FEATURE:
To Be a Threat to the Men in Power
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on the set of the video for Cloudbusting/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting at Thirty-Nine
_________
ONE of Kate Bush’s…
biggest and most celebrated singles turns thirty-nine on 14th October. The second single from Hounds of Love, Cloudbusting reached twenty in the U.K. It is an instantly noticeable and noteworthy song. One that has such a fascinating sound. A brilliant video and a truly remarkable vocal from Kate Bush. Her production on the song is phenomenal! With Stuart Elliott and Charlie Morgan on drums, strings by The Medicci Sextet and backing vocals from Brian Bath, Paddy Bush, John Carder Bush and Del Palmer, it is a track that is still played widely to this day. I want to explore this iconic song prior to its thirty-ninth anniversary. I am going to end by quoting a few articles that rank Kate Bush’s singles/songs and where they place Cloudbusting. Kate actually contacted Peter Reich to explain her motives for writing Cloudbusting. She hoped that he would approve of the song. She received his response a while later, saying that he loved what she was doing. If that sounds unfamiliar or you are not sure who Peter Reich is and how he connected with the song, then the Kate Bush Encyclopedia collates some words from Kate Bush where she explains the story behind one of her biggest and most important tracks:
“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.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
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
If I’ve got this right,he believed that sexual energy was positive, usable energy that he tied in with his concept of orgone energy. He upset a lot of people selling orgone boxes, saying they could cure cancer and stuff. He ended up being arrested and put in prison. I knew nothing about Wilhelm when I read the book,which was his son’s experience of all this, written from a child’s point of view with a tremendous innocence and sadness. Years ago, I just went into a shop and picked it off the shelf, and really liked the title and the picture on the front. I’d never bought a book before which I hadn’t known anything about;I just felt I’d found something really special. And nine, 10 years later, I re-read it and it turned into a song. When it was finished, I wrote a letter to Peter Reich saying what I’d done. It was important to me in some way to have a sense of his blessing because his book really moved me. He sent me back such a lovely letter. It was an incredible feeling of returning something he’d given to me.
There is quite a bit written about Cloudbusting. Last year, Wine Travel and Song deciphered this remarkable song. It is such a compelling and emotional song. Made so much more atmospheric and brilliant by its video. I shall come to that soon. I hope that this song gets a lot more words written about it:
“I still dream of Orgonon,” sings Kate Bush at the opening of “Cloudbusting” from her 1985 album, ‘The Hounds of Love.’ I’ve cherished this song since its release, yet I’ve always wondered about its subject matter. Was it simply about ‘cloud busting,’ or did it hold a deeper meaning? Like any Kate Bush song, the answer is both profound and captivating.
The song references the ‘Book of Dreams’ by Peter Reich, written about his father Wilhelm Reich and his unconventional theories, particularly his concept of “orgone,” a pseudo-scientific life energy he claimed to have discovered. The Orgonon mentioned at the start of the song is Wilhelm’s ‘Orgonon’ ranch in Maine, USA, where he conducted his experiments. You can actually visit the ranch and the William Reich museum today.
Wilhelm believed that his devices, called “cloudbusters,” could manipulate this energy to produce rain and influence the weather, which explains the cloud busting aspect of the song.
However, when you combine the song with its music video, a deeper subtext emerges. The song reflects the emotional bond between Peter and his father and their experiences with the cloudbuster. The video, featuring Donald Sutherland as Wilhelm Reich and Bush as his son, further illustrates this relationship and the concept of cloudbusting.
The line, “I can’t hide you from the Government,” alludes to the son’s desire and inability to protect his father from the consequences of his actions. Reich’s conflicts with government authorities in both Europe and the United States were multifaceted, including legal actions, investigations, and his unconventional therapeutic practices.
In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pursued legal actions against him, eventually leading to his arrest in 1956. Reich was charged with contempt of court and later sentenced to two years in federal prison, where he passed away in 1957”.
