FEATURE:
"Rosabel, believe!"
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush’s Houdini: An Inescapable Work of Brilliance
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NOW and then…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush captured by Janette Beckman in 1981
I spend an entire feature writing about a Kate Bush song but, more often than not, I’ll look at entire albums or periods of her career. The reason I am spotlighting Houdini from The Dreaming is because it is my favourite Kate Bush track. Although one of the song’s most beautiful elements, the swooning string arrangement, was put together by Dave Lawson & Andrew Powell (who produced her first two albums), I think the other strengths of the song are Bush’s incredible vocals, the vivid and astonishing story, and the way she commands your attention from the first to last note. As you could imagine, Houdini was inspired by Harry Houdini - the escapologist who was famed for being the ‘Handcuff King’ who could escape from almost impossible situations to the disbelief of his audiences. Houdini was also renowned for his debunking of spiritualists, and he is someone who fascinates me – clearly, Kate Bush felt the same! Look at the cover of her album, The Dreaming, and you see a key in her mouth, as she clasps the head of a man who is leaning in for a kiss – she is portraying Houdini’s wife, Bess, and Del Palmer is playing the role of Houdini. The idea was that the key is passed through a kiss, allowing Houdini to secretly receive the key and, when lowered in chains into the water, he can unlock the shackles and free himself.
After Houdini died in 1926, Bess attempted to contact him via seances. It was a little odd, as Houdini was a sceptic, so it would have been hugely ironic if he was actually able to contact Bess in the afterlife! During his time debunking spiritualist fraudsters, Houdini had devised a code, ‘Rosabel, believe’, so that she would know that it was him. Bess thought that she had successfully contacted Houdini in 1929, but it turned out to be a hoax. For an artist who wrote a masterpiece debut single after watching the last ten minutes of a BBC adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, how could she resist the supernatural epic that was Houdini’s life and death?! I love the fact that most artists would simply hear about Houdini’s story and just leave it at that. There is a small selection of artists whose minds are geared a different way; they think differently and do not just merely grab at the personal, obvious, and commercial when it comes to song inspiration. The vision of Bush scribbling Houdini and casting herself as the loyal wife - or looking at things in third-person - is something that opens my eyes and makes me smile. I will not discuss The Dreaming at length, but it is amazing to look at that record, and the sort of subjects Bush explores throughout. It is such a broad album in terms of its themes and sounds.
I am surprised that Houdini was not released as a single, as I think it would have charted better than The Dreaming (which only got to 48), There Goes a Tenner (a limp number-93), or maybe even the album’s first single, Sat in Your Lap (which got to 11 in the charts). Night of the Swallow was a single released in Ireland only, and Houdini appeared as a B-side – I think it is a shame that such a majestic song was sort of buried away as it was! I was looking at the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia, and I found an article where Bush discussed her motivation behind writing Houdini:
“The side most people know of Houdini is that of the escapologist, but he spent many years of his life exposing mediums and seances as frauds. His mother had died, and in trying to make contact through such spiritual people, he realized how much pain was being inflicted on people already in sorrow, people who would part with money just for the chance of a few words from a past loved one. I feel he must have believed in the possibility of contact after death, and perhaps in his own way, by weeding out the frauds, he hoped to find just one that could not be proven to be a fake. He and his wife made a decision that if one of them should die and try to make contact, the other would know it was truly them through a code that only the two of them knew.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush photographed by Anton Corbijn in 1981
His wife would often help him with his escapes. Before he was bound up and sealed away inside a tank or some dark box, she would give him a parting kiss, and as their lips met, she would pass him the key which he would later use to unlock the padlocks that chained him. After he died, Mrs. Houdini did visit many mediums, and tried to make contact for years, with no luck - until one day a medium called Mr. Ford informed her that Houdini had come through. She visited him and he told her that he had a message for her from Houdini, and he spoke the only words that meant for her the proof of her husband's presence. She was so convinced that she released an official statement to the fact that he had made contact with her through the medium, Ford.
It is such a beautiful and strange story that I thought I had very little to do, other than tell it like it was. But in fact it proved to be the most difficult lyric of all the songs and the most emotionally demanding. I was so aware of trying to do justice to the beauty of the subject, and trying to understand what it must have been like to have been in love with such an extraordinary man, and to have been loved by him. I worked for two or three nights just to find one line that was right. There were so many alternatives, but only a few were right for the song.
