FEATURE:
Standing at the Bottom of the Hill
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in November 1985 performing The Big Sky on the German T.V. show, Peter's Pop Show/PHOTO CREDIT: ZIK Images/United Archives via Getty Images
Kate Bush and the Foundations of Hounds of Love
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I have been leaning on…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Hogan/Getty Images
some essential Kate Bush books for a number of features. I am once more returning to Leah Kardos’s 33 1/3 book on Hounds of Love. I will be returning it multiple times as I am leading up to the album’s fortieth anniversary in September. Forensically looking at the tracks and discussing the legacy of the album. For now, I wanted to look at the foundations of the album. A little bit of background to the 1985 classic. I want to start with a detail from the book that I did not know. Not necessarily significant, it did interest me when I read it. By the end of 1981, Bush revealed that she was taking on a lot for The Dreaming (her fourth studio album was released in September 1982). She was throwing everything into it so was losing sight of her direction or what she wanted to say. In a rare break from recording, Kate Bush attended Sotheby’s annual rock memorabilia at the end of 1981. She picked up a Perspex of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their famous Two Virgins pose. She also bought a copy of the shooting script for The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour film. Leah Kardos notes how the imagistic and colourful textures of The Beatles’ film combined with the spectre of John Lennon’s recent death (he was killed in December 1980) impacted the final stages of The Dreaming. Released in September 1982, there is this blend of emotions and themes. Raw, intense and layered songs together with lighter and more accessible numbers. How a track like Get Out of My House and its incredible intensity and energy sits with something comparatively gentle like Suspended in Gaffa or There Goes a Tenner. Night of the Swallow alongside the violence and smoke of Pull Out the Pin.
It is interesting to note that Bush achieved so much with Hounds of Love. It was an album that was very much guided by her. Not an album where others were directing things. There was collaboration and interaction but, at the end of the day, this was Kate Bush producing an album in her own vision. None of her female peers were doing this. The only other artists at the time who had access to technology like hers and their own studio would have been Prince. Bush had a 48-track console in the childhood barn where she used to play a pump organ (one that has more than a few mice living in it!). I think home and family are the seeds of Hounds of Love. Bush stepping away from London and connecting with her childhood home once more. Spending time in Ireland to write lyrics. She spent precious time there in a country her mother was born in. Family connections very much crucial. I have mentioned some of the kit that was in Bush’s studio. Her father Robert helped manage the constructing the studio alongside Del Palmer (who engineered and played on Hounds of Love). It was ready by 1984. There was no line of sight between the control room and the recording space. Communication was achieved through walls via mic and foldback monitors. This made Bush perhaps less inhibited and nervous. Not wanting to be watched when she performed. A bespoke studio at her family home very much integral to the sound and brilliance of Hounds of Love. Not beholden to studio costs and the rush of the city, this was a setting that was a lot more conducive with productivity and an easier recording process. That said, it was an ambitious album, so there were moments of stress.
The control room in the studio was very much made up like a living room. Blue wallpaper with fluffy clouds. It is a shame there were not a load of photographs taken by Bush’s brother, John. No cameras in there filming this wonderful studio and the making of Hounds of Love. Windows let Bush and her team see the sunshine, garden and trees. It was a perfect environment that seemed a contrast to the more closed-in and stuffier environment that Bush experienced when making The Dreaming. A Soundcraft 2400 series mixing desk, two 24-track Studer tape machines synced with a Q Lock 310. A 48-track recoreder might sound excessive but Bush said in an interview with Keyboard how 24-track was limiting. It didn’t seem to go anywhere. There was also a pair of AMS speakers. The control room had a Grotrian-Steinweg grand piano. Bush shifted between the studio and her home eight-track home recording setup. There she had her Fairlight CMI, a second sampler, an E-Mu Emulator and a Yamaha CS-80. Outbound equipment in the control room had a range of processing options. There were the Urei 1176 and 1178 compressors, Drawmer and VP Gate Keeper II noise gates. Scamp filters and A&D F760-RSA compressors/expanders. Essential for ensuring that Bush’s vocal performances could go from a whisper to a scream. There were also racks of reverb effects: some AMS units, a Lexicon 224 and Quantec Room Simulator. This sounds like an expensive set-up and financial burden. Rather than Bush moving between London studios and spending £90 per hour (£375 per hour in today’s money) in the studio, she could work without having to worry about fees. She could be more creative and was not limited. It was mainly Kate Bush and Del Palmer in the control room. Hounds of Love was sleeker and more economical compared to The Dreaming. Del Palmer downplayed his role in Hounds of Love. He would set up a sound for Kate Bush and she would then record all the vocals and call him to get them all put together.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in an outtake from the Hounds of Love cover shoot/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
