FEATURE:
But He Never Even Made It to His Twenties
IN THIS PHOTO: An outtake photo from the Army Dreamers video shoot/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush’s Army Dreamers at Forty-Four
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IN coming Kate Bush features…
I am going to do a Deep Cuts feature – as I have not done one for a while – and another Kate Bush: The Tour of Life, to keep that series going and visible. I also have a run of anniversary features ahead of The Sensual World turning thirty-five on 16th October. An important album that deserves a lot of attention. I missed the thirty-first anniversary of Rubberband Girl (a U.K. single from The Red Shoes) and Eat the Music (the U.S. alternative release as opposed Rubberband Girl). There are single releases coming between now and November. Today, I want to remember Army Dreamers ahead of its forty-fourth anniversary on 22nd September. Apologies if I repeat myself when it comes to detail and background to this great song, as I have marked the anniversary quite a lot. I have a very soft spot for Army Dreamers. I am going to come to words form Kate Bush about one of her most powerful songs. The third and final single from Never for Ever – an album I feel had one or two more singles in it -, Army Dreamers reached sixteen in the U.K. That was the same position as the first single, Breathing. Two songs that deal with heavier and more political subjects. The chart position is good, though maybe the public were not as embracing as this side of Kate Bush as others. Never for Ever is an album that mixes more challenging and thought-provoking songs with dreamy and escapist cuts. A brilliant mix of sounds and themes, it was a number one success for Bush. I have already written anniversary features for Never for Ever. With its B-sides, Delius and Passing Through Air, Army Dreamers is one of Kate Bush’s strongest singles. Perhaps one of the reasons as to why Army Dreamers did not get as much exposure and success as it deserved is because it was one of sixty-eight songs considered inappropriate for airplay by the BBC during the first Gulf War.
Army Dreamers has been covered by, among others, Baby Bushka, Saint Saviour and The Last Dinner Party. Bush performed Army Dreamers notably on television in a few countries. Over in Germany, she appeared on Rock Pop and mimed the song as Mrs. Mop. In the Netherlands, Bush performed the song on Veronica Totaal on 15th October, 1980 whilst dressed in an army outfit. There are many notable aspects to the song. The fact Kate Bush sung in an Irish accent gave the song a poetic and vulnerable edge. Also, as her mother’s side were Irish, I think it is Bush speaking as her own mother and fearing her child might be lost. Maybe not to war but to the turbulence and stress on the world. Also, the fact Bush wrote Army Dreamers in the studio was a rarity. She did not do it too often. Inspiration struck pretty quickly. I wonder what inspired it. Maybe not intending to write a song like Army Dreamers, she was clearly moved by events around the world. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, starting the Soviet-Afghan War. The Cold War entered a perilous stage in 1979 and 1980. You could feel Bush’s anxieties and fears were mirroring everyone else’s. Not determined to sit back and remain silent about warfare and senseless violence. In many ways, Army Dreamers remains relevant to this very day. Before moving on, here are examples of Bush discussing Army Dreamers:
“It’s the first song I’ve ever written in the studio. It’s not specifically about Ireland, it’s just putting the case of a mother in these circumstances, how incredibly sad it is for her. How she feels she should have been able to prevent it. If she’d bought him a guitar when he asked for one.
Colin Irwin, ‘Paranoia And Passion Of The Kate Inside’. Melody Maker (UK), 10 October 1980
The song is about a mother who lost her son overseas. It doesn’t matter how he died, but he didn’t die in action – it was an accident. I wanted the mother to be a very simple woman who’s obviously got a lot of work to do. She’s full of remorse, but he has to carry on, living in a dream. Most of us live in a dream.
Week-long diary, Flexipop, 1980
The Irish accent was important because the treatment of the song is very traditional, and the Irish would always use their songs to tell stories, it’s the traditional way. There’s something about an Irish accent that’s very vulnerable, very poetic, and so by singing it in an Irish accent it comes across in a different way. But the song was meant to cover areas like Germany, especially with the kids that get killed in manoeuvres, not even in action. It doesn’t get brought out much, but it happens a lot. I’m not slagging off the Army, it’s just so sad that there are kids who have no O-levels and nothing to do but become soldiers, and it’s not really what they want. That’s what frightens me.
