FEATURE:
A Machine to Make It Rain
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on the set of Cloudbusting
A Return to Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting
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I have written about Kate Bush’s
terrific single, Cloudbusting (from her 1985 album, Hounds of Love), a couple of times before. As it turned thirty-six a couple of weeks or so back, I wanted to come back to a very special song. There is not a weak moment on Hounds of Love. One reason why the album is so good is because of the variety throughout. The suite on the album’s second side, The Ninth Wave, is almost a symphony. The tracks that comprise the first half are all eclectic and have their own stories. Although The Big Sky (the fourth single released from Hounds of Love) is my favourite track, I feel Cloudbusting is marvellous. It is a song that succeeds and stuns on all levels. From a musical standpoint, it is graceful, emotional and stirring. Bush’s vocal performance carries so many emotions. The lyrics, which I shall touch on soon, are fascinating. Before I come to the reason why I want to revisit Cloudbusting, the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia provides details concerning what Bush said of the song:
“This was inspired by a book that I first found on a shelf nearly nine years ago. It was just calling me from the shelf, and when I read it I was very moved by the magic of it. It's about a special relationship between a young son and his father. The book was written from a child's point of view. His father is everything to him; he is the magic in his life, and he teaches him everything, teaching him to be open-minded and not to build up barriers. His father has built a machine that can make it rain, a 'cloudbuster'; and the son and his father go out together cloudbusting. They point big pipes up into the sky, and they make it rain. The song is very much taking a comparison with a yo-yo that glowed in the dark and which was given to the boy by a best friend. It was really special to him; he loved it.
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
But his father believed in things having positive and negative energy, and that fluorescent light was a very negative energy - as was the material they used to make glow-in-the-dark toys then - and his father told him he had to get rid of it, he wasn't allowed to keep it. But the boy, rather than throwing it away, buried it in the garden, so that he would placate his father but could also go and dig it up occasionally and play with it. It's a parallel in some ways between how much he loved the yo-yo - how special it was - and yet how dangerous it was considered to be. He loved his father (who was perhaps considered dangerous by some people); and he loved how he could bury his yo-yo and retrieve it whenever he wanted to play with it. But there's nothing he can do about his father being taken away, he is completely helpless. But it's very much more to do with how the son does begin to cope with the whole loneliness and pain of being without his father. It is the magic moments of a relationship through a child's eyes, but told by a sad adult. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, 1985)
'Cloudbusting' is a track that was very much inspired by a book called A Book Of Dreams. This book is written through a child's eyes, looking at his father and how much his father means to him in his world - he's everything. his father has a machine that can make it rain, amongst many other things, and there's a wonderful sense of magic as he and his father make it rain together on this machine. The book is full of imagery of an innocent child and yet it's being written by a sad adult, which gives it a strange kind of personal intimacy and magic that is quite extraordinary. The song is really about how much that father meant to the son and how much he misses him now he's gone. (Conversation Disc Series, ABCD 012, 1985)”.
That did all fall apart over a period of about ten bars. And everything just started falling apart, 'cause it didn't end properly, and, you know, the drummer would stop and then the strings would just sorta start wiggling around and talking. And I felt it needed an ending, and I didn't really know what to do. And then I thought maybe decoy tactics were the way, and we covered the whole thing over with the sound of a steam engine slowing down so that you had the sense of the journey coming to an end. And it worked, it covered up all the falling apart and actually made it sound very complete in a way. And we had terrible trouble getting a sound effect of steam train so we actually made up the sound effect out of various sounds, and Del was the steam. (Laughs) And we got a whistle on the Fairlight for the "poo poop". (Richard Skinner, 'Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love'. BBC Radio 1, 26 January 1992)”
I love all the details about the song and what inspired it. I am eager to focus anew on Cloudbusting because of the amazing video. Because the greatest hits collection, The Whole Story, turns thirty-five on 10th November, I have been thinking about the visual side to Kate Bush. It is one of her clear strengths.
Not only does the Cloudbusting video star a famous actor in the form of Donald Sutherland; it also has the look of a film. The direction from Julian Doyle is amazing. I go back and forth regarding my favourite Kate Bush videos. Cloudbusting is definitely in the top five. It is a video that is, arguably, as strong as the song itself. There is no doubt that Kate Bush was becoming more ambitious regarding her videos by 1985. She has always wanted to direct and make films. In fact, she would the follow-up single to Cloudbusting, Hounds of Love. Maybe she was so affected by shooting Cloudbusting that she was inspired to direct! DAZED celebrated and spoke with some of the video’s key players to mark its thirtieth anniversary in 2015:
“It sounds like fiction of the most fanciful kind, but in fact, the video – and book – are drawn entirely from life. Written by Peter Reich and published in 1973, A Book of Dreams is an extraordinarily touching account of a father, one Wilhelm Reich, as seen through the eyes of his doting son. Reich senior was a controversial figure in the field of psychoanalysis. On the one hand, his pioneering work laid the blueprint for the sexual revolution of the 1960s, attracting interest from Albert Einstein and Norman Mailer, among others. On the other, his ‘orgone accumulator’ invention – a metal box which Reich claimed harnessed the sexual energy of his patients for alleged benefits to their health – brought an injunction from the US authorities that would eventually land him in prison, where he died at the age of 60 in 1957. It’s the moment of his arrest that provides the book and the video with its heartbreaking focal point, as a child’s love for his father bumps up against the impassive forces of McCarthy-era moral panic.
