FEATURE:
The Power of One’s Own Imagination
Hounds of Love at Thirty-Seven: The Majestic and Timeless Cloudbusting
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BECAUSE the mighty…
Hounds of Love is thirty-seven on 16th September, I have been exploring various songs and sides. I will do another feature or two before the actual date. The October 2022 edition of MOJO prominently features Hounds of Love. Released as the second single from the album on 14th October, 1985, this album provided huge bounty on the first side. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was the first single from Hounds of Love. That came out in August 1985. Cloudbusting is one of the most popular songs from the album and the fourth most-streamed of Bush’s songs on Spotify. The single reached number twenty in the U.K. I always think that was quite a low position for a song that is so good! The video as well features Donald Sutherland. Given the fact there was a six-figure budget for the video and you are utterly entranced by the song, why did it chart relatively low?! Maybe the public bought the album and did need the single as much. I am coming back to Cloudbusting for a couple of reasons. I shall come to them soon, in addition to providing my thoughts about the song. First, here is some information about Cloudbusting. In fact, it is Kate Bush discussing the origins and story of the song:
“This was inspired by a book that I first found on a shelf nearly nine years ago. It was just calling me from the shelf, and when I read it I was very moved by the magic of it. It's about a special relationship between a young son and his father. The book was written from a child's point of view. His father is everything to him; he is the magic in his life, and he teaches him everything, teaching him to be open-minded and not to build up barriers. His father has built a machine that can make it rain, a 'cloudbuster'; and the son and his father go out together cloudbusting.
They point big pipes up into the sky, and they make it rain. The song is very much taking a comparison with a yo-yo that glowed in the dark and which was given to the boy by a best friend. It was really special to him; he loved it. But his father believed in things having positive and negative energy, and that fluorescent light was a very negative energy - as was the material they used to make glow-in-the-dark toys then - and his father told him he had to get rid of it, he wasn't allowed to keep it. But the boy, rather than throwing it away, buried it in the garden, so that he would placate his father but could also go and dig it up occasionally and play with it. It's a parallel in some ways between how much he loved the yo-yo - how special it was - and yet how dangerous it was considered to be. He loved his father (who was perhaps considered dangerous by some people); and he loved how he could bury his yo-yo and retrieve it whenever he wanted to play with it. But there's nothing he can do about his father being taken away, he is completely helpless. But it's very much more to do with how the son does begin to cope with the whole loneliness and pain of being without his father. It is the magic moments of a relationship through a child's eyes, but told by a sad adult. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, 1985)
'Cloudbusting' is a track that was very much inspired by a book called A Book Of Dreams. This book is written through a child's eyes, looking at his father and how much his father means to him in his world - he's everything. his father has a machine that can make it rain, amongst many other things, and there's a wonderful sense of magic as he and his father make it rain together on this machine. The book is full of imagery of an innocent child and yet it's being written by a sad adult, which gives it a strange kind of personal intimacy and magic that is quite extraordinary. The song is really about how much that father meant to the son and how much he misses him now he's gone. (Conversation Disc Series, ABCD 012, 1985)
It's a song with a very American inspiration, which draws its subject from 'A Book Of Dreams' by Peter Reich. The book was written as if by a child who was telling of his strange and unique relationship with his father. They lived in a place called Organon, where the father, a respected psycho-analyst, had some very advanced theories on Vital Energy; furthermore, he owned a rain-making machine, the Cloudbuster. His son and he loved to use it to make it rain. Unfortunately, the father was imprisoned because of his ideas. In fact, in America, in that period, it was safer not to stick out. Sadly, the father dies in prison. From that point on, his son becomes unable to put up with an orthodox lifestyle, to adapt himself. The song evokes the days of happiness when the little boy was making it rain with his father. (Yves Bigot, 'Englishwoman Is Crossing The Continents'. Guitares et Claviers (France), February 1986)”.
There are a couple of things from the MOJO feature that caught my eye. Maybe a bit salacious and controversial, but Donald Sutherland sort of cemented this respect for Bush when, on the first morning of the shoot, he saw her coming out of her trailer smoking a joint! Kate and weed were no strangers. She smoked since she was a child, and weed was part of her life from her debut album, The Kick Inside (1978), onwards. Whether to counteract or handle stress or a way to get more relaxed or chilled, I love the fact that she had this nonchalant relationship with something that many might frown at. It just underlines how cool she is! The real reason I wanted to come back to Cloudbusting is because of is significance. I shall come to a particularly poignant thing about the fifth track from Hounds of Love. The video for Cloudbusting is among Bush’s best and most ambitious. The fact that Bush lobbied hard for Donald Sutherland and doorstepped him at his suite at the Savoy in London shows how important the visual side was. The directing flame was well and truly lit, as she would direct the next single from Hounds of Love. Its amazing title track. It is wonderful that a huge actor like Donald Sutherland appeared in the video! He was not having a great time on the film, Revolution, so this was something nice and different. I think he was so impressed with Bush asnd her professionalism. The reason he threw himself into it. The two grew quite close – ironic given they were playing father and son who are torn apart after a moment of breakthrough.