I love the personnel and musicianship on Army Dreamers. The Fairlight CMI coming into the mix in an evident and potent manner. Friends and relatives performing on the track. Some wonderful bodhran from Stuart Elliott. Acoustic guitar by Brian Bath. Most strikingly, mandolin from Paddy Bush. Alan Murphy providing electric and bass acoustic guitar. Duncan Mackay on the Fairlight CMI. Some excellent and powerful backing vocals from Brian Bath, Paddy Bush and Alan Murphy. Quite a tight crew combined on this magnificent song. Maybe because of genocide and conflict around the world this year, Army Dreamers as trended on TikTok and Instagram. Kate Bush News reported on an unexpected success story. Not quite the same success that Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) experienced in 2022, Army Dreamers has been a breakout moment of this year:
“Not to take away from all the love for Eat The Music this last week, but if we thought there might have been a possibility that yet another song from Kate’s canon could go viral and capture the global imagination, our money would have been on Cloudbusting, Hounds of Love or perhaps This Woman’s Work. However, for the last couple of months we’ve been tracking with interest the fascinating surge in popularity on TikTok and Instagram of Army Dreamers from the Never For Ever album, which Kate released in 1980. As we know, the song is about the effects of war as told by a mother who grieves for her young adult son, killed on military manoeuvres.
@newporttt WHERE THE FUCK ARE THESE PEOPLES PRIORITIES AT
♬ Army Dreamers - Kate Bush
To show what this viral interest looks like, the video below demonstrates a very quick phone screen scroll through the 15,700+ videos on TikTok that now feature Army Dreamers!
It previously happened a few years ago on TikTok with Babooshka and Wuthering Heights, the so-called TikTok “witchtok” craze introducing Kate to a whole new younger audience. It is hard to pinpoint exactly how a viral craze like Army Dreamers begins, but on TikTok, users tend to get inspired by a clip or a piece of music, and remix it, interpret it, make animations of it or even perform the song, as the lyrics and sentiment of the song take hold and go viral. Billboard reports this week that “…as a result, weekly official on-demand U.S. streams of the song have risen from under 80,000 for the tracking week ending Mar. 14 to nearly 1.1 million the week ending Apr. 18, according to Luminate – a cumulative gain of 1291%..” Forbes have reported: “For those who don’t want to do the math, that’s a growth of 1,291% in just one month, according to Billboard. 1,000-plus-% gains are unusual for any older track, and it takes something very special for any title to explode in popularity in that fashion…“
It strikes me that young TikTok users would of course latch on to the beautiful sentiments in the song as they grapple with at least two major world conflicts happening on the news. Kate is not unknown in the wider world anymore and here she is spelling out the futility of war. Evergreen Kate. A word of caution though – this is not the same meteoric rise that happened with Running Up That Hill in 2022 on the back of the song being used in Stranger Things. While Army Dreamers is currently Kate’s second biggest song on Spotify by a wide margin (360,000+ daily plays) it would take something truly extraordinary for Army Dreamers to become another global chart smash hit for Kate…but we’ll take it if it happens!”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Mae Karthauser/PHOTO CREDIT: Simon Congdon/CLASH
The Last Dinner Party gave a relatively recent live cover of Army Dreamers. Mae Karthauser has also covered the song. As of September 2024, Army Dreamers is the fourth most-streamed song by Kate Bush on Spotify (behind Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), Wuthering Heights and Babosohka). Its incredible and cinematic video has seventeen million views. It is a song that has risen in popularity and visibility the past year or so. It has always been popular and got airplay. Before wrapping up with a couple of other bits, CLASH interviewed Mae Karthauser recently about performing her version of Army Dreamers. Why she chose this particular Kate Bush track to perform:
“The first time I heard ‘Army Dreamers’, I was mesmerised,” Mae Karthauser says of the prescient Kate Bush 1980 anti-war anthem she’s just covered. “The tune has this amazing acrobatic quality. It’s so brooding and dark – a moody, melodic waltz. I went straight out on the day I first heard it and bought the Kate Bush songbook.”
‘Army Dreamers’ quickly became a staple in Mae’s setlist as she toured the world and performed on BBC radio and television. And today, haunted by the rising drumbeat of war across Europe and the Middle East, Mae has recorded her own gorgeous take on ‘Army Dreamers’, convinced more people than ever need to hear the Kate Bush classic – and be as moved to tears by it as she is.
CLASH sat down with Mae to discuss why she thinks the song has more resonance today than ever – and about the epic video she’s made for it in a creepy abandoned church.
Hey Mae Karthauser! You have a ton of banging original tunes. Why cover ‘Army Dreamers’?
It always gets requested at my shows. I think that’s maybe just because people love Kate Bush. Obviously, it’s an incredibly haunting, melodic song. For me, the lyrics – about a mother who sends her son away to war, who then receives a letter saying he’s never coming home – has so much resonance today, with the situation in Ukraine, and the Middle East.
Do you remember when you first heard Kate Bush?
I must have been only seven or eight years old. Funny story actually. It was on the old ITV talent show Stars In Their Eyes. This woman said ‘tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Kate Bush!’ and emerged from the dry ice in a giant wig. I thought she looked nuts. But then she started to sing Wuthering Heights, and I was inspired. How can you not want to dance around in a big, long dress to that?
