FEATURE:
Inside Kate Bush’s The Dreaming at Forty
Track Ten: Get Out of My House
__________
THE tenth and final…
part of this run where I look at the tracks on Kate Bush’s The Dreaming takes me to Get Out of My House. An epic finale from an album turning forty in September, it is one of her most layered, scary and physical tracks ever! There is a lot to unpack and unpick with regards the song. In terms of production and performance, this is Bush at her absolute best. As confident, compelling and stunning as anything on Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave (the conceptual suite from The Dreaming’s 1985 follow-up), this is a song that would have been a great single – and just imagine what she would have done with the video! Like every other song I have featured in this run, I will finish by discussing a few choice lyrics. First, as I have also been doing (and many thanks to their invaluable resources!), the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia provides interviews where Kate Bush reveals why the Stephen King novel, The Shining, was the inspiration for Get Out of My House:
“The Shining' is the only book I've read that has frightened me. While reading it I swamped around in its snowy imagery and avoided visiting certain floors of the big, cold hotel, empty for the winter. As in 'Alien', the central characters are isolated, miles (or light years) away from anyone or anything, but there is something in the place with them. They're not sure what, but it isn't very nice.
The setting for this song continues the theme - the house which is really a human being, has been shut up - locked and bolted, to stop any outside forces from entering. The person has been hurt and has decided to keep everybody out. They plant a 'concierge' at the front door to stop any determined callers from passing, but the thing has got into the house upstairs. It's descending in the lift, and now it approaches the door of the room that you're hiding in. You're cornered, there's no way out, so you turn into a bird and fly away, but the thing changes shape, too. You change, it changes; you can't escape, so you turn around and face it, scare it away. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, October 1982).
The song is called 'Get Out Of My House', and it's all about the human as a house. The idea is that as more experiences actually get to you, you start learning how to defend yourself from them. The human can be seen as a house where you start putting up shutters at the windows and locking the doors - not letting in certain things. I think a lot of people are like this - they don't hear what they don't want to hear, don't see what they don't want to see. It is like a house, where the windows are the eyes and the ears, and you don't let people in. That's sad because as they grow older people should open up more. But they do the opposite because, I suppose, they do get bruised and cluttered. Which brings me back to myself; yes, I have had to decide what I will let in and what I'll have to exclude. (Rosie Boycott, 'The Discreet Charm Of Kate Bush'. Company (UK), 1982)”.
I think that people would have been shocked hearing Get Out of My House back in 1982. Heavier and more intense than anything she had recorded to that point; it is a spectacular way to end The Dreaming! To put it anywhere else on the album would have been a mistake – given that it takes a bit out of you and is a hard act to follow! I said how a video of this would have been great. Featuring Bush as a spectral figure or someone possessed and scared in a house as the walls talk and ghosts swirl, she kind of nodded to some of those visual possibilities when she directed the video for her single, Experiment IV (that appeared on her 1986 greatest hits collection, The Whole Story).
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush attends a record signing at Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street in London on 14th September, 1982 for her album, The Dreaming
I am going to end by selecting a few verses and passages that I particularly love. On an album filled with choice and standout lines, Get Out of My House has more than its fair share! Filled with vibrantly frightening and anxious possibilities, the images Bush conveys suck you into the song. “No stranger's feet/Will enter me/(Get out of my house!)/I wash the panes/(Get out of my house!)/I clean the stains away/(Get out of my house!)” makes the mind race. It is the possessed house warding off any intruders and strangers! A maddened and delirious heroine – whether Bush imagines herself as Jack in The Shining or is casting herself in his role -, you get a bit of a glimpse into some of the stress and strain Bush was feeling when making the album: “This house is full of m-m-my mess/(Slamming)/This house is full of m-m-mistakes/(Slamming)/This house is full of m-m-madness/(Slamming)/This house is full of, full of, full of fight!/(Slam it)”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at Abbey Road Studio 2 on 10th May, 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Rapport/Getty Images; Olja Merker
The final lines build up the tension and we descend further into this delirious and chaotic whirlwind that is raging through the house: “I will not let you in!/Don't you bring back the reveries/I turn into a bird/Carry further than the word is heard/"Woman let me in!/I turn into the wind/I blow you a cold kiss/Stronger than the song's hit"/I will not let you in/I face towards the wind/I change into the Mule/"I change into the Mule". With incredible support – including "Eeyore" from Paul Hardiman, and percussion from Preston Heyman -, Get Out of My House is an appropriately huge and memorable way to end one of Kate Bush’s greatest albums. Three years later, she would release her commercial and critical masterpiece, Hounds of Love. I wanted to isolated the ten tracks on The Dreaming, as they are all individual and have huge merit. An album that I still feel is not as regarded and explored as it should be, I will do more features on it between now and September. With songs like Get Out of My House, and an album as ambitious, strong and textured as The Dreaming, it was clear that Kate Bush, as a producer, artist, musician and songwriter was…
VERY much in charge.