FEATURE:
You Want My Reply? What Was the Question?
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on the set of The Big Sky
Kate Bush’s The Big Sky at Thirty-Eight
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IN future Kate Bush features…
I am going to mix up specific song/album-related stuff with some more general things. How Bush has inspired a new generation of female artists for instance. There is a lot I want to cover off. There are some anniversaries approaching in terms of singles - and also the album, Director’s Cut. I will get to them. A track I have written about a few times through the years – though not visited for a little while – is my favourite song from 1985’s Hounds of Love: the majestic The Big Sky. It is the final single released from Hounds of Love. I am going to build in some background to the song. I also want to frame the release around what was happening to Kate Bush in 1986. Specifically around March and April. There is a lot to unpack when it comes to The Big Sky. Not least the video, which Kate Bush herself directed. Not only did she invite fans down to be extras in the video. There was also a Big Sky cream-coloured cigarette lighter that was made for fans who took part in the filming of the music video. It is shocking how low some of the singles from Hounds of Love charted. There as this sense of diminishing returns. Even though the album – released in September 1985 – reached number one in the U.K. and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) reached five, Cloudbusting got to twenty. Hounds of Love went to eighteen. These magnificent singles that charted so low. I wonder whether 1985 and 1986 were years when other tastes and artists were favoured on the singles charts. The Big Sky only reached thirty-seven. Such an energetic and mesmerising song, I do wonder why it was such a low-placing release!
Prior to coming to information about The Big Sky and its music video, this website provides Kate Bush timeline from March and April 1986. What was happening in the lead-up to the release of The Big Sky. Into 1986, there was still interest around Hounds of Love. Kate Bush still promoting it:
“March 6, 1986
Kate appears on Top of the Pops to perform Hounds of Love.
March 19, 1986
For the making of the video for The Big Sky Kate assembles over one hundred fans on the sound stage of Elstree Studios.
Kate records a live performance of Under the Ivy at Abbey Road Studios for the 100th edition of the Tyne Tees TV programme The Tube.
April 4, 1986
Kate participates in the first of three Comic Relief shows at the Shaftesbury Theatre. She performs Breathing live and performs a duet of Do Bears Sh... in the Woods? with Rowan Atkinson.
April 5, 1986
The second Comic Relief show.
April 6, 1986
The third Comic Relief show”.
I will finish with a feature about The Big Sky. For those who are not sure about the music video or what the inspiration behind the song was, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia fill us in. I think that The Big Sky is one of Kate Bush’s best songs. It deserved a lot more love than the chart position it got in 1986. Worthy of new love thirty-eight after its release. A song that Kate Bush rarely performed live (only the one time I think), I feel that people need to hear it:
“Music video
The music video was directed by Bush herself. It was filmed on 19 March 1986 at Elstree Film Studios in the presence of a studio audience of about hundred fans. The Homeground fanzine was asked to get this audience together, and they did within two weeks. Two coaches took everyone from Manchester Square to Elstree studios early in the morning, after which the Homeground staff, who were cast as some of the aviators, were filmed, and finally the whole audience was admitted for the ‘crowd scenes’. The scenes were repeated until Kate had them as she wanted.
Kate about ‘The Big Sky’
Someone sitting looking at the sky, watching the clouds change. I used to do this a lot as a child, just watching the clouds go into different shapes. I think we forget these pleasures as adults. We don’t get as much time to enjoy those kinds of things, or think about them; we feel silly about what we used to do naturally. The song is also suggesting the coming of the next flood – how perhaps the “fools on the hills” will be the wise ones. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, Issue 18, 1985)
‘The Big Sky’ gave me terrible trouble, really, just as a song. I mean, you definitely do have relationships with some songs, and we had a lot of trouble getting on together and it was just one of those songs that kept changing – at one point every week – and, um…It was just a matter of trying to pin it down. Because it’s not often that I’ve written a song like that: when you come up with something that can literally take you to so many different tangents, so many different forms of the same song, that you just end up not knowing where you are with it. And, um…I just had to pin it down eventually, and that was a very strange beast. (Tony Myatt Interview, November 1985)”
Critical reception
The Big Sky is a moment of real, mad bravado. The best and most threatening thing that this bizarre talent has ever done.
