FEATURE:
After the Clouds Have Been Busted…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for The Ninth Wave/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush's Hounds of Love at Thirty-Seven: The Ninth Wave
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ON 16th September…
Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love turns thirty-seven. The album has long been regarded as her very best. It has acquired fresh popularity and relevance after its first single, Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), appeared on Stranger Things. I have typed that line so many times now! It is great that the album has reached those who might have missed it before. The first half of the album is more conventional and contains the singles. Aside from Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), there is Cloudbusting, The Big Sky and Hounds of Love. I am not sure how far into the writing process for Hounds of Love Kate Bush thought of The Ninth Wave. This is the conceptual suite that is, in my view, the best thing about the album. I wanted to revisit it ahead of the anniversary of the album. Before going into more detail, here is a snippet of Bush discussing the idea behind The Ninth Wave:
“The Ninth Wave was a film, that's how I thought of it. It's the idea of this person being in the water, how they've got there, we don't know. But the idea is that they've been on a ship and they've been washed over the side so they're alone in this water. And I find that horrific imagery, the thought of being completely alone in all this water. And they've got a life jacket with a little light so that if anyone should be traveling at night they'll see the light and know they're there. And they're absolutely terrified, and they're completely alone at the mercy of their imagination, which again I personally find such a terrifying thing, the power of ones own imagination being let loose on something like that. And the idea that they've got it in their head that they mustn't fall asleep, because if you fall asleep when you're in the water, I've heard that you roll over and so you drown, so they're trying to keep themselves awake. (Richard Skinner, 'Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love'. BBC Radio 1, 26 January 1992)”.
In previous features, I have looked at The Ninth Wave as a film. Maybe turning it into a short film or longer piece. Of course, Bush did bring the suite to life on stage in 2014 during Before the Dawn. In interviews, when asked about The Ninth Wave, Bush said it concerned a terrifying thought. The idea of being stuck in the water and not knowing what is beneath. She feels this it the scariest thing possible. Much more terrifying than being in the air and in peril. She has also said how she heard people fall asleep when they are in the water/this situation, and they naturally roll over and drown, so her heroine needed to stay awake. It makes the first song on the suite, And Dream of Sheep, particularly tragic and ironic. That desire and almost painful need to sleep! Waking the Witch features voices telling the woman to stay awake and alive as it seems, as hope is slipping, she is getting tired and getting into danger. I keep writing about The Ninth Wave because it is so fascinating and accomplished. When Hounds of Love came out, Bush was only twenty-seven. That is such a young age for someone to write something as phenomenal and astonishing as The Ninth Wave! I almost think of Hounds of Love’s second side as a classical suite or a film that Bush tested out through music first. I guess one can think about The Ninth Suite being related to classic literature and imagery.
I get reminders and links to The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The heroine lives in a castle on a river and tries to escape. She ends up in a boat on a river and eventually dies. Although Bush’s figure survives and is rescued at the end of The Ninth Wave, that has never truly been confirmed. Although it seems like there is a rescuer lifting her to safety, could this be a dream? On stage, people saw Bush being rescued. She has said how The Ninth Wave does end with the woman being saved, but it is still open to interpretation. I found an interesting article where a Kate Bush fan page asked people about their general thoughts about The Ninth Wave. This response caught my eye:
“Though many of you may already have taken notice of the following on your own, IED has been so taken with these ideas that he felt he just had to mention them anyway.
The whole conceit of the heroine drifting in water refers to far more than just the explicit, immediate context of The Ninth Wave. In fact, the implicit references are so deliberate that they may arguably be more important than the explicit subject-matter. Actually, at least three earlier such subjects loom in the collective English consciousness. All of them have important positions in British cultural history.
Of these the best known outside England is the story of Ophelia in Hamlet. The allusion to Ophelia's insane self-immersion is plain to see in the photo for The Ninth Wave: the flowers. These were explained away almost flippantly by (if IED remembers correctly -- Doug, will you confirm or deny, since you were there too?) John Carder Bush as being intended to show the chaos and damage on board the ship during its sinking (or whatever ultimately forced the heroine into the ocean). The idea was supposed to be that commercially cultivated flowers, perhaps in the hands of the heroine at the time of the disaster, perhaps thrown by happenstance into the water from a dining table flower arrangement during the commotion and sinking, have happened to end up floating in the very same waves in which the heroine finds herself engulfed.
This explanation has always struck IED as suspiciously superficial -- not to mention implausible. The image of a beautiful young Englishwoman floating on her back in a cold, deathly state, dressed in a white lace nightie and set adrift amid exotic and colourful flowers has, since the seventeenth-century premiere of Hamlet, been inextricably connected with the fate of Ophelia.
In fact, the image of Ophelia in the water is a relatively modern variant on the Arthurian images of both Elaine and the Lady of Shalott. These two earlier legends feature their heroines floating downstream in open boats (in which they eventually are found dead). This image, in fact, was reproduced precisely by Kate herself in what was virtually her debut on video, the so-called Eftelink films, specifically the last of the six, a setting of "The Kick Inside". The reader will begin to see the extent of the convolutions involved; see, in fact, a multitude of wheels within wheels, and all of impeccably, classically English origin.
