FEATURE:
Madness, Mystery and Magic
Kate Bush’s The Dreaming: One of Her Most Extraordinary and Influential Albums
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THERE are new reasons…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at a record signing for The Dreaming at Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street, London on 14th September, 1982
why I am spending a little time with Kate Bush’s fourth studio album, The Dreaming. It was released on 13th September, 1982. Ahead of its thirty-ninth anniversary, I wanted to look back at one of my favourite albums. A new article has been published about the album that really fascinated me. In 2021, The Dreaming still remains fairly underrated. I do feel there has been a shift in perception since its release in 1982. Then, there was a degree of bafflement and dismissal from critics. The album got to three in the U.K. In the U.S., it barely made an impression at all on the charts. Perhaps many were not ready for something as experimental and textured. Preferring, perhaps, something more accessible and Pop-based, The Dreaming is an album that has been re-examined and won new ears. Songwriters and fans have discovered it and spread the word. Even though not many songs from The Dreaming are played on the radio (aside from the first single, Sat in Your Lap), this is an album that one needs to listen to in full! The songs are so interesting and nuanced. Bush’s production and songwriting is mind-blowing! Before coming onto a review and the article I mentioned, the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia talked about its release and Bush’s impressions of the record:
“Upon its release, 'The Dreaming' met with a mixed critical reception. Many were baffled by the dense soundscapes Bush had created. Record Mirror wrote: "Quaint, admirable, unclassified, Kate Bush goes her own sweet way... production hard to fault... ranges from the ethereal to the frankly unlistenable." Sounds added: "I'm drowning in a sea of vocal overdubs". Melody Maker said in a favourable review that the album was indeed baffling but also interesting, labelling 'Suspended in Gaffa' the only "vaguely conventional track", adding: "It's the sort of album that makes me want to kidnap the artist and demand the explanation behind each track".
Kate about 'The Dreaming'
After the last album, 'Never For Ever', I started writing some new songs. They were very different from anything I'd ever written before - they were much more rhythmic, and in a way, a completely new side to my music. I was using different instruments, and everything was changing; and I felt that really the best thing to do would be to make this album a real departure - make it completely different. And the only way to achieve this was to sever all the links I had had with the older stuff. The main link was engineer Jon Kelly. Everytime I was in the studio Jon was there helping me, so I felt that in order to make the stuff different enough I would have to stop working with Jon. He really wanted to keep working with me, but we discussed it and realised that it was for the best. ('The Dreaming'. Poppix (UK), Summer 1982)
Yes, it's very important for me to change. In fact, as soon as the songs began to be written, I knew that the album was going to be quite different. I'd hate it, especially now, if my albums became similar, because so much happens to me between each album - my views change quite drastically. What's nice about this album is that it's what I've always wanted to do. For instance, the Australian thing: well, I wanted to do that on the last album, but there was no time. There are quite a few ideas and things that I've had whizzing around in my head that just haven't been put down. I've always wanted to use more traditional influences and instruments, especially the Irish ones. I suppose subconsciously I've wanted to do all this for quite some time, but I've never really had the time until now. ('The Dreaming'. Poppix (UK), Summer 1982)”.
The Dreaming is such a fascinating record! One can pull apart the lyrics and stories of each track. Then there are the compositions and the production. So layered and stunning…I am glad that there is some sense of reinterpretation and respect for a 1982 masterpiece. Before coming to the new article, I want to source from The Quietus’ compelling and deep study of The Dreaming in 2012 (on its thirtieth anniversary):
“The album was not without its obstacles. She talked of a terrible case of writer’s block. Initially she recruited Hugh Padgham, due to the Gabriel/Collins connection. While she praised the engineer, he seemed both unsympathetic to her madcap approach (and allegedly her then fondness for pot, according to Graeme Thomson’s excellent bio, Under the Ivy). Either way he was committed to working for The Police & recommended his assistant Nick Launay. The pair, bonded by their experimental curiosity and youth, proved to have a more productive simpatico. They mic’d up corrugated iron tunnels around drum kits in an attempt to mimic ‘canons’. The Dreaming melts the gap between pre- and post- punk, Launay having worked with both PiL and Phil Collins, shared Bush’s disregard for the old/wave divide. As early as 1980, Kris Needs noted her ability "to break down musical barriers and capture true emotion". On The Dreaming, proggy shifting time signatures and textures vie with a wild energy and the kind of poly-rhythms deployed on another Launay job, PIL’s Flowers Of Romance (1981). Another engineer, Paul Hardiman, had worked with both Rick Wakeman and on Wire’s seminal first three albums.
