FEATURE:
Reaction, Reflection and Commercial Success
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pierre Terrasson
The Complicated Legacy of a Classic: Kate Bush’s The Dreaming at Forty-Two
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I have nothing but admiration…
for Kate Bush’s fourth studio album, The Dreaming. When you get critical ranking of her albums, The Dreaming does better now than it would have done when it was released. As it came out on 13th September, 1982, I wanted to mark forty-two years. Specifically, the complicated legacy of the album. How it was seen in 1982, how it seen now, how Kate Bush judged and assessed the album through the years. The fact that it was a commercial success but EMI were not happy. Almost apologetic. In some ways the choice of singles and lack of chart success was Kate Bush’s fault, though this idea she was a commercial artist and would release Pop singles for the charts was terribly naïve! There is a lot to unpick and unpack. I can imagine where critics were coming from in 1982. Maybe not expecting such a leap from 1980’s Never for Ever, perhaps they were ready for something softer and less layered. Never for Ever is layered, though it is a lighter album. One that seems more easier to listen to. The Dreaming is complex and experimental. It is Kate Bush pushing technology more and immersing herself in a slightly darker and more personally revealing album. It is a phenomenal work, yet maybe critics felt an artist like Kate Bush, who was still seen as quite a hippy-dippy or lampoonable young woman who was a bit of a novelty, should not be making an album like The Dreaming. That it was not the right move or she was not fit to do so. I am going to take from this feature by the Kate Bush Encyclopedia. Rather than critics being miffed or taking the transition and evolution badly, there was quite an insulting tone to some of the reviews:
“Critical reception
Upon its release, ‘The Dreaming’ met with a mixed critical reception. Many were baffled by the dense soundscapes Bush had created.
Quaint, admirable, unclassified, Kate Bush goes her own sweet way… production hard to fault… ranges from the ethereal to the frankly unlistenable.
Sunie, Record Mirror, 1982
It’s the sort of album that makes me want to kidnap the artist and demand the explanation behind each track.
Melody Maker, 1982
A work of pure inventive genius… intriguing heady stuff. One of the most powerful and unique vocalists in contemparary music.
Tarin Elbert, Music Express (Canada), 1982
Kate Bush shouldn’t be an unknown quantity very much longer. The Dreaming is her masterpiece, a perfect blend of romantic poetic imagery and daring musical approach. Bush’s ace-in-the-hole is her ability to fuse differing musical influences (jazz, classical, folk) and nest them comfortably within the boundaries of conventional pop song writing. (…) She’s the only female rocker out there doing anything original (or experimental).
Nick Burton, Record (USA), 1982
A mad record… with only two antecedents, the historic ‘Sergeant Pepper’ by the Beatles and the extraordinary ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. Of the first in its extraordinary character and creative spirit; of the second in its technical perfection.
Jean-Marc Bailleux, Rock And Folk (France), 1982”.
There is still a sense of confusion or cliché when people tackle The Dreaming. Even if there were some glowing reviews, the overall reaction was mixed. Those who disliked the album really had to explain why. That The Dreaming is weird or a hard listen. Considering there were other artists in 1982 making albums that were not instantly accessible or commercial, you wonder why there was such negativity or at least bemusement towards Kate Bush. If the oddness and strangeness of the album was seen as forced or unlistenable to some in 1982, today the album is being seen in more positive terms. Either ahead of its time or gaining new respect and meaning considering what Kate Bush followed The Dreaming with, I do think that we need to reassess and reappraise her 1982 masterpiece. There is at least more analysis and exploration of The Dreaming today. The last decade or so have seen some interesting and deep dives into the album. How it has influenced other artists. I want to source from this Pitchfork review from 2019:
“The Dreaming really is more a product of the 1970s—which actually sort of began in the late ’60s and extended through most of the ’80s—when prog rock musicians sold millions, had huge radio hits, and established fan bases still rabid today. But the album also came out in 1982, and it only cemented the sense of Bush as a spirited, contrarian of Baroque excess in a musical moment defined largely in reaction to prog’s excess. It’s exactly that audacity to be weird against the prevailing trends that made Kate Bush a great feminist icon who expanded the sonic (and business) possibilities for subsequent visionary singer-songwriters. While name-checking Emerson, Lake & Palmer or Yes is relatively unheard of in today’s hip hop, indie, or pop landscapes, Kate Bush’s name was and is still said with respect. Perhaps it’s because unlike all those prog dudes of yore, she’s legibly, audibly very queer, and very obviously loves pop music, kind of like her patron saint, David Bowie.
