FEATURE:
On the Crest of a Wave
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during the shoot for The Ninth Wave/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Exploring Pivotal Moments During the Second Side of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love
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ONCE again…
I am turning to Leah Kardos’s recent 33 1/3 book on Hounds of Love. You can buy it here. I am occasionally posting features about the album leading up to its fortieth anniversary on 16th September. I will explore The Ninth Wave in more detail as I head towards that date. That is the second side of Kate Bush’s most acclaimed album. Some say the absolute peak of her talents as a producer and artist. I want to focus on two songs from that suite that are really among the best things Bush has ever recorded. Leah Kardos goes into real detail when it comes to the songs on Hounds of Love. The technology used, various time signatures and notes. A real forensic dive into the tracks. Waking the Witch and Jig of Life occur. The third and fifth songs respectively of the suite – which has seven tracks -, the middle of that sandwich comes in the form of Watching You Without Me. It is the heart of the suite. Because Waking the Witch is about the heroine being roused awake and asked to survive by voices she hears (in her head or her dying thoughts). Jig of Life is this spirit of survival and strength. Did she survive or is Watching You Without Me and its spectral and haunted tone an omnibus sign? Waking the Witch and Jig of Life have this incredible energy and style. The former scarier and darker, whereas Jig of Life whips up these Irish sounds into a fevered frenzy. Both songs crucial in terms of the narrative of The Ninth Wave. Leah Kardos brilliantly writes about both of these tracks and what instruments and sounds go into them. Underlining Kate Bush’s brilliance as a producer.
Let’s start out with Waking the Witch. And Dream of Sheep seems to be the heroine wanting to go to sleep and be at home but having to stay awake. Under Ice her under the ice and struggling to get to the surface. One could say she was trapped under ice and everything after did not happen. Or, as I like to think, she got to the surface but faded. Hallucinations and voices trying to wake her up. It is a dramatic and tense song. A surging backward piano chord (C#(sus2) drags us, as Leah Kardos writes, into a piano-led sonic territory. “Suspended piano chords are refracted through a rhythmic delay”. One of the most interesting aspects are the voices and how they appear in the mix. There are a mixture of voices of authority and family. Love and discipline. Many of Bush’s friends and family can be heard. This bank of voices recalling the answerphone messages on The Dreaming’s All the Love. Robbie Coltrane one of the voices on Waking the Witch. John Carder Bush (her brother) comes from the back of the right speaker – “Over here!”. There is this gentleness and calm before things burst into life. A LinnDrum sequence us doubled. A high piano tremolo. Bush’s voice cut up to give the impression someone being dragged down and struggling to stay afloat. This affect achieved by quickly moving the record switch on the tape machine. This caused a big argument between Kate Bush and Del Palmer – her engineer and boyfriend at the time. Palmer later admitted he had to eat humble pie! This struggle for survival turns into a witch trial. Bush multiplying her voice to play the accused and the jury commending her. “Bush’s Witchfinder subjects the accused to such tests (“You won’t burn, you won’t bleed, confess to me girl”)”. These ‘tests’ go back to when women were accused of being witches. If they sank and drowned they were innocent; if they floated and survived they were witches and executed. I did not know that background voices sing lines adapted from the se shanty, Blood Red Roses. The chorus, “Oh, you pinks and posies, go down you blood red roses, go down!”, is believed to be about the gore of harpooning a whale.