The Dreaming was the real game-changer. Back in 1982, it was regarded as a jarring rupture. "Very weird. She’s obviously trying to become less commercial," wrote Neil Tennant, the future Pet Shop Boy, still a scribe for Smash Hits. He echoed the sentiments of the record-buying public. Even though the album made it to number three, the singles, apart from 'Sat In Your Lap', which got to 11 a year before, tanked. The title track limped to number 48 while 'There Goes A Tenner' failed to chart at all. It was purportedly the closest her record label, EMI had come to returning an artist’s recording. Speaking in hindsight, Bush observed how this was her "she’s gone mad" album. But The Dreaming represents not just a major advance for Bush but art-rock in general. Its sonic assault contains a surfeit of musical ideas, all chiselled into a taut economy.
Bush had pirouetted into public consciousness to such an extent that in May 1981, she was asked to play the wicked witch in Wurzel Gummidge. Campy light entertainment was still knocking at the door, still smitten with her theatrical excesses. However, the following month, 'Sat In Your Lap' unveiled Bush’s new aesthetic. Inspired by attending a Stevie Wonder concert, it’s a violent assertion of creative control, a final nail in the coffin of the so-called elfin pop princess. Pounding pianos and tribal drums dominate, frazzled synth brass puffs steam as Bush’s vocals veer from clipped restraint to harnessed histrionics, at times rushing by with Doppler effect. The lyrics scratch their head in search of epistemological nirvana, a pursuit akin to the arduous process of making the album. "The fool on the hill, the king in his castle" goes searching for all human knowledge and the more he discovers, he realizes the less he knows.
The Dreaming’s disparate narratives frequently seem to be tropes for Bush’s quest for artistic autonomy and the anxieties that accompany it; the bungled heist in There Goes A Tenner, the ‘glimpse of God’ in 'Suspended In Gaffa', even the Vietnamese soldier pursuing his American prey for days in 'Pull Out The Pin'. "Sometimes it’s hard to know if I’m doing it right, can I have it all?" she sings in 'Suspended In Gaffa', a Gilbert and Sullivan-esque romp in 6/8, as reimagined by Luis Bunuel. (She was also asked during the album’s recording to appear in a production of The Pirates Of Penzance). A peculiar mix of self-doubt and pole-vaulting ambition characterizes many of the songs here.
Another serpentine shape-shifter, 'Night Of The Swallow' deals with flight and imprisonment, a pilot begs his lover to "let me go" on a journey carrying potentially dangerous cargo (terrorists?). The lexicon of The Dreaming is rife with a similar tension: "wings beat and bleed" at windows, protaganists lock up their bodies like houses and then "face the wind" or recall "rich, windy weather" when incarcerated. Escapoligists perish "bound and drowned". An interpretive stretch perhaps but woven into the lyrics is the thrill and the threat of change: a move away from the prison house of public perception that had plagued Bush in a lot of ways or confronting her own limitations. It could even be wrestling with the surrender to the discipline of rhythm. Its presence ebbs and flows, a rigid backbone that frequently crumbles, giving way to more free-flowing musical passages.
The proviso Bush had for The Dreaming was that everything was to "be cinematic and experimental". Movies inform The Dreaming as much as any musical influences. When describing 'Pull Out The Pin', she synaesthetically blurs the vocabulary of music with that of film, referring to wide shots and "trying to focus on the pictures" between the speakers. The song’s evocation of the Vietnam forest, "humid... and pulsating with life" is astonishing; all queasy protruding Danny Thompson double bass lines, musique concrete, Chinese drums and a distorted guitar sounding like a US soldier’s scratchy transistor. Much of these sounds were collated by drummer Preston Heyman in Bali. With its foliage of samples and cultures converging it nods to My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, the landmark Byrne/Eno collaboration recorded in 79 but released in 81.