RICHARD COOK, SOUNDS, 3 MAY 1986
She has with her every release managed to maintain a uniqueness. She always sounds like herself and she never sounds the same, and that’s a difficult trick.
THE STUD BROTHERS, MELODY MAKER, 3 MAY 1986
Another gem from the utterly brilliant LP, this has more hypnotic pounding rhythms and chants, the orchestra sawing away as if their lives depended on it…
IAN CRANNA, SMASH HITS, 7 MAY 1986”.
I am going to end with this feature from 2022. It suggests (rightly) that most people associate Hounds of Love with Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). It is the lead song and their window in. If you need another track from the album that is deserving of equal focus and appreciation, then do go and check out The Big Sky:
“It must be an interesting moment to be Kate Bush. 39 years after her masterwork Hounds of Love came out, it’s back, thanks to a canny placement of its song “Running Up That Hill” in the hit Netflix series Stranger Things. And when I say “it’s back,” it’s actually to say that it’s hitting higher than it ever has: “Running” is at #8 of the Billboard Hot 100 in the US making it the first time Kate Bush has ever hit the top ten in this country (it only got to #30 when it originally came out, which was her previous high water mark on the US charts). Hounds of Love as a whole reentered the album charts at #28, two positions higher than its peak in 1985. In fact, the album has gotten as high up on the Billboard 200 as Bush has ever gotten, tied with her album The Red Shoes. It’s possible both the album and song could chart even higher this week. (Update, 3:33pm: Yup.) We should all have work we did decades ago hit so well with the youth of today.
Having legions of Those Kids Today glom onto one of your favorite artist is a perfect time for old people to go all hipster and gatekeepery, so I’m delighted to see that, so far at least, old school Kate Bush fans have not been like that at all — they’re genuinely happy to see one of their favorite artists have a renaissance in to pop culture. I think this is especially the case since the Hounds of Love album is probably the best marriage of Kate Bush’s commercial sensibilities (see: the first side of the LP) with her experimental urges (see: side two). There aren’t many albums that could feature both crowd-pleasing pop hits, and a thirty-minute conceptual song suite about drowning in the North Sea. That Kate Bush offers both without apology, and indeed with a certain witchy sort of glee, is part of what makes her unique in the canon of Anglosphere rock musicians. Why wouldn’t her old fans want to share this album?
And while “Running Up That Hill” is indeed probably the best Starter Kate Bush song out there — there’s just so much drama in it — allow me to suggest “The Big Sky” as a follow-up for the folks who don’t know if they want to commit to a whole album just yet. “The Big Sky” is, as they kids say, a whole bop: relentless but not unrelenting drums, bouncy rather than thundering, hammer on while Bush sings a paean to the glories of the huge bowl of the universe opening up above you. It’s not about much, but does it have to be? No! It can be about clouds looking like Ireland, and maybe people being confused about why Bush is so darn pleased about that. Be happy with Kate! Dance with her! Pause for the jet! Then dance again! Maybe it’s possible not to be happy when this song is playing, but I think you really have to work at it.
The whole of Hounds of Love is terrific, and it is one of my favorite albums. But in the days when I was still making mixtapes, it was “The Big Sky” that I picked more than any other Kate Bush song. Listen to it. Maybe you’ll hear why”.
On 28th April, we mark thirty-eight years of The Big Sky. The final single from Hounds of Love, it was an important release. The next album would be 1989’s The Sensual World. Even though there were release in-between (The Whole Story came in 1986 alongside the single, Experiment IV), this was the send-off from her most popular and acclaimed album. I think The Big Sky is the best song from Hounds of Love. A magnificent vocal and brilliant video directed by Kate Bush, it will always settle fondly in my mind. Ahead of its anniversary, I am glad I get to discuss…
THIS wonderful song.