FEATURE:
But This Time It's Much Safer In
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush relaxing with some video extras (including her brother Paddy) during filming the video for 1980’s Breathing/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush’s Breathing at Forty-Five
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ONE of Kate Bush’s…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush shot whilst on the set of Breathing/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
finest and most important singles turns forty-five shortly. Released on 14th April, 1980, Breathing was the first single from Bush’s third studio album, Never for Ever. Featuring Roy Harper on backing vocals, Breathing debuted on BBC Radio 1 on 11th April, 1980. The single peaked at number sixteen on the U.K. charts and remained in the charts for seven weeks. I am going to explore the song further ahead of its forty-fifth anniversary. One reason why Breathing was so important is because of its lyrical themes. A tale of a foetus being protected by its mothers womb but still fearful and vulnerable to nuclear fallout. The only performance of the song was during a Comic Relief concert on 25th April, 1986. It was a solo piano version. The second and final single from Kate Bush’s second studio album, Lionheart (1978), was Wow. Maybe wanting a more ‘serious’ song to be her next U.K. single, the first statement from an album that reached number one in the U.K. was important. She could have gone for the more commercial and Pop-influenced Babooshka. That was the second single. Instead, Breathing was selected. The closing track from Never for Ever, I guess it was a gamble releasing it as the first single. However, there was criticism from some in the press who felt Bush was a novelty or not someone who could fit in with the Punk scene of the late-'70s. An especially patronising interview from Danny Baker around the time Bush was making Never for Ever – or at least seeds were planted - might have provoked her to react. Army Dreamers, the third single, is also political in nature. The futility of young lives being lost during war. I am going to end with a couple of features around Breathing. Perhaps her most accomplished song to that point, it was an extraordinary achievement for someone who was only twenty-one when Breathing was released. Before getting to some features, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia sourced some interviews where Bush talked about the inspiration behind Breathing:
“It’s about a baby still in the mother’s womb at the time of a nuclear fallout, but it’s more of a spiritual being. It has all its senses: sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing, and it knows what is going on outside the mother’s womb, and yet it wants desperately to carry on living, as we all do of course. Nuclear fallout is something we’re all aware of, and worried about happening in our lives, and it’s something we should all take time to think about. We’re all innocent, none of us deserve to be blown up.
Deanne Pearson, ‘The Me Inside’. Smash Hits (UK), May 1980
When I wrote the song, it was from such a personal viewpoint. It was just through having heard a thing for years without it ever having got through to me. ‘Til the moment it hit me, I hadn’t really been moved. Then I suddenly realised the whole devastation and disgusting arrogance of it all. Trying to destroy something that we’ve not created – the earth. The only thing we are is a breathing mechanism: everything is breathing. Without it we’re just nothing. All we’ve got is our lives, and I was worried that when people heard it they were going to think, ‘She’s exploiting commercially this terribly real thing.’ I was very worried that people weren’t going to take me from my emotional standpoint rather than the commercial one. But they did, which is great. I was worried that people wouldn’t want to worry about it because it’s so real. I was also worried that it was too negative, but I do feel that there is hope in the whole thing, just for the fact that it’s a message from the future. It’s not from now, it’s from a spirit that may exist in the future, a non-existent spiritual embryo who sees all and who’s been round time and time again so they know what the world’s all about. This time they don’t want to come out, because they know they’re not going to live. It’s almost like the mother’s stomach is a big window that’s like a cinema screen, and they’re seeing all this terrible chaos.
I am going to move to a feature from Treblezine. At the start of a decade where fear of nuclear destruction was strong and very much in the news, few expected an artist like Kate Bush to document or channel some of that anxiety in a single. Forty-five years since its release, it remains this startling song that still affects me every time I hear it:
“Fear of nuclear war dominated the music of the ’80s. It began much earlier, back in the early days of the Cold War in the 1960s, with songs like Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” offering potential warnings of the inevitable destruction that would occur between two or more countries engaged in a nuclear arms race. But in the ’80s, when tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Union came ever closer to a boiling point, Cold War anxiety dominated popular music in a way that sometimes revealed itself in subtle ways, like on Nena’s “99 Luftballoons” or Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” and in more overt ways as well, as on Time Zone’s “World Destruction.” For a couple years the threat of total annihilation even seemed to preoccupy Prince, who released both “Ronnie Talk to Russia” and the end-of-the-world party anthem “1999.” If you turned on the radio in the ’80s, there’s a good chance you’d be hearing songs about a coming apocalyptic scenario, whether you realized it or not.