It remains a terribly sad record. A treatise on "how cruel people can be to one another, and the amount of loneliness people expose themselves to". Perhaps John Lennon’s murder and the dog-eat-dog ethos of Thatcherism had cast their shadow here. While the record was being made, the Falklands crisis escalated and unemployment rose. Many of The Dreaming’s characters seem to be caught in the vice grip of western ‘civilization’; the hapless robber in 'There Goes A Tenner', the aboriginal way of life on the brink of erosion on the title track, the Vietnamese soldier meeting his American nemesis on 'Pull Out The Pin'. They may symbolize the tightrope walk Bush felt she was embarking on with the record. But this dense and allusive stuff with twists and turns requiring as many footnotes as TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, shares that poem’s occidental disenchantment.
And like that modernist masterpiece, The Dreaming glimpses at a very metropolitan melancholy. Bush would never make an album in London again, a city she felt had an air of dread hanging over it’. 'All The Love', a forlorn musical sigh, features percussive sticks imitating Venetian blinds turning shut. It climaxes with messages from Bush’s actual malfunctioning answerphone: all very modern alienating devices, straight from the same world of Bowie’s 'Sound & Vision'. This was after all, the year Time magazine voted the computer as person of the year. Palmer’s ECM-like drowsy bass almost sobs with regret.
Throughout The Dreaming, sound speaks. 'All The Love' is subdued relief. But its constituent parts hover desolately in the mix, pitching a ‘lack of love’ song with a choirboy, somewhere between Joni Mitchell’s road trip jazz on 'Hejira' and the void of Nico’s 'The End'. Full of space & loneliness.
At the centre of this creative storm is Bush. The vocal performances are a multi-faceted assault on the singer’s sometimes squeaky, whimsical past. There are guttural, larynx-shredding exclamations juxtaposed with whispers, sometimes on even the softer songs. A master of counterpoint and vocal embroidery, which Bush attributed to her mother’s Irish ancestry, the singer layers the songs with kaleidoscopic variety. Even the mellifluous 'Suspended In Gaffa' has shrieking incisions. Her voice is largely deeper and thicker than before, the unbridled emotionalism now more potent, due to its stringent control. On 'Houdini', a pint of milk and two chocolate bars were consumed to give her voice the required "spit and gravel" ('Night Of The Swallow' and 'Pull Of The Pin' also have phlegmatic operatics)”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Clive Arrowsmith
Next year is the fortieth anniversary of The Dreaming. I feel there should be huge celebration then. Maybe we might get a reissue? Although Bush has dabbled in retrospection and reissues (she put out her albums in 2018 remastered), we have not seen extras and demos of the studio albums. I can only imagine what is in the vaults; the material Bush recorded for The Dreaming that was not used. Although Hounds of Love (the 1985 follow-up) is her most-acclaimed work, The Dreaming, to me, is as astonishing and accomplished. It is an album that means so much to different people. Ann Powers wrote a very personal and moving piece for NPR last month. I would encourage people to read the whole thing. I have selected some extracts that moved me:
“There are so many ways that women in particular are made into monsters. As girls, they bleed too soon, or grow too fat, or remain too boyish. They have the wrong color skin in societies that have turned lies about race into law. Becoming pregnant, they cannot contain themselves, losing the baby, or losing their firm bodies after the birth. Failing to become pregnant, they find themselves marked as barren, bony, half. Women may be called monstrous simply for keeping to themselves, unkempt and unbeautiful, especially as they age. Or for the opposite — claiming space with too large a footprint. Women are identified as monsters for being, speaking, changing, being alive. Some are punished openly for these violations. Most carry the judgement within.
Occasionally, a woman – usually an artist — will make it her mission to speak as the monster others fear her to be. Living through abnormality, she sees something else in it. Potential to claim the ugliness, to refine it like blood turning into energy inside her body, until it lends strength. Shape-shifting can become shame-shifting. The voice of the monster says, I am here, mine enemies, I feel with every fiber of my being, I am wholly myself and have the right to be alive.
My Kate fandom grew rapidly and in isolation, like oleander in a terrarium. My roommates thought she was weird, removing her records from the shared stereo in our dingy living room to put on The Cure. The ode to her greatness I wrote for the balding, leather-jacketed editor who'd given me my first byline got killed. Too florid, he said. I piled up lines in my journals using green and purple ink. "I am Athena — I am Diana — I am my own answer," I wrote, quoting a Kate song about childbearing in the same paragraph. "There's 'Room For the Life' in my womb and in my soul. I am a mysterious and beautiful creature, glorying in the independent realization of my essence."