I will wrap up soon enough. I wanted to move to this DAZED feature from 2015. A look inside the cinematic and epic video for Cloudbusting. They gathered words from contributors including its director Julian Doyle and star Donald Sutherland (almost a literal father figure, he chided Kate Bush for smoking weed before filming the video saying it would mess her up and affect her concentration - to which he replied she hadn’t been straight for nine years!). The stunning video was conceived by Terry Gilliam and Kate Bush as a short film. The video features the much-missed Donald Sutherland playing the role of Wilhelm Reich, and Bush in the role of his young son, Peter:
“Sometime in 1985, a package arrived with a video cassette and an autographed album,” says Peter Reich. “My wife and children, who were five and two at the time, listened, watched and were entranced. 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.”
Everyone knows that “Wuthering Heights”, Kate Bush’s debut single of 1978, was inspired by Emily Brontë’s gothic tale of unfulfilled passion and madness on the moors. But how many people know how one boy’s relationship with his father, a disciple of Freud who fled Nazi-occupied Austria to pursue his studies on the orgasm in America, came to inspire another, similarly cherished piece of pop-culture history?
If you’ve seen the video for “Cloudbusting”, released 30 years ago this month, you’ll know that it’s a cinematic, oddly moving tale of a young boy, played by Kate Bush in a ragamuffin wig, and his idyllic adventures with his dad, played by Donald Sutherland, who is working on a giant ray-gun contraption that can shoot at clouds to make it rain. At some point in the video, a group of men in suits arrive to snatch the boy’s father away, but not before the boy can reach into his dad’s jacket pocket and pull out a slim volume called “A Book of Dreams”.
It sounds like fiction of the most fanciful kind, but in fact, the video – and book – are drawn entirely from life. Written by Peter Reich and published in 1973, A Book of Dreams is an extraordinarily touching account of a father, one Wilhelm Reich, as seen through the eyes of his doting son. Reich senior was a controversial figure in the field of psychoanalysis. On the one hand, his pioneering work laid the blueprint for the sexual revolution of the 1960s, attracting interest from Albert Einstein and Norman Mailer, among others. On the other, his ‘orgone accumulator’ invention – a metal box which Reich claimed harnessed the sexual energy of his patients for alleged benefits to their health – brought an injunction from the US authorities that would eventually land him in prison, where he died at the age of 60 in 1957. It’s the moment of his arrest that provides the book and the video with its heartbreaking focal point, as a child’s love for his father bumps up against the impassive forces of McCarthy-era moral panic.
“(My dad) was the father of body therapy and the sexual revolution,” says Reich of his father. “In Germany in the 1930s, he led a political movement that called for, among other things, the abolition of laws against abortion and homosexuality, free birth-control advice and contraceptives, health protection of mothers and children, nurseries in factories and in other large employment centres, the abolition of laws prohibiting sex education and home leave for prisoners.”
Another of Reich’s inventions, of course, was the Cloudbuster, the fantastical rainmaking machine that features in Kate Bush’s video. We pick up the story of the shoot, speaking to key contributors including Donald Sutherland, director Julian Doyle and editor Terry Gilliam, with additional insights from Peter Reich. Watch the video and get the story below.
Terry Gilliam: “Kate called me to direct the video and I said, ‘No, how about Julian (Doyle)?’ They had a great time shooting, but somewhere in the editing a conflict developed and I became the mediator. Kate knows exactly what she’s doing, she knows what she wants. She’s the sweetest person on the planet but she’s absolute steel inside!”
Julian Doyle: “Kate came to me with a storyboard, which I remember had the sun coming up with a face on it. She was a lovely lady, with a great smile that she gave generously. I understood her influences – like, I knew immediately where ‘It’s coming through the trees’ (film sample on ‘The Hounds of Love’) came from and things like that. I also knew about Wilhelm Reich, because there was interest in him among the new women’s movement which was exploring the female orgasm and I was close to the women involved.