So you were drawn to the theatricality?
Totally. Kate Bush is crazy theatrical. There’s something in the way she embodies her art through music and movement that’s so captivating. Every twirl, every gesture speaks to me on a profound level. Theatricality is hard-wired into absolutely everything she does.
Can art change the way people feel about war?
I think so. I hope so. At least it should. My own family was shaped by war in some pretty important ways. My grandfather was German – Karthauser is a German surname, if you can’t tell – and he was forced to flee the Gestapo after sharing documents outlining the horrors of the holocaust with foreign powers.
So he was a Nazi whistleblower?
You could say that. He came to England as a refugee – there’s a whole big file on him at the National Archives. What really hits home for me is that he was one of the lucky ones. Right now, not very far from here, there’s thousands of families, mothers and sons, who aren’t so lucky. That’s what Army Dreamers is all about. The innocent folks snarled up in ugly forces beyond their control”.
Songs that Kate Bush wrote in the 1970s and 1980s have so much relevance now. Army Dreamers was reacting to what was happening at a time we hoped we not have to see repeated today. Have we learned anything from songs like Army Dreamers?! I am going to end with a fascinating and insightful feature from Dreams of Orgonon’s Christine Kelley:
“The senseless homicide, epistolary self-cuckoldry, and generational trauma in Never for Ever is a sort of horror writing from Bush. Her reverence for family and domesticity is clear throughout her work, and in how she lives — she stepped mostly out of public view for many years after the birth of her son. In Never for Ever, Bush explores what happens when families are torn apart by the infrastructure of modernity: weaponry, dissociation, social pressure, celebrity. Preliminary sketches of The Dreaming surface in the record’s soundscape of classical instruments and synthesizer innovations, underlined by trauma and madness. If Lionheart was Bush’s inward retreat in response to the world’s frightening instability, Never for Ever turns that lens outwards, exploring the impact of violence on families and survivors.
Bush has dabbled in folk music before, through engagements with parabolic theming, classical acoustic instrumentation, and straight-up rewrites of folk ballads. But “Army Dreamers” is a straight-up folk song, the apotheosis of Bush’s relationship with traditional British music. With a smattering of the distaff tragedy of a bereaved mother (“I’ve a bunch of purple flowers/to decorate to mammy’s hero”), whose enlisted son has perished while serving abroad (“four men in uniform/to carry home my little soldier”). Bush practically whispers the vocal, a hushed, mournful hiss with a mock Irish accent. The song’s hook, a “ck-ck” of Jay Bush loading guns sampled through a Fairlight CMI, gives the affair an understated yet harsh percussive flavor. The 3/4 rhythm of the guns is matched beat-for-beat by matched Paddy Bush’s mandolin, which begets a dirgeful, four-note figure (A, F… A, C…). Accompanying Paddy in the track’s roster of folk instruments is Stuart Elliott with a bodhrán, another beat grounding “Army Dreamers” in Irish folk music.
Bush’s Irish heritage surfaces tangentially throughout her career. The daughter of an Irish nurse, Bush has long dabbled in Great Britain’s folk music, with much quality time with her brothers spent listening to them playing folk songs (her family pastimes turned into a career: as an adult, Catherine still plays folk music with Paddy and Jay). Her debt to folk music has been repaid in full — The Kick Inside ends by rewriting a Child ballad, and “Violin” is goofy folk rock. The mandolin and bodhrán imbue “Army Dreamers” with an acoustic thickness, splinted together by a lugubrious waltz and sleepy B.V.’s (“he should have been a rock star” sound like it’s being sung by Eeyore). Its subject matter is no less dismal and rustic: a mother grieving her beloved soldier is a classical image of modern balladry, as is the proletarian culture and lack of opportunities faced by the mother and her son (“he should have been a rock star/but he never had the money for a guitar,” “he should have been a politician/but he never had a proper education”). There’s much to be said about Bush’s understanding of class through the lens of folk. Her treatment of the working class often yields mixed results — she’s a middle-class white woman who landed a record contract as a teenager. Bush’s understanding of poor people and the victims of colonialism is restrained in ways she seems unaware of. The matter of dabbling in Irish folk music and warfare in 1980 (when that thing called, hmm, what’s it called? Oh yeah, the Troubles) while hardly exploring the political conflicts of the matter comes across as ignorant.
