FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s The Dreaming at Forty
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in Abbey Road’s Studio 2 in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Rapport
13th September: A Listening Party Invite
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I pitched this on Twitter…
a while back. On 13th September, Kate Bush’s remarkable and hugely enduring fourth studio album, The Dreaming, turns forty. In October, I did suggest Bush’s albums warrant their own listening parties, sort of similar to what Tim Burgess does. I am going to come to my listening party suggestion but, before then, a bit of insight into The Dreaming. Even though SPIN ranked Bush’s The Dreaming as the third-best in her catalogue (and rightly placed The Kick Inside second, behind the mighty Hounds of Love) – last month, they ranked it as the best album of 1982 this month, where it beat out Prince 1999 and Michael Jackson’s iconic Thriller. Here is what they said about their 1982-conquering queen:
“Pop stars don’t always do a good job describing their own work, but Kate Bush had a point when she described The Dreaming as her “I’ve gone mad album.” A pounding maelstrom of frenetic drums inaugurates Bush’s fourth LP, in which the songwriter plunges brain-first into avant-pop paranoia. Teeming with production techniques that summon Public Image Ltd more than the mainstream radio acts of 1982, The Dreaming is full of jarring flourishes: Bush’s scorched cries of “I love life!” on the violent “Pull Out the Pin,” the didgeridoo drones of the title track, the utterly frightening donkey brays on “Get Out of My House.” Yet somewhere amidst this chaos comes the waltz-time reverie of “Suspended in Gaffa,” one of Bush’s most magical compositions. New converts may wonder how Bush traveled from the sweet naïveté of “Wuthering Heights” to the art-pop genius of Hounds of Love. They should spend some time with The Dreaming. – Z.S.”.
If you do not own a copy of The Dreaming on vinyl, then go and get one. Before coming to the listening party idea, I want to source some information about this spectacular album, in addition to a review. The below interview - where Bush discussed 1982’s The Dreaming – is one that I keep coming back to:
“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 2012, to mark thirty years of The Dreaming, The Quietus wrote a fascinating article about the album. It is something I would urge everyone to check out. I have selected section of it that I feel are especially noteworthy:
“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.
If 'Sat In Your Lap' vaguely chimed with Burundi beat of the times (Bow Wow Wow & Adam Ant ), its flip-side sounded like the inscription of a dream. Her reading of Donovan’s 'Lord Of The Reedy River' takes the minstrelsy of the original and filters it through disquieting modern psychedelia, the subtly shifting palette not too dissimilar to the singles The Associates were chaotically assembling that year (see 'White Car'/ 'Q Quarters'). Where much of synth pop was revelling in pared down repetition, this music was incantatory, voluptuous, like Keats drifting ‘Lethe-wards’. Recorded in Townhouse Studios’ disused swimming pool in order to evoke the sensation of floating down a river, the song’s grainy, low-resolution Fairlight motifs root it in its time but the aqueous phantasmagoria points the way forward to Hounds of Love’s 'The Ninth Wave'. Like Lennon wanting to be the Dalai Lama on Tomorrow Never Knows, Bush was using technology as a means of metamorphosis.
She disappeared into the studio after the single’s release. Emerging 13 months later with 'The Dreaming' single, which sadly flopped. Repeated listens reveal a record that deserves to rank alongside her more famous songs. With its "flood of imagery painted into it", the track would have benefitted enormously from an extended mix but its dismal chart placing meant it wasn't to become her first single release on 12". The semi-instrumental version on the b-side illuminates how Bush was becoming an inspired producer, creating tracks engorged in overdubs yet "full of space and loneliness".
The Dreaming elicits comparisons with Nic Roeg’s Walkabout(1971), not just due to its setting but in its tragic understanding of the human inability to communicate (a recurrent Bush theme). The film recites AE Housmann at its finale, so too a wind of ‘civilized’ change consumes The Dreaming’s finale. Into the aborigines’ hearts ‘an air that kills’, consigning their way of life to the ‘land of lost content. The animalistic chants and the Dreamtime itself, a belief system where Ancestral/ Totemic beings leave their fingerprints on the land or as other forms through reincarnation, evidenced her infatuation with transformation in sound and subject. The desire for artistic development, escaping the narrow confines of public perception and perhaps those early years watching Bowie parade his various personae (she was in the Hammersmith Odeon audience July ’73 when he retired Ziggy) all seem to influence the symbolism of The Dreaming.