On The Dreaming, Bush’s self-proclaimed “mad” album, her mind works itself out through her mouth. Her cacophony of vocal sounds—at least four on each track—pushed boundaries of how white pop women could sing. Everything about it went against proper, pleasing femininity. Her voice was too high: a purposeful shrilling of the unthreatening girlish head voice; too many: voices doubled, layered, calling and responding to themselves, with the choruses full of creepy doubles, all of them her; too unruly: pitch-shifted, leaping in unexpected intervals, slipping registers until the idea of femme and masculine are clearly performances of the same sounding person; too ugly: more in the way cabaret singers inhabit darkness without bouncing back to beauty by the chorus in the way that female pop singers often must.
All this excess is her sound: a strongly held belief that unites all of the The Dreaming. Nearly half of the album is devoted to spiritual quests for knowledge and the strength to quell self-doubt. Frenetic opener “Sat in Your Lap” was the first song written for the album. Inspired by hearing Stevie Wonder live, it serves as meta-commentary of her step back from the banality of pop ascendancy that mocks shortcuts to knowledge. A similar track, “Suspended in Gaffa,” laments falling short of enlightenment through the metaphor of light bondage in black cloth stagehand tape. It is a pretty queer-femme way of thinking through the very prog-rock problem of being a real artist in a commercial theater form, which is probably why it’s a fan favorite.
In her borrowing further afield, her characters are less accurately rendered. This has been an unabashedly true part of Bush’s artistic imagination since The Kick Inside’s cover art, vaguely to downright problematic in its attempts to inhabit the worlds of Others. On “Pull Out the Pin” she uses the silver bullet as a totem of one’s protection against an enemy of supernatural evil. In this case, the hero is a Viet Cong fighter pausing before blowing up American soldiers who have no moral logic for their service. She’d watched a documentary that mentioned fighters put a silver Buddha into their mouths as they detonated a grenade, and in that she saw a dark mirror to key on the album cover. While the humanizing of such warriors in pop narrative is a brave act, it’s also possible to hear her thin arpeggiated synth percussion and outro cricket sounds as a part of an aural Orientalism that undermines that very attempt.
The closer “Get Out of My House” was inspired by two different maternal and isolation-madness horror texts: The Shining and Alien. In all three stories, a malevolent spirit wants to control a vessel. Bush does not let the spirit in, shouts “Get out!” and when it violates her demand, she becomes animal. Such shapeshifting is a master trope in Kate Bush’s songbook, an enduring way for her music and performance to blend elements of non-Western spirituality and European myth, turning mundane moments into Gothic horror. It’s also, unfortunately, the way that women without power can imagine escape. The mule who brays through the track’s end is a kind of female Houdini—a sorceress who can will her way out of violence not with language, but with real magic. At least it works in the world of her songs, a kingdom where queerly feminine excess is not policed, but nurtured into excellence”
It is interesting reading how critics appraise The Dreaming in the modern time. A lot differently to how it was viewed in 1982. Maybe this feeling that Kate Bush was taking a big gamble in 1982 or was ruining her career. Not respecting her need to move forward and produce an album that felt right to her. So many snobby and awful takes on The Dreaming. I will move on in a minute. In 2012, The Quietus had their say about an overlooked classic. An album that has never really received it dues:
“It remains a terribly sad record. A treatise on "how cruel people can be to one another, and the amount of loneliness people expose themselves to". Perhaps John Lennon’s murder and the dog-eat-dog ethos of Thatcherism had cast their shadow here. While the record was being made, the Falklands crisis escalated and unemployment rose. Many of The Dreaming’s characters seem to be caught in the vice grip of western ‘civilization’; the hapless robber in ‘There Goes A Tenner’, the aboriginal way of life on the brink of erosion on the title track, the Vietnamese soldier meeting his American nemesis on ‘Pull Out The Pin’. They may symbolize the tightrope walk Bush felt she was embarking on with the record. But this dense and allusive stuff with twists and turns requiring as many footnotes as TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, shares that poem’s occidental disenchantment.
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.
Throughout The Dreaming, sound speaks. ‘All The Love’ is subdued relief. But its constituent parts hover desolately in the mix, pitching a ‘lack of love’ song with a choirboy, somewhere between Joni Mitchell’s road trip jazz on ‘Hejira’ and the void of Nico’s ‘The End’. Full of space & loneliness.