Since we’re used to Bush being asleep to political infrastructure and class, we can at least turn to her complex politics of domesticity. While she doesn’t interrogate the structural causes of political violence, she’s still centering a song around the vulnerable people whose lives are destroyed by it. Never for Ever is populated by mothers and wives. Five of its eleven songs explicitly focus on maternal and uxorial figures, and that’s if we don’t count the broadly familial “All We Ever Look For.” Bush’s wives and mothers tend towards fatigue over their familial roles, experiencing emotions that contradict their outward actions or social operations. Bush’s mothers are an intrinsic good whose absence or loss is a tragedy, and whose losses are a social catastrophe. Key to the mother’s characterization in “Army Dreamers” is absence. She bemoans not merely her lost son, but his lost opportunities and the things she couldn’t provide for him. “What a waste of army dreamers,” muses Bush, in a ritual mourning of military casualties, which treats them as a cessation of dreams.
Most impressive is the way “Army Dreamers” treats the mother as an individual while also stressing her importance to her family. Stripped of her duties to her son, she is left with no more motherhood to perform. This suggests that while war is horrible, the people who are left behind have their own experiences of it. Men get sent off to die, and the women they leave behind are expected to grieve dutifully. Yet they’re prescribed a performative kind of grief — the actual effects of trauma are widely besmirched and ignored by the jingoistic reactionaries who send civilians off to die. Women are usually seen as broken when their soldiers fail to come home — this isn’t quite what Bush does. Is the mother broken? No, of course not. Has she had a vital part of her life snatched from her? Utterly.
There’s a touch of sentimentalism to this, if at least a grounded and humanitarian one. Violent deaths are often devastating because they cut short the lives of unsuspecting civilians who’ve been planning to go live their lives as usual the next day. Bush’s anti-militarism is hardly strident, but “Army Dreamers” has an edge to it even in its understatedness, blaming the services of “B.F.P.O” for overseas tragedies (although interestingly, her son’s death appears to be an accident — there’s little fanfare of death, no suggestion of the glory of battle). The horror of the death is largely its silence — all the things that couldn’t happen, no matter how much saying them would make them so.
The politics of the situation are left understated, as is typical for Bush, and yet with a light inimical rage, as if Bush is finally turning to the British establishment and shouting “look at what you’ve done!” While “Army Dreamers” is far from an indictment of the military-industrial complex (indeed, it has more to do with the British Army’s consumption of Irish civilians than anything else), its highlighting of war as futile is striking. “Give the kid the pick of pips/and give him all your stripes and ribbons/now he’s sitting in his hole/he might as well have buttons and bows” is a line of understated condemnation that spits on military emblems (pips are a British Army insignia) and consolidates trenches and graves. “B. F. P. O.,,” intone Bush’s backing vocalists again and again. In interviews, Bush backpedals from any perceived anti-militarist sentiments in her work (“I’m not slagging off the army…”), but her song tells a different story: nothing comes with B. F. P. O. except carnage.
In the song’s music video, Bush’s final collaboration with director Keef MacMillan (the two strong-willed auteurs could only collaborate together for so long), the visceral glimpses of departed loved ones that plague mourners gets captured in one devastatingly simple moment. Bush, a soldier stationed in a forest and surrounded by men in camo, turns to a tree to see her lost son. She runs to embrace him, and he’s gone before she reaches the tree. There’s a hard cut to Bush’s eyes flashing wide open. There it is: trauma and grief in a glance. Waking up, but still living the same dream.
Recorded in spring of 1980 at Abbey Road. Released with Never for Ever on 7 September 1980; issued as a single on 22 September 1980. Performed for television numerous times, including on programs in Germany and the Netherlands. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, production. Stuart Elliott — bodhrán. Brian Bath — acoustic guitar, backing vocals. Paddy Bush — mandolin, backing vocals. Alan Murphy — electric guitar, acoustic bass guitar, backing vocals. Duncan Mackay — Fairlight CMI. Jon Kelly — production, engineering. Photo: BTS picture from music video (cred. John Carder Bush)”.
On 22nd September, Army Dreamers turns forty-four. It not only keeps the attention on her amazing third studio album, Never for Ever. There is also this modern-day relevance that has resulted in this new wave of popularity and interest in the song. One that has lost none of its edge and potent beauty. Army Dreamers a waltz. Different from any Kate Bush singles to that point, this was a songwriter, in her early-twenties, looking beyond the personal, film and literature for inspiration. Exploring darker themes. Out of her teens, Never for Ever was a platform for Bush to show her concern around violence and destruction in the world. The loss of young life and the environmental impact of nuclear war. Two of her three singles concerned the political and warfare. It was a bold move but one that resulted in two top twenty singles. In 2024, Army Dreamers has resonated with a new, young generation. Its messages and warnings hitting home at a violent and disturbing time! Let’s hope that the hard-hitting words and lessons Bush sings in Army Dreamers leads to change and peace…
IN years to come.