In a recent feature, I did say how there was room for improvisation and collaboration on Kate Bush albums. True I think on Never for Ever (1980), The Sensual World (1989) and Aerial (2005). Hounds of Love did allow that, though Bush gave specific instructions to musicians. There was a lot of respect in the room for Kate Bush, so there was this easy relationship. Youth (Martin Glover) recalls Bush instructing him and also let him do what he liked. This combination of clear instructions and some freedom to add something personal. Bush as this wonderful producer and Youth as a skilled musician. I want to talk about the foundations of Hounds of Love. The feel of the studio and the equipment in it. Alongside all the impressive kit was an invaluable Nagra recorder. Nature very much playing a crucial role. This recorder was a unit that could be taken outside to record environmental sounds. Bush could get sounds of the sea and wind without relying on somewhat inauthentic sound effects. Even though Kate Bush’s vocals on songs such as Waking the Witch and The Big Sky are hugely evocative and powerful, she did feel inhabited. She had to psyched herself up to get that level of drama. I have written about this before. How Bush, emotionally or literally, got a little drunk. Bush’s vocals on Hounds of Love sound different to those on The Dreaming. Del Palmer revealed in a 1993 interview how a Neumann U47 was positioned in a reflective live room with stoned walls and a bricked floor. The sound was then proceeded through what was described as an ‘overdose of compression’. That was engaged with a noise gate to clean up the spill. Bush moved away from the microphone to breathe and “managed her distance based on the volume of her performance”. Not technically perfect or right, Bush and Palmer did love the results. Leah Kardos notes how Bush works well with a lively room to change her vocal performance, often mid-lyrics. Bush’s high register notes in the verse of Hounds of Love melting into a low croon at the end of a phrase. No loss of focus in the mix. No diminishing of volume.
Key to the foundations of Hounds of Love is the colour scheme. Consider the album cover where Bush is pictured laying with her Weimaraner dogs, Bonnie and Clyde. Shot by John Carder Bush (her brother), Bush’s face is made up with shades of lilac, blue, pink and coral. A streak or purple in her hair. Hounds of Love as this purple album. If red is the colour of love, then Bush mixed in some blue. Maybe representative of water or sadness. Not only is the album cover purple. The sound of the album is purple. Lush and mysterious (thanks again to Leah Kardos!). According to the Maitreya School of Healing, which was co-founded by Bush’s friend, the healer Lily Cornford (who is honoured on The Red Shoes’ Lily), the colour (wisteria amethyst) promotes “strength, dignity, spiritual growth and courage”. Water, sky, storms, the dream world, passion, fears and contrasts. Chills and warmth. Passion and restraint. Bush both soft and strong. It is important to think about these aspects when we discuss Hounds of Love. I will talk about in another Hounds of Love feature. The legacy of the album. It inspired artists like Tori Amos. Her 1992 debut album, Little Earthquakes (which Amos co-produced) mixing in big, gated percussion sounds (hear Precious Things and Crucify). Vocal similarities on her Crucify and Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting. Cloudbusting strings connecting with Amos’s Girl; Bush’s Hello Earth – a chillier vocal sound and sweeping orchestra – and Tori Amos’s China.
Amos’s Little Earthquakes influenced Alanis Morissette’s 1995 album, Jagged Little Pills. In a 1998 interview, Tori Amos talked about the effect of Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave on her. How it changed her life. How she left a man she was living in. Amos has recognised the debt owed by covering Kate Bush songs in her set (And Dream of Sheep and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), both from Hounds of Love). In 2016, Grimes named Kate Bush as one of her two biggest musical influences (the other was Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor). Bush’s lead of building her studio, producing her album and controlling the aesthetic is inspiring to D.I.Y. artists the world over today. In 2019, Grimes campaigned for the recognition of ‘Ethereal’ as a genre. These auteur artists who direct their videos and produce their own work. In 2019, Spotify partnered with Grimes and there was a seven-and-a-half-hour playlist dedicated to experimentalism. Naturally, Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was in there. Artists that no doubt were inspired by Hounds of Love also in there. Caroline Polachek, SOPHIE, James Blake, FKA twigs, and Imogen Heap. In 2022, Björk talked about Kate Bush creating this matriarchy in music. Producing her work and being emotionally expressive but also autonomous. How the success of Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) following its Stranger Things placement kicked down doors and changed the scene. Gave strength and agency to women. It can be traced back to hose foundational moments of Hounds of Love. Bush designing the studio and creating this wonderful environment. Great technology and calming colours overlooked by nature and the open air. All crucial building blocks that would lead to this monument of an album. One that turns forty on 16th September. In the first of a run of fortieth anniversary features, I wanted to show love for one of the…
GREATEST producers of all time.