But the images are not only associated with the word, but with English paintings, as well, and these are predominantly Victorian. The most famous of all of these pictures, and possibly the single greatest image of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, is "Ophelia", by John Everett Millais (1852). Kate is definitely very familiar with the painting; her brother confirmed as much in conversation with IED at East Wickham Farm in 1985. At the time this point made littel impression on IED, but since then it has come to take on increasing importance in his fevered brain...
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush being carried off stage during the performance of Hello Earth during 2014’s Before the Dawn/PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay
During that conversation IED and JCB discussed the connection of the "Lakeside" images (photographs taken by Jay of his sister sitting and stretching by the banks of the river or lake which appears in the Eftelink videos) with Pre-Raphaelite imagery. We also talked about the famous post-Pre-Raphaelite painting (in the Tate Gallery) of the Lady of Shalott, by John William Waterhouse. There are at least four other very familiar paintings of about the same date which depict episodes from the legend of the Lady of Shalott, and which were inspired by a poetic setting of the legend in...Tennyson's Idylls of the King. (More wheels ...) IED has been purposelessly musing on all of this, mulling over also Kate's own comments about the influence of Pre-Raphaelitism on her own artistic vocabulary (see quote No. 1) as well as the large painting, called "The Hogsmill Ophelia", which hangs in her studio (see quote No. 2). And the more familiar he becomes with the images and the references, the more sense it all makes. What do you think?
Quote Number 1:
NM: I'm reminded by a painting in the corner here, which is a sort of satire of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, that I always have thought that those Victorian painters, the Pre-Raphaelites, were an influence to the texture of your song writing.
KB: Yes, yes. I think that particularly in my very early teens I was very enchanted by the whole romance of it, yes. They find their way into songs, the imagery. I think that's what happens: something attracts you because of its imagery and you digest it and it comes up in a song. I think that's how artists work; they are like magpies, picking up little bits of gold and storing them away.
Quote No. 2:
At one end of the studio is a huge painting of a drowned, cracked doll floating face up past a sewer. For some reason this painting, which might be described as macabre-kitsch, seems to say a lot about its owner. Kate returns and sees me examining it.
"That's called 'The Hogsmill Ophelia'. A lot of people find it disturbing but I don't. I lived with it for ages. Looked at it every day. That picture cost me all the money I had once. Paintings are a great inspiration. One of my favourites is by Millais, 'The Huguenot'. It's of a man going off to the wars being hugged to the breast of his lover. She's holding him to her by a scarf around his arm. It's very beautiful.”.
At seven tracks, I think of The Ninth Wave as its own body of work, rather than the second side of Hounds of Love. It is remarkable how each song has its own life and sound. You know Bush composed the song with video ideas in mind. Although it has not happened yet, you wonder what she would have concocted if she ever did film The Ninth Wave. I am not going to go into detail about each song, except for its finale, The Morning Fog. From the almost ballad and lullaby-like quality of And Dream of Sheep, we then get the chillier and more haunting Under Ice. That leads to the terrifying and head-spinning Waking the Witch. Later on, we get one of the most dramatical musical switches Bush has ever put to tape when we go from Jig of Life – which is spirited and has fantastic Irish musicians playing – to Hello Earth. It is a dramatical change of sound and direction! The Morning Fog is the heroine saying she has been born again. The final words offer hope and this second chance: “I'm falling/And I'd love to hold you know/I'll kiss the ground/I'll tell my mother/I'll tell my father/I'll tell my loved one/I'll tell my brothers/How much I love them”. This is what Bush said about The Morning Fog in 1992:
“Well, that's really meant to be the rescue of the whole situation, where now suddenly out of all this darkness and weight comes light. You know, the weightiness is gone and here's the morning, and it's meant to feel very positive and bright and uplifting from the rest of dense, darkness of the previous track. And although it doesn't say so, in my mind this was the song where they were rescued, where they get pulled out of the water. And it's very much a song of seeing perspective, of really, you know, of being so grateful for everything that you have, that you're never grateful of in ordinary life because you just abuse it totally. And it was also meant to be one of those kind of "thank you and goodnight" songs. You know, the little finale where everyone does a little dance and then the bow and then they leave the stage. [laughs] (Richard Skinner, 'Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love. Radio 1 (UK), aired 26 January 1992)”.
On 16th September, Hounds of Love will get a lot of attention. Many will discuss it in the context of Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). I do hope that some talk about The Ninth Wave and its importance. Such a stunning and immersive suite that I am still blown away by! I can only imagine how fans reacted to it the first time in 1985. They would not have been prepared for something like this! A long-held ambition from Bush was to realise The Ninth Wave. She finally got to do this in 2014. What a treat it must have been for fans to see that across twenty-two nights. How exhausting it must have been for her! Displaying her imaginative, songwriting and production genius, The Ninth Wave is also Kate Bush at the top of her game regarding vocal performances. She puts so much emotion and character into every song! If Bush, earlier on Hounds of Love, was asking if she could do a deal with God so she could swap places with someone to better understand them, you get the sense that The Ninth Wave is when she truly needed divine intervention. If all looked lost at the start of The Ninth Wave, there is this satisfying conclusion. Though, as I have said, could that have been a dream? Did the heroine die during Waking the Witch and everything afterwards is imagined or her final thoughts? I’d like to think that, actually, it out worked okay and the ill-fated and poor woman (who we assume got into the water when she got swept from a ship) did make it…
OUT safely.