It’s a terrifying thought. Even more so when taken into account that, at least according to the lore, a made-for-TV-movie made the matter one of utmost urgency for then president Ronald Reagan. But then again who can be blamed when the idea of having your nation destroyed somehow becomes real, however absurd the method of communication. Personally, I find Kate Bush’s take on the matter much more devastating.
Five years before releasing her blockbuster Hounds of Love, featuring her iconic single “Running Up That Hill”—which ended up back on the singles charts this year thanks to Stranger Things—Kate Bush released her own song addressing our potential impending destruction, “Breathing.” The final track on Never For Ever, an album that also contained the much more playful “Babooshka,” “Breathing” looks at nuclear destruction from the perspective of an unborn fetus, one that, if it survives, will inherit a world that’s essentially gone, and at best nearly uninhabitable.
True to much of the pop songs with fear of World War III on their mind at the time, “Breathing” isn’t scary on an aesthetic level—and Kate Bush can do scary. Check “Waking the Witch” or any number of moments on 1982’s The Dreaming for proof of that. It’s not tense and climactic like Iron Maiden’s “Two Minutes to Midnight,” either, though Bush’s sense of scale and theatrics at times could stand toe-to-toe with the best of the decade’s metal bands. “Breathing” is, instead, a characteristically dramatic ballad for Bush, one of the most powerful songs she’d written just two years into her career, made all the more unnerving by a closer read of the details within the song. Its first line tells us the stakes, the fate of the child wholly dependent on the life of the mother. “Outside gets inside,” she sings, at once extolling the safety of the fortress inside the womb, while offering reminders of the vulnerability therein, like breathing in the nicotine from her cigarettes.
The sense of doom and desperation grows deeper into the song, Bush lamenting, “We’ve lost our chance, we’re the first and the last” in its third verse, and in its final chorus—just before the image of a not-subtle-at-all mushroom cloud in its Bush-in-a-bubble music video—she desperately pleads, “Oh God, please leave us something to breathe.” Bush scales up from the most intimate and vulnerable to a more universal appeal for mercy, from the fetus that’s at the mercy of the life of its mother—which in this scenario is arguably every bit as helpless—to the civilization at large that stands to be wiped out with the press of a button.
It’s a masterful kick in the gut. Bush described the song as her “little symphony,” and though she’d released songs prior that carried a similar sense of ambition and grandeur, all of that escalated on “Breathing.” The thread of fear and anguish, as well as a subtle sense of anger at the power-hungry world leaders in dark rooms that would seal millions of innocent people’s fates without remorse, persists at every point, including its spoken-word bridge, describing the differences between a small nuclear bomb and a large one—the irony and even black humor of its placement serving only to emphasize that you’d have to be a psychopath to greenlight that kind of devastation. But ultimately it all comes back to that one very basic idea of defenselessness, whether it’s the child, the mother, or simply Kate Bush herself, desperately grasping for air in the fallout, and their pleas falling on deaf ears.
“Breathing,” heavy as the subject matter might have been, was the lead single from Never For Ever, and in doing press for the album, Kate Bush described a moment of revelation about the gravity of living during a time of continued threat of nuclear war. “Til the moment it hit me, I hadn’t really been moved,” she said in a 1980 interview. “Then I suddenly realised the whole devastation and disgusting arrogance of it all. Trying to destroy something that we’ve not created – the earth. The only thing we are is a breathing mechanism: everything is breathing. Without it we’re just nothing.”
That same year, Bush also sang the hook (“jeux sans frontieres“) on “Games Without Frontiers” from Peter Gabriel’s self-titled “Melt” album, which coincidentally, perhaps unavoidably also carried a similar sense of anxiety about nuclear war and brinksmanship between armed nations. And though that concept didn’t necessarily follow her to subsequent albums, what did was a similar sense of perspective, bringing a more personal, human identity to darker concepts, whether the inner monologue of a soldier desperate to survive in “Pull Out the Pin,” or the conceptual suite of “The Ninth Wave,” which follows a person lost at sea whose will to live is the thing keeping them afloat.