We take a break from the C# minor “for a counter phrase that swirls with the sound of church bells and woozy spiralling guitar figures around E minor”. Bush recites some Catholic Vulgate scripture (including “Deus et dei domino no-no-no-no”). When coming back to the C# minor riff, we get this wonderful and “prickly” synth sequence by Kevin McAlea and Fairlight CMI bass by Del Palmer. The Witchfinder doubts her innocence and the jury deliver their verdict. Found guilty, there is this desperation and plea – “Help this blackbird, there’s a stone around my leg”. When you think all is doomed, a rescue helicopter can be heard ahead. A cry telling her to get out of the water. The helicopter effect the same one used on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Unfortunately, the helicopter was not one that rescued the heroine or was her safety. More a sound that broke her from his nightmare. Bush used Waking the Witch as a springboard to discuss wider issues around women’s instincts and intuition and how they are put down. Sexism based around the thought that women must be witches or people to be forced down. Leah Kardos notes how Waking the Witch is harrowing. Referencing Moby-Dick, The Wall and The Witch of Blackbird Pond (among others), it is s staggering feat of writing and production. Bush said years later how she weas disappointed with her Eventide Harmonizer-enhanced performance of the Witchfinder. She stated how, is she had more energy, she would have hired an actor. Leah Kardos loves Bush’s performance and, like the closing moments of Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), there is created a “connective tissue between these songs that explores the dis/empowering aspects of gender”.
If Waking the Witch is the heroine brought from the brink and at her most scared and perilous, Jig of Life is this will to live. This second wind. After Watching You Without Me and this sense of the protagonist’s family waiting for her and her being there only in spirit, there is this reason to survive and find hope. Bush’s foundations for Jig of Life was the “ceremonial music of the Anastenaria, a centuries-old ecstatic dance and fire-walking ritual performed during religious feasts in Greece and Bulgaria” This rare piece of music that Paddy Bush shared with his sister inspired one of Hounds of Love’s greatest moments. Notable, among other things, because of the “whirling figures” played on a tsabouna (Greek bagpipes). Bush was fascinated by the wat whipped themselves into a trance because of the hypnotic quality of the music. The musical and rhythmic qualities lifted and used for the first part of Jig of Life. “Based on the Greek dhromi mode (on the root of A), the tonality is mostly minor but with idiomatic instabilit6y on the second degree (B), throwing up an occasional B♭ in the swirling flow of melody and hitting wonderfully dissonant pinch points at 0’44” and 1’33”. In a suite full of characters and voices – imagined and dreamt -, Bush comes back as an old lady to urge her younger self to keep going (“let me live, girl”). The old woman solemnly explains it is not just her own survival that is at stake but that of her unborn children. The line, “the place where the crossroads meet” is, as Leah Kardos theorises, “the image of Hecate, the goddess in Greek mythology who is often depicted flanked by two dogs and sometimes shown with a triple-formed face that sees the past, present and future simultaneously”. That B section at 1’40” leads to an instrumental break that based around Celtic folk melody. Starting out with John Sheahan’s fiddle, it then transforms into this emphatic and hot-blooded jig. One arranged by Bill Whelan.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during the shoot for The Ninth Wave/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
The jig stops dead where Bush repeats “I put this moment… here”. I love the technical detail Leah Kardos notes: “Her words are separated across the extreme width of the stereo field at first, moving closer towards a possible connection when John Carder Bush’s voice interrupts with ‘Over here’”. He performs a rousing performance of his own poetic verse. A fan that spoke with John Carder Bush revealed that the poem was going to be read by an Irish performer but it was decided John Carder Bush would tackle it, with the idea to pitch his voice up to that of a female register. That was fortunately abandoned. John Carder Bush adopted an Irish accent. Jig of Life would have had a different meaning and life if the idea to have this female voice read the poem stuck. A wonderfully affirmative, positive and loving section on The Ninth Wave. Among the chaos, fear and darkness, Jig of Life is this mini masterpiece. As Leah Kardos notes: “the powers of mothers from the past and future rallying at the crisis point to help Bush choose to live”. I love Jig of Life and Waking the Witch. Crucial tracks in the story. Hello Earth and The Morning Fog follow Jig of Life and end the album. Whether you feel the protagonist survived and Jig of Life was this turning point or she sadly succumbed to the ocean around Under Ice, there is no denying the brilliance of the songs. Reading Leah Kardos’s book and her musicologist approach. The notes, time signature and players. Getting this new appreciation for two wonderful songs. On 16th September, we mark forty years of Hounds of Love. I, among millions of others, will be excited to mark the anniversary of…
A masterpiece.