Donald Sutherland: “Barry Richardson, who was the hairdresser on Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, asked me if I’d do a music video with Kate Bush. I told him no and we went on to other conversations. A couple of days later there was a knock on my door. I lived in the Savoy Hotel (in London). On the river. Suite 312. I loved it there. So cosseted. So private. Only the floor butler rang the door. I opened it. There was no one there. I heard a voice saying hello and I looked down. Standing down there was a very small Kate Bush. Barry had told her where I lived. What can you do? She wanted to explain what her video was about. I let her in. She sat down, said some stuff. All I heard was ‘Wilhelm Reich’. I’d taken an underground copy of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism with me when I went to film (Bernardo) Bertolucci’s Novecento in Parma. Reich’s work informed the psychological foundations of Attila Mellanchini, the character Bernardo had cast me to play. Everything about Reich echoed through me. He was there then and now he was here. Sitting across from me in the person of the very eloquent Kate Bush. Synchronicity. Perfect. She talked some more. I said OK and we made ‘Cloudbusting’. She’s wonderful, Kate Bush. Wonderful. I love that I did it. (What do I remember) about doing it? I remember being in the car and the hill and them taking me, taking Reich, away and looking back through the back window of the car and seeing her, seeing Reich’s son Peter, standing there. And I remember the first morning on set seeing her coming out of her trailer smoking a joint and I cautioned her, saying she shouldn’t smoke that, it’d affect her work, and she looked at me for a second and said she hadn’t been straight for nine years and I loved her.”
Peter Reich: “At one point in the video, the federal agents in black suits pull from a file cabinet a newspaper article about a rainmaker. In fact, during a drought in 1953, blueberry growers hired Dr Reich to make it rain in blueberry country along the Maine coast. I was along for that rain-making operation in the summer of 1953 and helped crank the levers. No rain was forecast. A most vivid memory: being aroused in the early morning hours just before dawn and led to an open door to observe a steady rain. The incident with federal agents coming on our property occurred a couple of years later, that day in August 1956 when I ran up that hill. That was the summer the government burned several tonnes of Wilhelm Reich’s books and equipment.”
Julian Doyle: “I thought it should look like a real story – like a film, not a pop video. I wanted to point out the story was real, which is why I had Kate take out the book. I also wanted more time so I doubled up a section of the music. Kate lengthened it even more, then she wanted to change the edit. I thought they were mistakes – so in bringing in Terry (Gilliam) it stopped her making bad changes to the edit as she accepted what Terry said. The editing process is very difficult – as it goes on for some time you have to be quite stubborn in character, keeping a balance in being open but not changing (things) because you are bored with them. Someone like Eric Idle, who is extremely smart and quick-witted, is a disaster in the cutting room, because he gets bored quickly and soon wants to cut out every joke.
“I was pleased we got up early to get the (shot with the) sun rising behind Kate falling down. I was also pleased with the track to close-up (on Donald Sutherland) where he changes from smiling to worried and then I pan into light flare. (When Donald had finished shooting his scenes) I said to him, ‘We have finished with you, thanks – but I just want you to walk away down the hill towards the sun.’ He looked great taking off his jacket. The very last shot of the shoot was the very last shot of Kate punching the air. There are only seven frames before I cut.”
Peter Reich: “Watching it for the first time, and ever since, not infrequently, the video’s emotional power is overwhelming and enduring, even after 30 years – or 60 years, for me. I did meet Kate once or twice. She gave me a very British umbrella, how very appropriate, one rainmaker to another”.
The final feature I am going to reference is VICE. In 2018, they wrote and argued why Cloudbusting is the song of every summer party. I had never really considered it as a summer song. I think it has quite an autumnal vibe. I think of the countryside and the open. However, it is an ultimate cloud-buster, so why should we not crown it as a summer anthem?! The multiple sides and strengths of Kate Bush’s songs! I hope that people who have not yet heard Cloudbusting and Hounds of Love investigate them:
“In that way, there’s a sensuality about “Cloudbusting” that makes it feel like it belongs firmly within summer, the most tactile season. Bush’s voice, which tangibly sighs and pleads across the track, feels like it’s trying to grab onto something, like fingers in sand, or feet climbing a hill under beating sun. Her lyrics are largely centred on the Reichs (singing from Peter’s point of view, Bush is concerned with Wilhelm Reich’s arrest in 1941: “I can’t hide you from the government / Oh, God, Daddy, I won’t forget”), and yet the hope at its core, paired with the rousing, lilting musicianship that could mean anything at all, allows the song to maintain a universality that is bigger than their story. In fact, “Cloudbusting” is just one of many examples of Bush’s gift for taking a narrative (think, even, of her most famous song “Wuthering Heights”) and reinventing it for her own purposes, to make more all-encompassing points.