In the aftermath of Kate Bush’s big Stranger Things moment, there have been jokes about newcomers eventually discovering her song about sexual congress with a snowman. The flipside is a newcomer to her music discovering “Breathing,” a beautiful and heartbreaking song whose underlying narrative might just be her most vividly horrifying”.
I am going to end with a feature from Dreams of Orgonon and their detailed examination of Breathing. Forty-five years since it was released to the world, have we taken anything from its messages? Maybe a warning and fear specifically of its time, I think one can read Breathing as a message for all humanity and time. The true horror of warfare. Something that was on Bush’s mind when she wrote Never for Ever, she is still thinking about it now. Last year’s Little Shrew (Snowflake) raised money for War Child. She was affected by scenes of conflict in Ukraine and children being killed and displaced:
“Breathing” is the most unified and conceptually coherent work of Kate Bush’s career. Each aspect of its composition and production strives in a single accord. Its mastering of the techniques it uses can be found as much in its broad strokes as its fine details. Bush’s songwriting makes a huge leap in quality, achieving a new standard. It is one of the greatest British singles of the early 1980s, and its reasonable chart standing (#16 in the UK) is as baffling as it is delightful. Without “Breathing,” there is no The Dreaming or Hounds of Love or Aerial. There are two major discernable eras in Bush’s career: before “Breathing,” and its aftermath.
As a conventional and sane member of society, Bush achieves creative apotheosis through a fetus’s perspective of nuclear fallout. Again, that’s not hyperbole — that is actually what the song is about, if not straightforwardly. “Breathing” contains astounding clarity, with its premise explicitly stated through lyrics such as “outside/gets inside/through her skin,” “last night in the sky/such a bright light,” and “breathing my mother in.” It’s rather clear what’s going on: a fetus (probably human, but easily headcanoned out of specieshood) knows that a nuclear bomb has exploded and is experiencing the slow irradiation of its mother’s body with horror. Its fears are expressed in primal terms. It hasn’t gone to school. Nobody has told it what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All it perceives is a bright light that destroys everything that even its mother can’t protect it from. Bodies are destroyed — the emotional reality takes over, and no rational mind will help.
On a technical level, “Breathing” is Bush’s magnum opus. Her mastery of her own voice is as impressive as the achievements of The Dreaming and Hounds of Love. Throughout the first verse, she sounds as if she’s holding her breath (“out-SIIIIIDE” sounds like shallow inhalation), crooning in a way that’s both innocent and haunting. The two refrains largely follow the first verse’s lead, while the second one sees Bush push her range upwards, making “we’ve lost our chance” a guttural invocation. By the song’s coda, she’s outright screaming at the top of her lungs for breath. Melodically and rhythmically, “Breathing” is on similarly breathy wavelengths. It’s in Eb minor, excepting a few detours into Eb major: the verse commences with the i chord (Eb minor), joins an augmented fifth to it (B) to create a VI chord, and then inverts the i chord with its parallel major (a favorite technique of hers — see also “The Infant Kiss”). The verse ultimately comes out largely to i-VI-I-iv-I (with some tricky slash-chord articulates of E flat major). Rhythm is consistent throughout the verse, with shifting time signatures of 2/4, 4/4, and 3/4 changing by the measure, at a pace consistent with breathing. The refrain is almost entirely in common time, excepting its final measure (2/4). The refrain’s breathing is done by its chord progression (i-III-VI), rising and falling, like an agonized chest not quite inhaling enough oxygen to keep living. Sonically, there are echoes of earlier rock songs: the bridge sounds like Bowie’s similarly cosmic “Space Oddity” in places, and a mechanical hum in the second verse evokes memories of Pink Floyd’s luddite threnody “Welcome to the Machine.”
