her, as she wonders whether she will make it through. We do not know how she is rescued, but she does get out alive – and it is kind of fascinating to wonder how she got into the water and what lead her to be stranded! If you do not own Hounds of Love on vinyl, then go and get a copy, and experience one of the greatest albums ever made. I was only two when Hounds of Love was released on 16th September, 1985, but I remember people talking about the album through the decade and the 1990s. So many albums from that time sound dated and flat, but Hounds of Love still sound so remarkable and original. The reviews for Hounds of Love are universally adoring – I don’t think there were many albums from the 1980s that got such acclaim from everyone; and an album still attracting acclaim and respect! In 2016, Pitchfork gave Hounds of Love a perfect ten when they reviewed it, and I want to take a few passages from that review, as they make some really interesting observations:
“What set Bush apart from Fairlight wizards like Thomas Dolby, who made a point of their geekdom, was that she also drew deeply from the world music that captivated her older brother Paddy Bush. His balalaika, didgeridoo, and other centuries-old folk instruments tempered her Fairlight’s inherent futurism. She didn’t employ it to create walloping beats like the Art of Noise, or use it to spew out orchestral blasts like the Pet Shop Boys. She used the Fairlight the way Brian Wilson used cut-up tape and how today’s avant-garde exploit Pro-Tools—to create perfectly controlled cacophony.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in directorial action/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from the book, Kate: Inside the Rainbow)
Bush’s talent was so undeniable that she could sneak into contemporary music’s center while curbing none of her eccentricities. The album’s second single “Cloudbusting” celebrates Wilhelm Reich, a brilliant Austrian psychoanalyst but crackpot American inventor. Full of details gleaned from his son Peter Reich’s A Book of Dreams, it’s specific to their teacher/pupil relationship, which is played out further in its video featuring Donald Sutherland. But “Cloudbusting” also deals with a much more universal situation: Children long to protect their parents, despite having no adult power to do so. Accordingly, Bush resorts to the one thing all children possess in abundance—imagination. “I just know that something good is gonna happen,” she sings, a string sextet sawing insistently as martial drums beat a battle cry that morphs from helplessness to victory, however imaginary. The son she portrays wills himself into thoughts nearly delusional as his dad’s, and the result is optimistic yet poignant, as he ultimately believes, “Just saying it could even make it happen.”
It was a response, perhaps, to the age-old quandary of commanding respect as a woman in an overwhelmingly masculine field. Bush's navigation of this minefield was as natural as it was ingenious: She became the most musically serious and yet outwardly whimsical star of her time. She held onto her bucolic childhood and sustained her family’s support, feeding the wonder that’s never left her. Her subsequent records couldn’t surpass Hounds of Love’s perfect marriage of technique and exploration, but never has she made a false one. She’s like the glissando of “Hello Earth” that rises up and plummets down almost simultaneously: Bush retained the strength to ride fame’s waves because she’s always known exactly what she was—simply, and quite complicatedly, herself”.
Whilst all of Kate Bush’s albums have inspired artists and affected music, I think Hounds of Love is especially instrumental. Classic Pop investigated Hounds of Love five years ago, and they remarked on its impact and Bush’s feelings towards the album:
“Almost three decades after Hounds Of Love’s release, Kate Bush is regarded as pop royalty (it’s official: she was awarded a CBE earlier this year) and the album is still regarded as a masterpiece, regularly earning a spot on “Best Albums” lists. Its influence is also evident in the work of artists such as Bjork, Tori Amos, Bat For Lashes, Goldfrapp and Florence + The Machine.
As for Bush herself, she remains fiercely proud of Hounds Of Love and has only good memories of making it.“At the time, it was such a lot of work,” she concedes. “The lyrics and trying to piece the whole thing together. But I did love it, and everyone who worked on the album was wonderful. In some ways, it was the happiest I’ve ever been when writing and making an album. I know there’s a theory that goes around that you must suffer for your art – you know, all that stuff about, ‘It’s not real art unless you suffer.’ But I don’t believe this at all because I think, in some ways, this was the most complete work that I’ve done; in some ways, it’s the best and I was the happiest that I’d been, compared to making other albums”.
This week, there will be a lot of focus on Hounds of Love, and I know there are people who will hear it for the first time. After the exhaustion of The Dreaming, Kate Bush could have retreated or made a very simple album, but Hounds of Love sounds like her busiest and most remarkable album; she was clearly invigorated and rejuvenated when she moved and built her own studio. Following the steps she made between Never for Ever (1980), and The Dreaming (1982), I think Hounds of Love was an apex and the moment when everything fell into place.
Before wrapping up, I want to source from an article by Ben Hewitt in The Quietus to mark Never for Ever’s fortieth anniversary last week. Hewitt made the suggestion that Never for Ever is pivotal when it came to subsequent albums like Hounds of Love:
“Like ‘Wuthering Heights’, Never For Ever made history: the first No 1 album by a British female solo artist. Yet its significance transcends chart milestones. For the next decade Bush would build on its potential to become, as she joked to Q in 1989, the “shyest megalomaniac you’re ever likely to meet”. Whereas her first three albums were squeezed into two-and-a-half years, the subsequent three spanned nine. The next one, the bewildering, avant-garde masterpiece The Dreaming, was the first she produced entirely by herself; soon after, she built a studio-come-sanctuary near her family home and hunkered away to make the flawless Hounds Of Love. Each record introduced new inspirations, new instruments, new collaborators and new methods, all indebted to Never For Ever’s triumph of bloody-minded determination. It doesn’t belong in her imperial period, but that imperial period wouldn’t exist without it”.
It has been great writing about an album that is considered to be Kate Bush’s finest creation. Listening to Hounds of Love now, and I am blown away by its genius. It is a staggering album…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in an outtake from the Hounds of Love cover shoot/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from the book, Kate: Inside the Rainbow)
THAT few have ever topped.