FEATURE:
Storms Over America
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a water tank at Pinewood Studios whilst filming visuals for The Ninth Wave’s And Dream of Sheep
Watching from Above: Kate Bush’s Hello Earth from Hounds of Love
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WHILST I have written…
quite a few features regarding Hounds of Love and various songs from it, I do not think I have heavily featured one of the standout tracks from the album, Hello Earth. It is the penultimate track on the album, and it appears on the conceptual suite, The Ninth Wave. Though I can appreciate The Ninth wave as a cohesive piece that is best heard in one sitting, I do think that the seven songs from that side are well worth investigation on their own merit. To me, Hello Earth is one of the most moving and stirring songs that Bush ever wrote! I will delve more into the lyrics soon but, before then, I will bring in some information and background about a stunning song. It is to the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia for assistance:
“Song written by Kate Bush. Originally released on her fifth studio album Hounds Of Love. Sixth track of The Ninth Wave suite. The choral section, performed by the Richard Hickox Singers, is taken from a Georgian folk song called 'Zinzkaro' ('By The Spring'), which Kate heard performed by the Vocal Ensemble Gordela on the soundtrack of Werner Herzog's 1979 film Nosferatu The Vampyre.
'Hello Earth' was a very difficult track to write, as well, because it was... in some ways it was too big for me. [Laughs] And I ended up with this song that had two huge great holes in the choruses, where the drums stopped, and everything stopped, and people would say to me, "what's going to happen in these choruses," and I hadn't got a clue.
We had the whole song, it was all there, but these huge, great holes in the choruses. And I knew I wanted to put something in there, and I'd had this idea to put a vocal piece in there, that was like this traditional tune I'd heard used in the film Nosferatu. And really everything I came up with, it with was rubbish really compared to what this piece was saying. So we did some research to find out if it was possible to use it. And it was, so that's what we did, we re-recorded the piece and I kind of made up words that sounded like what I could hear was happening on the original. And suddenly there was these beautiful voices in these chorus that had just been like two black holes.
In some ways I thought of it as a lullaby for the Earth. And it was the idea of turning the whole thing upside down and looking at it from completely above. You know, that image of if you were lying in water at night and you were looking up at the sky all the time, I wonder if you wouldn't get the sense of as the stars were reflected in the water, you know, a sense of like, you could be looking up at water that's reflecting the stars from the sky that you're in. And the idea of them looking down at the earth and seeing these storms forming over America and moving around the globe, and they have this like huge fantasticly overseeing view of everything, everything is in total perspective. And way, way down there somewhere there's this little dot in the ocean that is them. (Richard Skinner, 'Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love. Radio 1 (UK), aired 26 January 1992)”.
There are upas and downs and myriad emotions on The Ninth Wave. I think that, occurring near the end of the story, Hello Earth has a sense of dreaminess and optimism among its more dreaded moments. After the propulsive and Irish-infused Jig of Life, Hello Earth takes the pace down a bit and it is a lot more choral-like and tender. I like the verse where Bush sings about holding one hand up and blotting the Earth out. It is almost like she is seeing a reflection of the planet from the sea and blocking it out, or she is looking down from very high and watching herself in the sea waiting to be rescued. The opening is one of the most captivating segments of The Ninth Wave: “"Columbia now nine times the speed of sound/"Roger that, Dan, I've got a solid TACAN locked on, uh, TACAN twenty-three"/"The, uh, tracking data, map data and pre-planned trajectory are all one line on the block"/"Roger your block decoded". I love the mixture of the dramatic and child-like on Hello Earth. The song’s heroine has this fascination with Earth and its beauty, but there is also this rather epic and sweeping aspect to the song. I think that Bush’s lyrics were at their most poetic and original on Hounds of Love. One of my favourite passages is this: “Watching storms/Start to form/Over America./Can't do anything/Just watch them swing/With the wind/Out to sea”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush being carried off stage during a performance of Hello Earth during Before the Dawn in 2014
I was not lucky enough to attend Kate Bush’s live residency, Before the Dawn, in 2014 and witness Hello Earth mounted for the stage almost thirty years after it was released. It must have been staggering and hugely emotional seeing the song brought to life in such a way. I like the fact that, on the song, there is a continuation of the Irish tones and sounds heard on Jig of Life – with Liam O'Flynn on uillean pipes, and Donal Lunny on bouzouki. The addition of The Richard Hickox Singers combines magnificently. One gets such a rich and heady brew that provokes the imagination and makes the senses tingle! I was keen to come back to Hounds of Love because, whilst it was great to celebrate its thirty-fifth anniversary last year, I wanted to go deeper with one of the album’s very best songs. I usually listen to The Ninth Wave as a suite, so I never really stop and dissect each track and think about their story. There is sadness and heartbreak on Hello Earth, but I think there is that feeling that help is coming and things are going to work out for the heroine – after the terrifying earlier stages of The Ninth Wave, the listener is as relieved as they are entranced. Listening to Hello Earth so many years after I first heard it…
STILL has such a powerful effect.