“(My dad) was the father of body therapy and the sexual revolution,” says Reich of his father. “In Germany in the 1930s, he led a political movement that called for, among other things, the abolition of laws against abortion and homosexuality, free birth-control advice and contraceptives, health protection of mothers and children, nurseries in factories and in other large employment centres, the abolition of laws prohibiting sex education and home leave for prisoners.”
Another of Reich’s inventions, of course, was the Cloudbuster, the fantastical rainmaking machine that features in Kate Bush’s video. We pick up the story of the shoot, speaking to key contributors including Donald Sutherland, director Julian Doyle and editor Terry Gilliam, with additional insights from Peter Reich. Watch the video and get the story below.
Kate Bush (excerpt from a Kate Bush Club newsletter, 1985): “I was inspired by a book that I first found on a shelf nearly nine years ago. It was just calling me from the shelf, and when I read it I was very moved by the magic of it. It’s about a special relationship between a young son and his father. The book was written from a child’s point of view. His father is everything to him; he is the magic in his life, and he teaches him everything, teaching him to be open-minded and not to build up barriers... But there’s nothing he can do about his father being taken away, he is completely helpless. But it’s very much more to do with how the son does begin to cope with the whole loneliness and pain of being without his father. It is the magic moments of a relationship through a child's eyes, but told by a sad adult.”
Terry Gilliam: “Kate called me to direct the video and I said, ‘No, how about Julian (Doyle)?’ They had a great time shooting, but somewhere in the editing a conflict developed and I became the mediator. Kate knows exactly what she’s doing, she knows what she wants. She’s the sweetest person on the planet but she’s absolute steel inside!”
Julian Doyle: “Kate came to me with a storyboard, which I remember had the sun coming up with a face on it. She was a lovely lady, with a great smile that she gave generously. I understood her influences – like, I knew immediately where ‘It’s coming through the trees’ (film sample on ‘The Hounds of Love’) came from and things like that. I also knew about Wilhelm Reich, because there was interest in him among the new women’s movement which was exploring the female orgasm and I was close to the women involved.
Donald Sutherland: “Barry Richardson, who was the hairdresser on Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, asked me if I’d do a music video with Kate Bush. I told him no and we went on to other conversations. A couple of days later there was a knock on my door. I lived in the Savoy Hotel (in London). On the river. Suite 312. I loved it there. So cosseted. So private. Only the floor butler rang the door. I opened it. There was no one there. I heard a voice saying hello and I looked down. Standing down there was a very small Kate Bush. Barry had told her where I lived. What can you do?
She wanted to explain what her video was about. I let her in. She sat down, said some stuff. All I heard was ‘Wilhelm Reich’. I’d taken an underground copy of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism with me when I went to film (Bernardo) Bertolucci’s Novecento in Parma. Reich’s work informed the psychological foundations of Attila Mellanchini, the character Bernardo had cast me to play. Everything about Reich echoed through me. He was there then and now he was here. Sitting across from me in the person of the very eloquent Kate Bush. Synchronicity. Perfect. She talked some more. I said OK and we made ‘Cloudbusting’. She’s wonderful, Kate Bush. Wonderful. I love that I did it. (What do I remember) about doing it? I remember being in the car and the hill and them taking me, taking Reich, away and looking back through the back window of the car and seeing her, seeing Reich’s son Peter, standing there. And I remember the first morning on set seeing her coming out of her trailer smoking a joint and I cautioned her, saying she shouldn’t smoke that, it’d affect her work, and she looked at me for a second and said she hadn’t been straight for nine years and I loved her”.
Just over thirty-six years after the world witnessed this remarkable song from a genius album, I wanted to spend some time with it. It sounds like Bush had a great time working with Sutherland and, as I suggested, picked up some invaluable experience regarding directing and film-making. She would adopt her own style and technique for videos she directed. The power and importance of songs like Cloudbusting reverberates to this day. A stunning track with one of the best videos Kate Bush’s career, it is sensational. With lyrics that are moving and striking (“I hid my yo-yo/In the garden/I can't hide you/From the government/Oh, God, Daddy/I won't forget”), one is powerless to resist the song’s wonder! A happy thirty-sixth anniversary to…
A sonic and visual masterpiece.