Throughout The Dreaming, a young woman expresses the pain and explores the potential of monstrous transformation. "With my ego in my gut, my babbling mouth would wash it up," Bush sings in the album's centerpiece, the drum-struck "Leave It Open." Her mouth issues moans and screams, sounds less and more than human. "Harm is in us, the power to arm," the backing vocalists, her consorts and twins, chant as she wails like a wind spirit. She will wrestle with unnamed forces within and without. By the end of the song she has found her statement of purpose, rendered in a complex layer of manipulated lines and backward tracks. "We let the weirdness in," she sings. She ingests the poison of others' perceptions and her own fears and transfigures.
I can still remember lowering the needle onto the vinyl in that junk-furnished living room, laying on the floor right beneath the turntable, turning up the volume until the speakers shook. The drums on The Dreaming announced it as something new. I knew next to nothing about African music at 18, but I could recognize syncopation, which brought the noise to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" (my verging-on-ex boyfriend, a classical cellist, had turned me on to that) and the swagger to the artist who ruled the speakers at arty kids' parties that year — Prince. "Sat in Your Lap," The Dreaming's first track, hit with a huge bass drum intermingled with something else. What was it? My ears tried to grab the song's moving parts. Kate screaming: "I must admit, just when I think I'm king, I just begin!" Bang, bang! Kate's brother Paddy huffing and ho-ho-hoing in the background, the keyboard bouncing like wheels on cobblestone, a child's shout surfacing deep in the mix. And her dragon call, bold, then beaten back, then hoisting itself up again.
The songs about Bush's own struggles were the ones that struck me the hardest. At their heart was a clanging rage, partly stemming from Bush's impatience with being objectified as either a nut case or a sex symbol. I felt trapped like that, for other reasons. Just starting to find my feet as a writer, covering the all-ages beat for Seattle's favorite rock rag, I felt like a lumpy alien among the sarcastic men and too-cool women who hung out in the office located over the Rendezvous bar. I'd dash in and out of my editor's office, hoping no one would try to talk to me. At school I was in over my head, trying to understand Joyce's Ulysses as taught by a Great Scholar who never addressed me beyond an occasional curt correction. Most of my brain space remained fixated on the two subjects I'd brought with me from Catholic high school: God, whom I was trying desperately to reinvent to accommodate my loosened morals, and boys, the main impetus for the loosening. "I don't understand why I, who am a decent, kind, and religious person, keep getting cheated out of happy romance by falling for jerks," I wrote in my journal. "I ought to go to a therapist."
I did not go to a therapist. Instead, I sank my whole monstrous body into The Dreaming and imagined myself shape shifting as Kate could. What made it seem possible was the struggle I could hear in every track. She was teaching herself how to be a new kind of musician; I needed to be a new kind of me. The fight inside me pitted my longing to become shameless — to own that punk attitude the prettier, thinner girls around me seemed to effortlessly adopt — against the shame I felt inside. Shame about being too fat, too loud, not the kind of girl the rock boys I wanted wanted back. Shame because I slept with those guys anyway and then they turned away from me. Shame because my mother still thought I was a virgin. Shame when I spoke too much in class and the male professors raised their eyebrows. Shame when I didn't speak up, standing in the kitchen at punk parties dominated by playful fistfights between the boys while the girls slinked off to smoke menthols on the porch. Shame because, since the day my seventh-grade classmates had scorned me for leaving period blood in a lavatory toilet, I'd known I was hideous”.
I have always been baffled how The Dreaming never got the respect it deserved. Bush threw herself into the album fully. Even if the material is not that commercial, it is so awe-inspiring and important! Bands and other artists who were producing similarly experimental music in the 1982 were not getting the same sort of dismissal. As I say, The Dreaming has found new love; people judging it as a whole, rather than on the singles – apart from Sat in Your Lap, it was not a great showing in terms of chart positions! After thirty-nine years, it remains this mind-bending and wonderous album from a musical genius. Every time I listen to it, The Dreaming elicits…
SO many moods and reactions.