FEATURE:
4/37
HMV’s ‘1921 Centenary Edition’ of Kate Bush’s Masterpiece, Hounds of Love
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THIS is not related…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in an outtake from the Hounds of Love cover shoot/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
to any new Kate Bush music. Instead, HMV are celebrating one-hundred years in business (the chain/company was founded on 20th July, 1921) by releasing a series of vinyl reissues. There will be thirty-seven in all. Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love is in a prestigious club as the fourth album in the series. One could argue that several Bush albums are eligible to be included in a special series. As HMV are celebrating their centenary with such a limited run of albums, the fact any Kate Bush album is in there is a huge honour! To be fair, it could only be Hounds of Love! The Kate Bush News website explains what HMV are offering - in addition as to how you can get hold of a limited pressing:
“With their upcoming 100th birthday this month, HMV, the UK-based music and film retailer, have recently launched their new and exclusive 1921 Centenary Editions. “We have carefully curated a selection of the finest albums and soundtracks from the last 100 years and had them specially pressed onto some beautiful limited edition vinyl – all of which will be available exclusively in hmv stores on Saturday July 24.”
Describing the album as “a timeless classic from a truly unique artist”, Hounds of Love joins their 1921 Centenary Edition series with a new and exclusive reissue pressed on recycled vinyl and limited to 1500 copies. We note that this is not a coloured vinyl, as with some other editions in this series. Kate’s album is No.4 0f 37 albums in this set of vinyl reissues.
HMV say that these exclusives will be available on a first come, first served basis, and they recommend that you head to your local store nice and early so you don’t miss out. While stocks last there will also be a very limited number of copies of Hounds of Love 1921 Centenary Edition available in their online store from 4pm on July 24. You can see all the other HMV vinyl exclusives here”.
One can guarantee that Kate Bush fans are going to snap up all the copies in record time! It is clear that, over thirty-fiver years since its release, Bush’s fifth studio album is so revered, respected and idolised. It is a masterpiece that is helping to mark a century of a beloved and iconic record store chain. As vinyl sales boom and there is continuing demand for the format, I know Bush would approve of this huge new honour! She is a huge fan of vinyl. To have one of her personal favourite (of hers) albums recognised in this way will mean a lot. Although The Kick Inside is my favourite of Bush’s albums, I cannot deny the fact that Hounds of Love is a stunning masterpiece that will be examined and dissected decades from now. There are numerous articles and reviews that celebrate and extoll the brilliance of the 1985-released Hounds of Love. I will finish by bringing in a couple of features/reviews that spotlight the album. In their review, this is what Pitchfork had to say:
“Skies, clouds, hills, trees, lakes—along with everything else, Hounds of Love is also a heated paean to nature. On the cover, Bush reclines between two canines with a knowing familiarity that almost suggests cross-species congress. She honors the sensual world's benign blessings on “The Big Sky” even while Youth’s raucous bass suggests earthquakes. Bush references its elements with childlike awe: “That cloud looks like Ireland,” she squeals. “You’re here in my head like the sun coming out,” she sighs in “Cloudbusting,” and her stormy emotions are reflected by the music’s turbulence. But nature’s destruction can also inspire us to seek solace in spirituality, and that’s what happens on Side Two’s singular suite, “The Ninth Wave.”
Bush plays a sailor who finds herself shipwrecked and alone. She slips into a hypothermia-induced limbo between wakefulness and sleep (“And Dream of Sheep”), where nightmares, memories and visions distort her consciousness to the point where she cannot distinguish between reality and illusion. Is she skating, or trapped “Under Ice”? During her hallucinations, she sees herself in a prior life as a necromancer on trial; instead of freezing, she visualizes herself burning (“Waking the Witch”). Her spirit leaves her body and visits her beloved (“Watching You Without Me”). Then her future self confronts her present being and begs her to stay alive (“Jig of Life”). A rescue team reaches her just as her life force drifts heavenward (“Hello Earth”), but in the concluding track, “The Morning Fog,” flesh and spirit reunite, and she vows to tell her family how much she loves them.
As her sailor drifts in and out of consciousness, Bush floats between abstract composition and precise songcraft. Her character’s nebulous condition gives her melodies permission to unmoor from pop’s constrictions; her verses don’t necessarily return to catchy choruses, not until the relative normality of “The Morning Fog,” one of her sweetest songs. Instead, she’s free to exploit her Fairlight’s capacity for musique concrete. Spoken voices, Gregorian chant, Irish jigs, oceanic waves of digitized droning, and the culminating twittering of birds all collide in Bush’s synth-folk symphony. Like most of her lyrics, “The Ninth Wave” isn’t autobiographical, although its sink-or-swim scenario can be read as an extended metaphor for Hounds of Love’s protracted creation: Will she rise to deliver the masterstroke that guaranteed artistic autonomy for the rest of her long career and enabled her to live a happy home life with zero participation in the outside world for years on end, or will she drown under the weight of her colossal ambition?