That broadness can be observed at all levels of the song, and I think I like best about “Cloudbusting”. It’s rare that you hear pop music that feels so simply big. It is an island of a song, existing in and of itself, and it lies outside of trends, expressing itself entirely without need for them. It is not the Song of the Summer, but the Song of Every Summer, because it can mean something different every time. It tells a story that is small – the tale of a son and his father – but inside that specificity there are pockets of enormity: there’s a whole sky just in its soaring chorus.
It’s here, in the chorus, where the summer in “Cloudbusting” seeps out. Bush’s voice, pretty but somehow beseeching, conjures sun after rain, light after dark, summer after a long, punishing winter. It’s a perfect image of possibility, made more powerful by the surge of the cello. And then there are the words themselves, like an incantation opening up the sweeping vistas of life that summer promises in a way that other times of year just cannot: I just know that something good is going to happen. And I don’t know when. But just saying it could even make it happen.
I am quite sure that there are no words that feel truer on a summer evening, which is as close as nature gets to real magic – the cloudless heavens turning purple, your body warm and light like the air – than those words of Kate Bush’s from “Cloudbusting”’s chorus. Close your eyes and say them for yourself. I just know that something good is going to happen. And I don’t know when. But just saying it could even make it happen. Perhaps it really could”.
I know I have brought in various rankings features when speaking of other Kate Bush tracks. As Cloudbusting is one of the standouts from Hounds of Love, I think it is worth reintroducing them. In 2021, Dig! ranked Cloudbusting seventh in their lowdown of the twenty best Kate Bush songs. (“The first half of Hounds Of Love saw Kate take the sonic daring of The Dreaming and apply it to universal, skyscraping songs that found a huge audience. Cloudbusting was a case in point – a stunning song propelled by a stately marching beat, an insistent, choppy string arrangement and, for the most part, little else. By the end it has become something utterly triumphant, and yet the lyrics are based on Peter Reich’s 1973 memoir, A Book Of Dreams, which dealt with his painful relationship with his father, the controversial psychoanalyst Wilhelm. It deals with memories of childhood on their family farm, called Orgonon, where the two attempted to cause rainfall by pointing a machine (a cloudbuster) designed and built by Reich at the sky to break up clouds. The song goes on to describe the effect of Wilhelm’s arrest and imprisonment on Peter, and his helplessness at being unable to protect his father. It takes a rare genius to turn all of that into a hit single”).
Smooth also ranked it seventh in their feature from last year. In 2022, GQ named Cloudbusting among the best ten Kate Bush songs that are not Wuthering Heights or Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Earlier this year,. Classic Pop listed Kate Bush’s best forty songs. Cloudbusting was ranked eighth. Last year, Prog named Cloudbusting among the greatest forty Kate Bush songs. In 2022, Stereogum ranked the song second in their feature listing Bush’s ten strongest songs (“The aching, string-swept “Cloudbusting” contains some of Bush’s best lyrics. At one point she compares someone to a glow-in-the-dark yo-yo (“What made it special/ Made it dangerous”); on the other side is a sweetly optimistic chorus: “I just know that something good is gonna happen/ I don’t know when/ But just saying it could even make it happen.” Make no mistake, however: “Cloudbusting” is introspective and aching, searching for something — or someone — to make life a bit more manageable after some heavy loss. “All of us tend to live in our heads,” she told the Associated Press in 1989. “In ‘Cloudbusting,’ the idea was of starting this song with a person waking up from this dream: ‘I wake up crying.’ It’s like setting a scene that immediately suggests to you that this person is no longer with someone they dearly love”). In 2018, The Guardian ranked Kate Bush’s singles. They placed Cloudbusting ninth. Finally, when MOJO published a feature spotlighting Kate Bush’s best fifty songs earlier this year, they put Cloudbusting at ten. You can see the sort of respect and love this song has received. The second single from the mighty Hounds of Love, we mark its thirty-ninth anniversary on 14th October. Even if it only did just get into the top twenty in the U.K., its legacy and importance outstrips chart positions. I feel that more people are seeking out the song and its video follow Donald Sutherland’s passing (he died in June at the age of eighty-nine). How important he was. It was the final song (second song of the encore) Bush played for her Before the Dawn residency dates in 2014. Such an epic finale! This will be the last time I mention Hounds of Love in a fulsome capacity this year – though I have said that before! -, so it is a great way to salute the album one more time. Showcasing her songwriting and production genius, the stirring Cloudbusting is…
A timeless masterpiece.