FEATURE:
With My Silver Buddha
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982
Kate Bush’s Pull Out the Pin
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I am thinking ahead…
to the fortieth anniversary of Kate Bush’s The Dreaming next year. Her fourth studio album, it was released in September 1982. It is an album that I really love and have featured quite a bit. I have not done a song-specific feature regarding Pull Out the Pin. The lyrics are so extraordinarily vivid and awash with bold and incredible visions. One of my favourite passages is this: “With my silver Buddha/And my silver bullet/(I pull the pin)/You learn to ride the Earth/When you're living on your belly and the enemy are city-births/Who need radar? We use scent/They stink of the west, stink of sweat/Stink of cologne and baccy, and all their Yankee hash”. The third song on The Dreaming, it follows the opener, Sat in Your Lap, which is punchy and frantic; There Goes a Tenner is jauntier and has a bit of a groove to it. I feel Pull Out the Pin was the first track on The Dreaming that demonstrated Bush’s more experimental and weirder sound. It has voices, effects and elements that are unlike anything she had ever done. The Kate Bush Encyclopaedia collects some interview quotes where Bush explained the meaning and story behind Pull Out the Pin:
“We sat in front of the speakers trying to focus on the picture - a green forest, humid and pulsating with life. We are looking at the Americans from the Vietnamese point of view and, almost like a camera, we start in wide shot. Right in the distance you can see the trees moving, smoke and sounds drifting our way... sounds like a radio. Closer in with the camera, and you can catch glimpses of their pink skin. We can smell them for miles with their sickly cologne, American tobacco and stale sweat. Take the camera in even closer, and we find a solitary soldier, perhaps the one I have singled out. Sometimes a Vietnamese would track a soldier for days and follow him, until he eventually took him. This soldier is under a tree, dozing with a faint smile and a radio by his side. It's a small transistor radio out of which cries an electric guitar. I'd swear it was being played by Brian Bath, but how could that be, way out here on our stereo screen. I pop the silver Buddha that I wear around my neck into my mouth, securing my lips around his little metal body. I move towards the sleeping man. A helicopter soars overhead, he wakes up, and as he looks me in the eyes I relate to him as I would to a helpless stranger. Has he a family and a lady waiting for him at home, somewhere beyond the Chinese drums and the double bass that stalks like a wild cat through bamboo? The moving pictures freeze-frame and fade - someone stopped the multi-track, there's more overdubs to do. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, October 1982)
I saw this incredible documentary by this Australian cameraman who went on the front line in Vietnam, filming from the Vietnamese point of view, so it was very biased against the Americans. He said it really changed him, because until you live on their level like that, when it's complete survival, you don't know what it's about. He's never been the same since, because it's so devastating, people dying all the time.
The way he portrayed the Vietnamese was as this really crafted, beautiful race. The Americans were these big, fat, pink, smelly things who the Vietnamese could smell coming for miles because of the tobacco and cologne. It was devastating, because you got the impression that the Americans were so heavy and awkward, and the Vietnamese were so beautiful and all getting wiped out. They wore a little silver Buddha on a chain around their neck and when they went into action they'd pop it into their mouth, so if they died they'd have Buddha on their lips. I wanted to write a song that could somehow convey the whole thing, so we set it in the jungle and had helicopters, crickets and little Balinese frogs. (Kris Needs, 'Dream Time In The Bush'. Zigzag (UK), November 1982)”.
It is unsurprising that Bush was drawing from history and subjects as unusual and stirring as war for The Dreaming. She has never been someone who dips into the same fountain of inspiration as her peers and ever repeated herself.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982 promoting The Dreaming
Pull Out the Pin is one of the undoubted highlights from The Dreaming. Fusing Bush’s phenomenal lyrics, her expanding sound palette – where the Fairlight CMI plays a much bigger role – and her accomplished and wonderful production, one must marvel at song like this! Nearly forty years after The Dreaming came out, one has heard nothing quite like it. I don’t think I have ever heard Pull Out the Pin played on the radio. If you have not listened to the song before, then go and check it out. It is one of Bush’s finest efforts. It is strange that The Dreaming is still underrated and under-appreciated by some. Maybe they find it too dense and edgy in some places. There is so much variation and breadth in her first album where she was solely in the producer’s chair. I am going to wrap up now. I wanted to come back to a song that not that many people know about. One can lose themselves in the chaos and anxiety of the track. Bush is wonderful throughout. An amazing gem played by a stellar crew of musicians - drums: Preston Heyman; string bass: Danny Thompson; piano: Kate Bush; electric Guitar: Brian Bath and backing vocals: Dave Gilmour -, we get the echoed lines at the end: “Just one thing in it: Me or him/And I love life!”. Those are lines that will definitely stay in your head – given the way Bush delivers them with such passion and intensity! The divine and frightening Pull Out the Pin is…
A drama or huge proportions.