Released the same year, Peter Gabriel IV (aka Security) opened with a double punch that eerily echoes The Dreaming. 'The Rhythm Of The Heat' in its pictorial three dimensions and 'San Jacinto' in its indigenous/'civilized' worlds colliding. No more could people like Padgham dismiss her as a Gabriel wannabe. She was now a peer and innovator. The title track segues into 'Night Of The Swallow'. Moon-glow piano balladry mutates into a torrid Irish folk blow-out; chiaroscuro Celtic cine-pop.
The Irish contributions, coming from members of Planxty and The Chieftans, were recorded over an all-night session at Dublin’s Windmill Lane Studios. Her musical imagination has the transporting power of cinema. As the scene moves from The Dreaming’s Antipodean soundscape to the outlaw glamour of a ceilidh band, it almost resembles the aural equivalent of the ‘magic geography’ of Bush favourites, Powell and Pressburger.
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.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.
An embarrassment of riches then, bestowed upon an unworthy rabble. The Dreaming was released to a baffled public but the more open-minded sectors of the music press acknowledged Bush’s achievement. Despite many laudatory notices, watching Bush and Gabriel’s respective appearances on Old Grey Whistle Test confirms what she was up against. Gabriel is afforded due reverence as an art-rock renaissance man, Bush, on the other hand, while covering roughly the same ground, is ever so slightly mocked. Behind her unwavering propriety, irritation smoulders. As with her appearance on Pebble Mill, the usually sympathetic Paul Gambaccini constantly frames the music in context of its radio playability or lack thereof. Bush looks bewildered and more than a little wan. The music she had created was no longer so easily assimilated by daytime TV.
But it was The Dreaming that lay the groundwork. It ignited US critical interest in her (including the hard-assed Robert Christgau and the burgeoning college radio scene finally gave Bush an outlet there. Hounds Of Love, remains the acme of this singular talent’s achievements. It uses ethnic instrumentation while sounding nothing like the world music that would be popularized through the 80s. It is a record largely constructed with cutting edge technology that eschews the showroom dummy bleeps associated with synth-pop. At the time, she talked of using technology to apply "the future to nostalgia", an interesting reverse of Bowie’s nostalgic Berlin soundtrack for a future that never came. Like Low, The Dreaming is Bush’s own "new music night and day" a brave volte face from a mainstream artist. It remains a startlingly modern record too, the organic hybridization, the use of digital and analogue techniques, its use of modern wizadry to access atavistic states (oddly, Rob Young’s fine portrait of the singer in Electric Eden only mentions this album in passing).
For such an extreme album, its influence has been far-reaching. ABC, then in their Lexicon Of Love prime, named it as one of their favourites, as did Bjork whose similar use of electronics to convey the pantheistic seems directly descended from The Dreaming. Even The Cure’s Disintegration duplicates the track arrangement on the sleeve and the request that ‘this album was mixed to be played loud’. 'Leave It Open'‘s vari-speed vocals even prefigure the art-damaged munchkins of The Knife vocal arsenal. Field Music/The Week That Was arrayed themselves with sonics that seem heavily indebted to Bush’s work here. Graphic novelist Neil Gaiman even had a character sing lyrics from the title track in his The Sandman series. John Balance of post-industrialists Coil confessed that the album’s songs were all ideas that he later tried to write. But Bush got there first. And The Dreaming remains a testament to the exhilarating joy of "letting the weirdness in”.
Apologies for repeating or recycling any material I have written before about The Dreaming but, for those new to the album or have overlooked it, I think it is important to reiterate and repost. My idea is that, on the day of The Dreaming’s fortieth anniversary (13th September), there is a listening party. Maybe there have been Kate Bush listening parties before, but none that I am aware of! Such an important album that has gained new respect and understanding following mixed reviews back in 1982, its tracks are all so different, wonderfully interesting and extraordinary. The time is not set in stone, but I was guessing maybe 7 p.m. GMT would be best. It may be earlier than that, but the intention is to include as many people as possible – so that various time zones are covered and catered for. It would basically be a chance for fans of The Dreaming to comment on each of the ten tracks. People’s memories and thoughts; their favourite lyrics and music bits. I would kick things off and post a link for each track. With a hashtag like #TheDreamingListeningParty, people would tweet about what the track means and why they like it. I am not sure if anyone associated with the album might be available, but it might be short notice to get them organised and tracked. It will be fitting, fun and right to salute and show proper respect for an album that is forty on 13th September. If there was some bemusement and colder words reserved for it back in 1982, today there is no doubt that this Kate Bush album is…
A definite masterpiece.