FEATURE:
Inside Kate Bush’s The Dreaming at Forty
Track Six: The Dreaming
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OVER the halfway point…
PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
through a run of features that looks inside each of the ten tracks on Kate Bush’s The Dreaming, I have reached the title track. Her incredible fourth studio album is forty in September, so I wanted to spend some time beforehand looking at an album that, although loved, is still underrated. The Dreaming is a track from the album that I have written about before. It was the second single from the album, arriving thirteen months after Sat in Your Lap. Like quite a few tracks on The Dreaming, the title cut is underappreciated and definitely worthy of more love. Before getting to archived interviews where Bush talked about the inspiration behind the song, this Wikipedia article gives some information about the B-side of The Dreaming:
“An alternative version of "The Dreaming", entitled "Dreamtime", was used as the UK single B-side. It is usually referred to as an instrumental version of "The Dreaming". This is not strictly true, in that while the track omits all the sung lead vocal lyrics, it still retains most of the backing vocals, such as the stretched dreamtime harmonies heard during the chorus. It is also of note that "Dreamtime" contains both an extended intro and outro. It starts with approximately 4 bars of double-tracked didgeridoo drone before the original arrangement comes in and finishes with approximately 30 seconds of the same following a breakdown of the original arrangement. At the very end, Harris can be heard saying "...and stuff like that".
I will come to some of the lyrical highlights from the song. Although it does have a black mark in the sense that Rolf Harris features playing didgeridoo, I don’t think this should tarnish a remarkable track that raises important concerns and has big messages. The Kate Bush Encyclopaedia collates interviews where Bush revealed inspiration behind The Dreaming. I have picked a couple:
“We started with the drums, working to a basic Linn drum machine pattern, making them sound as tribal and deep as possible. This song had to try and convey the wide open bush, the Aborigines - it had to roll around in mud and dirt, try to become a part of the earth. "Earthy" was the word used most to explain the sounds. There was a flood of imagery sitting waiting to be painted into the song. The Aborigines move away as the digging machines move in, mining for ore and plutonium. Their sacred grounds are destroyed and their beliefs in Dreamtime grow blurred through the influence of civilization and alcohol. Beautiful people from a most ancient race are found lying in the roads and gutters. Thank God the young Australians can see what's happening.
The piano plays sparse chords, just to mark every few bars and the chord changes. With the help of one of Nick Launay's magic sounds, the piano became wide and deep, effected to the point of becoming voices in a choir. The wide open space is painted on the tape, and it's time to paint the sound that connects the humans to the earth, the dijeridu. The dijeridu took the place of the bass guitar and formed a constant drone, a hypnotic sound that seems to travel in circles.
None of us had met Rolf (Harris) before and we were very excited at the idea of working with him. He arrived with his daughter, a friend and an armful of dijeridus. He is a very warm man, full of smiles and interesting stories. I explained the subject matter of the song and we sat down and listened to the basic track a couple of times to get the feel. He picked up a dijeridu, placing one end of it right next to my ear and the other at his lips, and began to play.
I've never experienced a sound quite like it before. It was like a swarm of tiny velvet bees circling down the shaft of the dijeridu and dancing around in my ear. It made me laugh, but there was something very strange about it, something of an age a long, long time ago.
Women are never supposed to play a dijeridu, according to Aboriginal laws; in fact there is a dijeridu used for special ceremonies, and if this was ever looked upon by a woman before the ceremony could take place, she was taken away and killed, so it's not surprising that the laws were rarely disobeyed. After the ceremony, the instrument became worthless, its purpose over. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, October 1982)
Well, years ago my brother bought 'Sun Arise' [by Rolf Harris] and I loved it, it was such a beautiful song. And ever since then I've wanted to create something which had that feel of Australia within it. I loved the sound of the traditional aboriginal instruments, and as I grew older, I became much more aware of the actual situation which existed in Australia between the white Australian and the aborigines, who were being wiped out by man's greed for uranium. Digging up their sacred grounds, just to get plutonium, and eventually make weapons out of it. And I just feel that it's so wrong: this beautiful culture being destroyed just so that we can build weapons which maybe one day will destroy everything, including us. We should be learning from the aborigines, they're such a fascinating race. And Australia - there's something very beautiful about that country. ('The Dreaming'. Poppix (UK), Summer 1982)”.
Many don’t associate Kate Bush with political or being socially conscious. She has always has this side to her. Concerned about the plight of the Aborigines, it is a very honest and authentic. This was not Bush jumping on a bandwagon or trying to exploit a particular wave. I love the lyrics throughout The Dreaming. The most striking verse is this: “The civilised keep alive/The territorial war/"See the light ram through the gaps in the land"/Erase the race that claim the place/And say we dig for ore/Or dangle devils in a bottle/And push them from the Pull of the Bush/"See the light ram through the gaps in the land"/You find them in the road/"See the light bounce off the rocks to the sand"/In the road”. In terms of the vocals and composition, it is one of the most fascinating examples on The Dreaming. From the piano and Fairlight from Bush to the animal noises by Percy Edwards; the bullroarer by Paddy Bush and the crowd noise by Gosfield Goers, The Dreaming is a track that jumps out of the speakers! There are so many remarkable lines performed by Bush. I even think the Australian accent she adopts is good and never sounds too jarring. Another of my favourite passages is this: “Ma-ma-many an Aborigine's mistaken for a tree/("La, la, oo-ooh!")/"See the light ram through the gaps in the land"/You near him on the motorway/And the tree begin to breathe/Erase the race that claim the place/And say we dig for ore/"See the light ram through the gaps in the land"/Dangle devils in a bottle/And push them from the Pull of the Bush/"See the sun set in the hand of the man". I shall leave it here. I can sort of see why, as a single, The Dreaming did not fare too well. More of an album track, it is spectacular and has this sense of importance and weight. The title track from Kate Bush’s fourth studio album proved that she is…
SUCH a remarkable songwriter.