By the time I became one of the few American journalists to have interviewed her in person in 1985, Bush had clinched her victory. She’d flown to New York to plug Hounds of Love, engaging in the kind of promotion she’d rarely do again. Because she thoroughly rejected the pop treadmill, the media had already begun to marginalize her as a space case, and have since painted her as a tragic, reclusive figure. Yet despite her mystical persona, she was disarmingly down-to-earth: That hammy public Kate was clearly this soft-spoken individual’s invention; an ever-changing role she played like Bowie in an era when even icons like Stevie Nicks and Donna Summer had a Lindsey Buckingham or a Giorgio Moroder calling many of the shots.
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”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush shot in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Given the fact HMV are saluting a classic album to tie in with their centenary, I wonder whether EMI/Bush will put out Hounds of Love in the future with some extras/demos. This is a subject I cover a lot – and will continue to do so -, though the continued recognition and kudos Hounds of Love receives shows that there is so much love for it. Hounds of Love is undoubtedly one of the greatest albums ever created. To that end, it is worth bringing in another write-up. Far Out Magazine are big fans of Kate Bush. They have a lot of admiration for Hounds of Love:
“The album sees Bush commanding this ever-changing landscape with the staunch command of a tribal queen, not by simply submitting to new technologies, but by moulding them into her image. She employed the most state-of-the-art studio technology, using a delicate mixture of synths, Linn drum machines and use of the Fairlight CMI sampler to become a unique proposition of new in 1985. The addition of this modernity into Bush’s already overflowing crucible of folk, theatrics and tradition, created a truly unique sound. Samplers and synths are mixed with choirs in ‘Hello Earth’ while ‘Jig Of Life’, as one might expect, was a traditional Irish ditty discovered by her brother Paddy.
It’s a marriage of duelling concepts which she also manages to produce throughout much of the album’s run time. Bush expertly uses the themes of love and romance to colour much of the initial sheen one feels when first listening—but there are moments of darkness littered throughout the record. Whether it’s the brilliant ‘Cloudbusting’ whose theme focuses on the Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Reich, a man who built a cloudbusting device powered by cosmic energy, and, incidentally, a man who was later arrested by the FBI. Or, indeed, the threat of impending and terrifying death in ‘Under Ice’ — Bush delivers all her emotions as candidly as possible.
In truth, while this album certainly was my epiphanic moment when discovering Kate Bush, it could be argued it was hers too. While she had already been creating heart-stopping music for some years, becoming the first-ever female to take a number one spot with a self-penned track in ‘Wuthering Heights’, this was the album that Bush dropped the pop shackles and created something truly special.
The album arrived in 1985 after a lengthy period of quiet from the artist, a period away from the limelight which had led to a number of her fans becoming concerned. Before the LP arrived, Bush had left her supporters a singular note, one that appeared as part of her fan club newsletter: “This year has been very positive so far,” she said. “It doesn’t have the same air of doom and gloom that ‘81 and ‘82 seemed to hold. The problem is that if I don’t make an album this year, there will be at least another two-year gap, and the way business and politics are, it would be a negative situation. I seem to have hit another quiet period. I intend to keep on writing for the first part of the year, so yet again I slip away from the eyeball of the media to my home.”
This would’ve likely been the cause for Hounds of Love and its incredible artistic success both within the music world and outside of it. This isolation from the ‘pop world’ clearly allowed Bush to incubate songs she had never done before. To develop her thoughts on the duality of life and show it in her work. It allowed her to be untainted by the demands of Smash Hits et al and instead focus on the expression of the poetry in her soul.
That is, for me, where Bush’s Hounds of Love should be firmly placed; in the soul, with all the other poetry. The album manages to collate a myriad of themes and melodies and load them one by one into consciousness, unravelling with every note, into something that becomes entirely yours as the audience.
She equally develops themes of love, heartbreak, life, and death with equal measure, equal light and dark, and, most notably, equal beauty. It’s fair to say I owe a lot to that girl… sorry, I should say, my fianceé. She provided me with one of my favourite albums of all time and allowed me to recheck my adolescent opinions against learned ears. She allowed me to truly enjoy the work of an extraordinary artist.
Simply put, Kate Bush is a master painter and Hounds of Love is truly her masterpiece”.
I will wrap up now. There has been so much attention on Kate Bush’s work this past year or so. From new books and magazine articles to cover versions and projects, people around the world are showing their passion for such a special and unique album. From the hits-stuffed and hugely memorable first side to the masterful suite, The Ninth Wave, there is no other album like Hounds of Love! It is terrific that the record, so many years after it release, is being garlanded with…
RECOGNITION and esteem.