FEATURE:
This Is No Trick of Hers, This Is Your Magic…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982
Kate Bush's The Dreaming at Forty: Human Behaviour, Change, and Proving Critics Wrong
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IN marking the fortieth anniversary…
of Kate Bush’s The Dreaming, there are a few areas I want to explore. Her fans will come together on 13th September to celebrate a big and important anniversary. Before coming to specific features about production, songs, and its legacy, there is a great section of information from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, where they have sourced interviews she conducted where she spoke about her fourth studio album. She spoke about the concept and themes of The Dreaming. Whereas Hounds of Love (the album that followed The Dreaming) has a conceptual second side suite, The Ninth Wave, and one can look at albums like The Kick Inside (her 1978) and see themes there, The Dreaming seems more scattershot and harder to pin down. That said, human behaviour does seem to be a central core to each of the songs. Bush definitely made it clear in interviews that she was changing between albums. Keen to push and evolve her sound, I think many people just expected her to do the same thing. The fact The Dreaming divides people is because there was this expectation Bush would repeat herself and stay in a very convenient and neat box. It is interesting hearing Bush talk about this remarkable album through the years:
“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)
It is interesting what she says about being bored. Disappointed if all her albums were the same. One of Kate Bush’s greatest assets is that she can make albums these very different and new things; we are always invested and engrossed. The Dreaming is Bush proving what a remarkable accomplished, versatile and deep songwriter she was. Still trying to throw off ideas that she was a novelty act or was this singer who was a bit one-note and lightweight, The Dreaming is Kate Bush not only establishing herself as one of the most pioneering and compelling songwriters of her era. She also showed what a truly staggering producer she is. If The Dreaming seems like quite a heavy or negative listen, as Bush said in a couple of different interviews, she was trying to be positive and also put herself and true being into every note and song:
I think [The Dreaming] is about trying to cope...to get through all the shit. I think it was positive: showing how certain people approach all these negative things - war, crime, etc. I don't think I'm actually an aggressive person, but I can be. But I release that energy in work. I think it's wrong to get angry. If people get angry, it kind of freaks everybody out and they can't concentrate on what they're doing. (Jane Solanas, 'The Barmy Dreamer'. NME (UK), 1983).
I have no doubt that those who buy singles because they like my hits, are completely mystified upon hearing the albums. But if it comes to that, they should listen to it loudly! If a single theme linked The Dreaming, which is quite varied, it would be human relationships and emotional problems. Every being responds principally to emotions. Some people are very cool, but they are silenced by their emotions, whatever they might be. To write a song, it's necessary that I be completely steeped in my environment, in my subject. Sometimes the original idea is maintained, but as it takes form, it possesses me. One of the best examples would be this song that I wrote on 'Houdini': I knew every one of the things that I wanted to say, and it was necessary that I find new ways that would allow me to say them; the hardest thing, is when you have so many things to fit into so short a space of time. You have to be concise and at the same time not remain vague, or obscure. The Dreaming was a decisive album for me. I hadn't recorded in a very long time until I undertook it, and that was the first time that I'd had such liberty. It was intoxicating and frightening at the same time. I could fail at everything and ruin my career at one fell swoop. All this energy, my frustrations, my fears, my wish to succeed, all that went into the record. That's the principle of music: to liberate all the tensions that exist inside you. I tried to give free rein to all my fantasies. Although all of the songs do not talk about me, they represent all the facets of my personality, all my different attitudes in relation to the world. In growing older, I see more and more clearly that I am crippled in facing the things that really count, and that I can do nothing about it, just as most people can do nothing. Making an album is insignificant in comparison with that, but it's my only defense. (Yves Bigot, 'Englishwoman is crossing the continents'. Guitares et Claviers (France), February 1986)”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pierre Terrasson
Kate Bush has also said in interviews how critics said The Dreaming was a commercial disaster. The album got to number three in the U.K. and sold well. There is no doubt that The Dreaming was a massive success. Some saw it as a little underwhelming because it didn’t do as well as 1980’s Never for Ever. That reached number one in the U.K. It is good that The critical standing of the album has improved vastly in recent decades. In 1982, there was mixed reaction. In a poll conducted by NPR, they ranked The Dreaming as the twenty-fourth-greatest album ever made by a female artist. SLANT named it as the seventy-first-best album on its list of the Best Albums of the 1980s. I can understand why some did not understand or fully absorb The Dreaming upon its release. It is a lot to take! In 2016, Drowned in Sound showed The Dreaming some real love. There are a few parts that I want to bring in:
“The Dreaming is therefore tirelessly imaginative, asking the listener to submerge themselves in a wealth of illusory and semi-fictional realms. But it’s also remarkable for what happened behind the scenes as well. Bush had made steps into production before, on the EP On Stage and on Never For Ever, where she was aided by engineer Jon Kelly. Here though, she took the bold step to produce the entirety of the album alone. While she did collaborate to some extent with a few engineers (such as Nick Launay, who had previously worked with Public Image Ltd and Phil Collins), the control that Bush had on the record is plain to hear at every twist and turn. She extensively made use of the Fairlight CMI – one of the earliest workstations with an embedded digital sampling synthesiser – and a number of other state-of-the-art machines when recording.
She didn’t look back. In 1983 she built her own 48-track studio in the barn behind her family home, using it to start demoing and producing what is often considered to be her magnum opus, Hounds Of Love. There, she would occasionally channel some of the experimental spirit that defined The Dreaming (especially on its conceptual latter half), but it was far and away more commercially and critically successful, often being hailed as Bush’s best record. Hounds Of Love was nominated for four gongs at the 1986 BRIT Awards: Best Album, Best Female Artist, Best Single (for ‘Running Up That Hill’) and, perhaps most significantly, Best Producer.
The Dreaming, by contrast, remains the overlooked jewel in her canon. But while it may be challenging and uncompromising, it’s almost hard to imagine what Kate Bush would be like today if she hadn’t released it. A staggeringly bold step forward for her as a singer, songwriter and producer, The Dreaming was a milestone both for Bush herself and the wider world of music”.
That is a very relevant thing to end with. What would her career have been like if she hadn’t released The Dreaming?! In the same way The Kick Inside is not a merely promising debut but a fully-formed and incredible introduction, The Dreaming is not a bridge or stepping stone to Hounds of Love. Rather, it is a misunderstood and now-reassessed album that stunned the world and has inspired so many artists since its release. A producer, songwriter and artist who overtook her peers and released an album so ahead of its time people are only recently starting to appreciate its real worth and beauty, I can appreciate why Bush spent so much time and energy getting it to her specifications. Maybe she did go slightly mad making it but, without The Dreaming, the music world would be…
SO much poorer.