Gradually it grew and began to piece together, and I found myself wrapped up in the feelings of the song - almost pining for Houdini. Singing the lead vocal was a matter of conjuring up that feeling again and as the clock whirrs and the song flashes back in time to when she watched him through the glass, he's on the other side under water, and she hangs on to his every breath. We both wait. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, October 1982)”.
I am a big fan of The Dreaming, and it is definitely in my top-five Kate Bush albums. The final two tracks on the album, Houdini and Get Out of My House, I think, are the two strongest albums enders she ever put out – topping Army Dreamers and Breathing from her previous albums, 1980’s Never for Ever. I do also really love the fact that Bush, against rationale and convention, wanted to give her voice a rawer and more mucus-y vocal for Houdini. Her more guttural and impassioned voice can be heard on songs like Get Out of My House, but there is something possessed about her voice at various points in Houdini – some people have, without irony, suggested the song might have been a precursor for Death Metal, as there is almost this death growl (albeit, one not quite as extreme as you might find in modern Metal!). The vocal is extraordinary, but eating bars of chocolate and drinking milk, whilst it gives her that mucus in the throat, could have taken a bigger toll; it is impressive how she managed to shift between the rawer voice and heavenly-sweet in the same track, without much pause for breath or any sort of recovery and rest!
The string arrangement adds a Classical, Baroque edge that she sort of flirted with in other songs; I think Houdini’s strings are spellbinding, and it is a shame that Bush did not use orchestration and strings as explicitly before Houdini (the odd song here and there, but none as impactful, in terms of the strings’ sound, as you get in Houdini). She would use stringed instruments a lot more after The Dreaming; Hounds of Love (1985) and Aerial (2005) are fantastic examples of how Bush can use strings in an incredibly original and powerful way! With Stuart Elliott on drums, Eberhard Weber deploying some stunning bass, and Kate Bush on piano and Fairlight, Houdini manages to use few musicians, but it says so much! Apart from Kate Bush’s voice, we hear Gordon Farrell say “Houdini” and Del Palmer sings “Rosabel, Believe!” – beautifully deployed, they act as these characters in this incredible drama. With Palmer’s theoretical Houdini having received the key through a kiss, Bush’s Bess looks on – “Through the glass/I'd watch you breathe/("Not even eternity")/Bound and drowned/And paler than you've ever been/("will hold Houdini!")”. It is impossible to listen to Houdini and not cast yourself in the story and imagine him going into the water. From the early scenes of Bush breaking a spiritual/séance circle (“The tambourine jingle-jangles/The medium roams and rambles”), to the intense and passionate moment a key is slipped to Houdini (“I'd pass the key/And feel your tongue/Teasing and receiving”), it is such an incredibly detailed and wonderful song.
The song switches between the mysterious – I always wonder whether “I'd catch the cues/Watching you/Hoping you'd do something wrong” is Bess hoping Houdini fails in his escape?! – to the humorous – “Not even eternity/Can hold Houdini!” -, and it is fascinating picturing the possible expressions on Bush’s (Bess) face as she watches Houdini lowered into the water. In terms of chronology, I always think the first verse or two concerns Bush/Bess trying to make contact with Houdini after he has died, and then she sort of talks about his escape tricks prior to his death and how, even when Houdini looked pale and near to death, there was hope and a deep love between them – “With your life/The only thing in my mind/We pull you from the water!”. One can unpick the lyrics and have their own take, but I think the best thing to do is to listen to the song. Sandwiched between the emotional and incredible All the Love and The Shining-inspired Get Out of My House on The Dreaming, Houdini is this mini-masterpiece that, oddly, takes on a different life when you listen to it on its own - as opposed experiencing it as the penultimate track when you listen to The Dreaming all the way through. In future Kate Bush features, I am going to explore broader subjects and topics, but the past couple have been reserved for an incredible album (last time out, I extolled the virtues of her 2011 album, 50 Words for Snow) and this magnificent song. The Dreaming’s Houdini has this incredible pull and magic and, after just one listen, you’ll find that…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush shot by Janette Beckman in 1981
IT is impossible to break free from its spell.