At the centre of this creative storm is Bush. The vocal performances are a multi-faceted assault on the singer’s sometimes squeaky, whimsical past. There are guttural, larynx-shredding exclamations juxtaposed with whispers, sometimes on even the softer songs. A master of counterpoint and vocal embroidery, which Bush attributed to her mother’s Irish ancestry, the singer layers the songs with kaleidoscopic variety. Even the mellifluous ‘Suspended In Gaffa’ has shrieking incisions. Her voice is largely deeper and thicker than before, the unbridled emotionalism now more potent, due to its stringent control. On ‘Houdini’, a pint of milk and two chocolate bars were consumed to give her voice the required "spit and gravel" (‘Night Of The Swallow’ and ‘Pull Of The Pin’ also have phlegmatic operatics
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”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush signing copies The Dreaming at the Virgin Megastore, Oxford Street, London in September 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pete Still
Going back to the article from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, they collected together interview segments where Kate Bush talked about The Dreaming. Whilst it is an exceptional album that showcases a district songwriting and production style, it was quite a tough period. Bush putting everything into the album. It is sad that Bush almost had to defend the album and play down its brilliance. Perhaps reacting to critics’ takes or the fact that making Hounds of Love as a happier and less challenging process:
Kate about ‘The Dreaming’
After the last album, ‘Never For Ever’, I started writing some new songs. They were very different from anything I’d ever written before – they were much more rhythmic, and in a way, a completely new side to my music. I was using different instruments, and everything was changing; and I felt that really the best thing to do would be to make this album a real departure – make it completely different. And the only way to achieve this was to sever all the links I had had with the older stuff. The main link was engineer Jon Kelly. Everytime I was in the studio Jon was there helping me, so I felt that in order to make the stuff different enough I would have to stop working with Jon. He really wanted to keep working with me, but we discussed it and realised that it was for the best.
‘The Dreaming’. Poppix (UK), Summer 1982
Yes, it’s very important for me to change. In fact, as soon as the songs began to be written, I knew that the album was going to be quite different. I’d hate it, especially now, if my albums became similar, because so much happens to me between each album – my views change quite drastically. What’s nice about this album is that it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. For instance, the Australian thing: well, I wanted to do that on the last album, but there was no time. There are quite a few ideas and things that I’ve had whizzing around in my head that just haven’t been put down. I’ve always wanted to use more traditional influences and instruments, especially the Irish ones. I suppose subconsciously I’ve wanted to do all this for quite some time, but I’ve never really had the time until now.
‘The Dreaming’. Poppix (UK), Summer 1982
The thing about all my album titles is that they’re usually one of the last things to be thought of because it’s so difficult just to find a few words to sum the whole thing up. I’ve got this book which is all about Aborigines and Australian art and it’s calledThe Dreaming. The song was originally called “Dreamtime”, but when we found out that the other word for it was “The Dreaming” it was so beautiful – just by putting “the” in front of “dreaming” made something very different – and so I used that. It also seems to sum up a lot of the songs because one of the main points about that time for the Aborigines was that it was very religious and humans and animals were very closely connected. Humans were actually living in animal’s bodies and that’s an idea which I particularly like playing with.
Paul Simper, ‘Dreamtime Is Over’. Melody Maker (UK), 16 October 1982
I think [The Dreaming] is about trying to cope…to get through all the shit. I think it was positive: showing how certain people approach all these negative things – war, crime, etc. I don’t think I’m actually an aggressive person, but I can be. But I release that energy in work. I think it’s wrong to get angry. If people get angry, it kind of freaks everybody out and they can’t concentrate on what they’re doing.
Jane Solanas, ‘The Barmy Dreamer’. NME (UK), 1983
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 defence.
Yves Bigot, ‘Englishwoman is crossing the continents’. Guitares et Claviers (France), February 1986
My first production. A really difficult album to make. People thought I’d gone mad, the album wasn’t warmly received by critics. People told me it was a commercial disaster but it reached number three so that’s their problem.
Consider all of this together with two contrasting facts. The Dreaming was a commercial success in many countries. It reached number three in the U.K. It was not as though the public heard singles like Sat in Your Lap and The Dreaming – the two released prior to September 1982 – and were put off! They were not expecting a different album at all. They supported Kate Bush. Her dedicated fanbase and new fans who were intrigued by what she was putting out. There is also the fact that EMI were so close to giving the album back to Kate Bush. They felt that taking two years to follow up Never for Ever was a long time! That what was produced was not what they were looking for. I like how Kate Bush took three years to follow up The Dreaming and also produced an album that went to the top of the U.K. chart! Her quality and vision cannot be faulted. Her record label not really understanding her or showing as much support as they should have. Though, given chart placings, perhaps there was some minor justification. Nervous of her producing and taking ‘a long time’ – most artists today take a couple of years or longer between studio albums! – to produce something that was not commercial. It did not have any hit singles on it. Bush knew that. She wasn’t trying to write any! That assumption that Kate Bush should follow what she did before. I think of The Dreaming as a rebellion against a whole load of things. Having another producer mould her work. Have critics define and insult her. This feeling that she was one thing. The fact that The Dreaming did get mixed response in 1982 could have destroyed it. Instead of reverting to the past, she pushed forward and changed unhealthy aspects of The Dreaming’s record process. Kate Bush never gets respect for her production work. The Dreaming is a phenomenal album and one that has inspired so many other artists. Whether Bush felt she was going mad at the time or that was just a defence against critical negativity I am not sure. What I know is that, forty-two years after its release, The Dreaming remains a work of brilliance. One that is also underrated. One that is truly spellbinding because she…
LET the weirdness in.