If you want to know more about the video, I would recommend this feature. This is what Wikipedia say about the legendary video for Cloudbusting:
“The music video, directed by Julian Doyle, was conceived by Terry Gilliam and Kate Bush as a short film. The video features Canadian actor Donald Sutherland playing the role of Wilhelm Reich, and Bush in the role of his young son, Peter. The video shows the two on the top of a hill trying to make the cloudbuster work. Reich leaves Peter on the machine and returns to his lab. In flashback, he remembers several times he and Peter enjoyed together as Reich worked on various scientific projects, until he is interrupted by government officials who arrest him and ransack the lab. Peter senses his father's danger and tries to reach him, but is forced to watch helplessly as his father is driven away. Peter finally runs back to the cloudbuster and activates it successfully, to the delight of his father who sees it starting to rain.
Filming took place at the Vale of White Horse in Oxfordshire, England. The hill on which the machine is positioned is Dragon Hill, immediately below the Uffington White Horse, a prehistoric hill carving which can be seen briefly in a couple of the shots. Bush found out in which hotel Sutherland was staying from actress Julie Christie's hairdresser and went to his room to personally ask him to participate in the project. In the UK, the music video was shown at some cinemas as an accompaniment to the main feature. Due to difficulties on obtaining a work visa for Sutherland at short notice, the actor offered to work on the video for free. Although the events depicted in the story took place in Maine, the newspaper clipping in the music video reads The Oregon Times, likely a reference to Reich's home and laboratory "Orgonon".
The Cloudbusting machine in the video was designed and constructed by people who worked on the Alien creature and bears only a superficial resemblance to the real cloudbusters, which were smaller and with multiple narrow, straight tubes and pipes, and were operated while standing on the ground In a reference to the source material of the song, Bush pulls a copy of Peter Reich's A Book of Dreams from Sutherland's coat.
The full-length video features a longer version of the song, which is different from the Organon Mix released on 12-inch vinyl. This version was commercially available on "The Red Shoes" single.
Around the time of the release Bush sent Peter Reich a VHS copy of the music video. Reich was immediately a fan. He later told Dazed magazine "Quite magically, this British musician had tapped precisely into a unique and magical fulfilment of father-son devotion, emotion and understanding. They had captured it all”.
I say this about every Kate Bush song it seems, but Cloudbusting does contain some of Bush’s best lyrics. I love the inspiration behind the song and how she took something niche and potentially challenging and wrote this beautiful, beautiful song. I adore the opening verse: “I still dream of Orgonon/I wake up crying/You're making rain/And you're just in reach/When you and sleep escape me”. That said, and returning to the Kate Bush Encylopedia not everything was plain sailing when it came to the recording:
“That did all fall apart over a period of about ten bars. And everything just started falling apart, 'cause it didn't end properly, and, you know, the drummer would stop and then the strings would just sorta start wiggling around and talking. And I felt it needed an ending, and I didn't really know what to do. And then I thought maybe decoy tactics were the way, and we covered the whole thing over with the sound of a steam engine slowing down so that you had the sense of the journey coming to an end. And it worked, it covered up all the falling apart and actually made it sound very complete in a way. And we had terrible trouble getting a sound effect of steam train so we actually made up the sound effect out of various sounds, and Del was the steam. (Laughs) And we got a whistle on the Fairlight for the "poo poop". (Richard Skinner, 'Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love'. BBC Radio 1, 26 January 1992)”.
The thing I want to end with relates to the Before the Dawn residency. The 2014 gig series was Bush’s return to large-scale live performance. Having not done something like this since 1979, it was an emotional thing for her and her fans. The set contained some of her biggest hits, but she did prominently feature her two suites. The Ninth Wave from Hounds of Love finally got to the stage. She realised straight away that it had cinematic potential and there were video plans long ago. This was the first time the suite was staged. Aerial’s (2005) second album/side, A Sky at Honey, was also featured. Of course, there was an encore to the Before the Dawn setlist. For the encore, Bush started with a rare appearance for 50 Words for Snow. The only song on that album not relating to snow, Among Angels, was the first song. Cloudbusting was the final track. This is the final song Bush is likely to ever play live. That is quite startling to realise. That final night on 1st October, 2014, people heard Cloudbusting and maybe didn’t realise that this was it. One of Hounds of Love’s most important song ended Kate Bush’s live career. I can only imagine how emotional it was performing that song for the final time – Bush knowing she is unlikely to step on the stage again! As Hounds of Love is thirty-seven on 16th September, I wanted to revisit Cloudbusting. I will do another feature or two about the album, as it is such a fascinating and important work! One of the most remarkable songs Bush ever wrote, I have been listening to it a lot in preparation. It gets inside me and elicits emotions each time I hear it. We know that Stranger Things recently used Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) in an episode. In the process, it got the song to number one in the U.K. and broke records for Bush. You’d imagine Cloudbusting is the Hounds of Love track you’d expect to see scoring a big T.V. or film moment. You can never say never. It may well…
HAPPEN yet.