If your reaction to this isn’t “hey, Kate, who’s your dealer?”, you are a liar and you should be ashamed of yourself. But as we aren’t in East Wickham’s social circle of 1980 and thus lack access to whatever strain Bush smoked at the time, we can interrogate more pertinent issues of why the fuck Bush is using this perspective to explore nuclear war. Since the emotional state of fetuses is pertinent to some deluded members of society, we should probably address that particular discourse. If “Breathing” were released right about now, the pro-life crowd wouldn’t latch onto it (it’s much too weird for a group of people who are busy mutilating their eardrums with MercyMe), but one could see its subject matter being twisted for reactionary ends. The song does cope with fetal autonomy, or lack thereof, but it’s incredibly abstract and fails to resemble abortion in any way (the metaphor would be weird, too: “hey Del, you know what abortion reminds me of? The fucking H-bomb!”). Furthermore, abortion, while still a major topic of conversation in the UK, where abortion was only legalized in Northern Ireland in 2019, is a fundamentally different conversation than it is in the United States. Bush was clandestine about her thoughts on abortion, although one can deduce through an interview where she opines “that life is something that should be respected and honored even in a few hours of its conception” that her private opinions on the matter are on the reactionary side. But that’s not the subject of the song. The issue goes deeper than that — to the dredges of consciousness, the origins of human life, and the human mind’s need for survival.
Like a breath, the fetus in “Breathing” inhabits its mother (although unlike breath, it needs its emissary to survive). While it doesn’t treat a fetus like a parasite, the sheer weirdness of having a burgeoning organism inside one’s body receives emphasis (before you ask, Kate Bush did see Alien. More on that in “Get Out of My House” in August). Rather, the fetus emblematizes the earliest vestiges of human form — hints of consciousness, a complete unfamiliarity with the world. Certainly Bush’s fetus isn’t human, and perhaps only semi-corporeal — “I’ve been out before/but this time it’s much safer in” infers extraordinary capabilities beyond what we’d expect from a human fetus. Contemporary quotes from Bush support this reading: “it’s more of a spiritual being… it has all its senses, and it knows what’s going on outside of the mother’s womb.” A clairvoyant specter, one could say. What a weird epistemology.
“Breathing” contains the body horror of crass jingoism’s mutation of human life. “Breathing my mother in” summates what fetuses do normally while warping it into a desperate gasp for breath. A fetus contains nascent vestiges of human form — we all have to start somewhere. But we have to end somewhere too. “Breathing” offers no hope for survival. Its coda is a macabre apocalypse — Middleton’s dolefully frightened keyboard and Bath’s grimacing, sustained guitar licks underscore predator Roy Harper’s calls of “what are we going to do without?” as Bush’s gasps of “LEAVE ME SOMETHING TO BREATHE!” tear the world asunder. Earlier, the second verse is similarly pessimistic about the possibility that “we’ve lost our chance/we’re the first and last.” This is where it starts and where it ends — the bomb destroys bodies and ends the possibility of life.
Sensationalism often takes over conversations about nuclear war. Human casualties are often excused or minimized in the name of military power. Even without taking long-term deaths into account (not to mention cultural trauma), the explosion and firestorm of Little Boy alone are estimated to have killed between 70,000 and 80,000 people in Hiroshima. And that’s not accounting for the immediate deaths in the bombing of Nagasaki, which has a far broader but still ghastly casualty count of 22,000 to 75,000. The victims weren’t merely blown apart either or shot either — they were incinerated, burned alive, hardly recognizable as recently living people. This is the greatest body horror ever wrought by humanity. And nuclear warheads’ harm to people isn’t limited to civilians in wartime either. The United Kingdom gave countless British soldiers cancer, infertility, and children with birth defects in its postwar nuclear tests. Far from being a national security interest, this is fundamentally a weapon that changes the makeup of human biology.
Throughout the years, Bush has sung about the power and vitality of the body. It’s perhaps her most crucial theme: the body is the most beautiful organism we encounter and should be preserved. “Breathing” is fully in line with this idea, and yet it’s a radical departure because the body doesn’t win. It’s turned against itself and destroyed. Never for Ever ends on a note of nihilism.
Where do we go from here? Bush’s dream (of Orgonon?) has been corrupted and will never be the same. The Dreaming reels from the trauma of “Breathing.” The body keeps fighting, but the soul has been weakened. Emotions are less straightforwardly positive than they used to be. But they’re also crucial: “Breathing” is pervaded by emotional reality as well as bodily pain. A scary light in the sky is scary because of its emotional reality.
Bush claimed that the political content of “Army Dreamers” and “Breathing” only served to “move [her] emotionally.” Characteristically, Bush is both wrong and insightful here. The idea that songs are less political because you’re emotionally invested in the political issues they discuss is utter nonsense. But… of course political issues are emotional. Bush even acknowledges this in the next part of the quote, saying “it went through the emotional center… when I thought ‘ah, ow!’ And that made me write.”
Perhaps nothing is more political than personal emotions. Emotions are always present in a person’s values, decisions, choices, and aesthetics. Human beings are ventilation devices for emotions. Perhaps without realizing it, the entity that moved Bush is the radical politics of emotion in the service of bodily liberation. Emotions are political. Everything is political, as no man is an island. And crucially, breathing, and who gets to do it, is political.
Recorded in March 1980 at Abbey Road. Released as a single on 14 April 1980, then as the closing track of Never for Ever on 7 September that year. A censored version of the music video was aired on Top of the Pops on April 14. Performed live by Bush (solo) at a Comic Relief concert in 1986. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, piano, production. Stuart Elliott — drums. Jon Kelly — production, engineering. Max Middleton — Fender Rhodes. Alan Murphy, Brian Bath — electric guitar. Larry Fast — Prophet. Morris Pert — percussion. Roy Harper — backing vocals. Image: Hiroshima immediately after the dropping of “Little Boy” (photographer unnamed)”.
I will finish things there. Maybe repeating words I have published about this song before, Breathing turns forty-five on 14th April. It is a hugely atmospheric song that should be better known and highlighted. It is a shame that Bush never performed the song live around the time of its release. I would be interested in another album like Director’s Cut (Bush reworked/re-recorded songs from 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes), where Bush revisited Breathing. Last year, when MOJO ranked Bush’s best fifty tracks, they placed Breathing twentieth. In 2018, The Guardian placed Breathing tenth when they ranked Bush’s singles. In 2023, PROG examined Kate Bush’s best forty songs. This is what was written about Breathing:
“A startling reaction to the prospect of nuclear war, told from the perspective of an unborn baby that doesn’t want to leave the safety of the womb to face the horrors of the world outside.
Marjana Semkina, Iamthemorning: “It’s heartachingly beautiful, fragile and dark at the same time, which is a juxtaposition I very much appreciate and always try to achieve in my music. The subject of the song is especially dark and resonates with me in the light of the political events of the past months, since it’s a song about a foetus experiencing the world outside during the nuclear fallout.
“Kate Bush calls us to turn to the most basic of all human needs: breathing, for no matter how bad things get, you need to breathe. The studio version also features some spoken word about what a flash from a nuclear bomb looks like, and listening to it now has a very strange effect on me – it’s almost too scary to keep listening. But it’s also absolutely beautiful how the song shifts from being ominous and dark to light and hopeful, telling us that not all is lost yet, as long as you only keep breathing”.
In 2021, Dig! published a feature where they wrote about twenty must-hear examples of Kate Bush’s work. Breathing is a song that might not be as regarded as her work on Hounds of Love. However, it is an early-career masterpiece that should be seen as such. A song that showed just how phenomenal Kate Bush is:
“Recorded in early 1980 and released as Never For Ever’s lead single in April that year, Breathing is written from the perspective of a foetus preparing to enter a post-apocalyptic world. As she told Smash Hits at the time of the single’s release: “It’s about a baby still in the mother’s womb at the time of a nuclear fallout, but it’s more of a spiritual being. It has all its senses: sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing, and it knows what is going on outside the mother’s womb, and yet it wants desperately to carry on living, as we all do of course. Nuclear fallout is something we’re all aware of, and worried about happening in our lives, and it’s something we should all take time to think about. We’re all innocent, none of us deserve to be blown up.” Again, despite the foreboding subject matter, it’s a gorgeous-sounding entry among the best Kate Bush songs – a sumptuous prog masterpiece that showed her musical ambition”.
If you have not heard Never for Ever and do not know why Breathing is so well placed and important, then listen to the album. The first single from her third studio album, it was as big step forward. Not just in terms of the composition sound. Bush’s vocals at their peak. Her lyrics concise and terrifying. Vivid and haunting. The combination meant Breathing should have done better than number sixteen in the U.K. Regardless, it is a masterpiece that I wanted to shine a spotlight on. It is undoubtably one of Kate Bush’s…
GREATEST achievements.