FEATURE:
The Need to Break Free
Kate Bush’s The Dreaming at Forty
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EVEN though...
Kate Bush’s fourth studio album, The Dreaming, is not forty until September, I am writing a few featured about it in the run-up to the anniversary. One think that is clear with the album is that Bush was making a statement. She was fed up with being guided and easily defined. Someone who was loved and had a lot of attention in her corner, maybe that pressure and sense of being crowded comes out in The Dreaming. From record labels and people trying to define her music or guide her too closely, through to that expectation from her family, it would have been intense for Bush. She was only twenty-four when The Dreaming was released. Still so young, you can definitely detect this woman blossoming and striking out. The layered and dense sounds of The Dreaming is this sense of independence and almost rebellion coming out in the music. Producing the album herself and doing things her way, this was not going to be anything like she had produced before! Even though Bush had a sense of pressure and would have wanted to find some space and peace – which is one reason why she built a bespoke studio at her family home for Hounds of Love; getting out of the smog and busyness of London -, there was also a desire to have fun and more pleasure.
Prior to The Dreaming, there was a lot of album promotion. A new artist being pulled pillar to post! Not that things calmed down in 1982 - but you get the sense Bush wanted to branch out and have the option to do other things. In an interview with Company Magazine at the start of 1982, Bush talked about her desire to work on stage and in film:
“One new song on her next album has Kate talking about herself and her new awareness of life, its goals and inevitable pressures. "The song is called Get Out of My House ," she says, "and it's all about the human as a house. The idea is that as more experiences actually get to you, you start learning how to defend yourself from them. The human can be seen as a house where you start putting up shutters at the windows and locking the doors--not letting in certain things. I think a lot of people are like this--they don't hear what they don't want to hear, don't see what they don't want to see. It is like a house, where the windows are the eyes and the ears, and you don't let people in. That's sad because as they grow older people should open up more. But they do the opposite because, I suppose, they do get bruised and cluttered. Which brings me back to myself; yes, I have had to decide what I will let in and what I'll have to exclude.
"While I was working on this album I was offered a part in a TV series. I've been offered other acting roles, but this was the first totally creative offer that has ever come my way. I had to turn it down--I was already committed to the album. Sadly, I don't think that offer will be made again, but you have to learn to let things go, not to hang on and get upset, or to try to do it and then end up making a mess of everything else. It's like wanting to dance in the studio when I'm recording--I want to but I know that I can't because it will just tire me. I wish I had the energy to do everything," she says, sighing at her limitations, "but at least I'm healthy and fit."
Kate is one of those lucky people who never puts on weight. <Well...> She's a slim, elf-like, five foot three and has been a vegetarian since sixteen because, she says, "I just couldn't stand the idea of eating meat--and I really do think that it has made me calmer." She smokes occasionally--though she admits she shouldn't--and hardly drinks. "Champagne, I love champagne...but I don't really call it alcohol!" She confesses that she doesn't do breathing exercises, though she is very aware of breath control when she is singing. She regards her voice as a "precious instrument: it can be affected by almost anything: my nerves, my mood, even the weather." On stage she's a bundle of energy--a complete contrast to the calm, mature, pretty girl who sits drinking coffee in the elegant farmhouse drawing room.
"My plans for the future..." she muses. "Well, I want to get into films. And I want to do more on stage. I love staging my own shows, working out the routines, designing the whole package, and using every aspect of my creativity." What kind of films would she like to make? "My favourite is Don't Look Now. I was incredibly impressed by the tension, the drive and the way that every loose end was tied up. I get so irritated by films which leave ideas hanging."
Singing, she says, will always be with her. So will songwriting. Never satisfied with her voice or with her work, she strives all the time towards some impossible goal of perfection. "But, I suppose," she says, "that if the day ever came when I was 100 per cent satisfied, that would be the day that I stopped growing and changing--my deatch knell."
Despite her stardom, Kate Bush has remained amazingly gentle and sensitive. She is well aware of how easy it would be to be sucked into the music business, drained of all her natural creativity in and artificial world. To her the most important thing is, "To feel that I am progressing with my own life and my work. I also desperately want to feel some kind of happiness in what I am creating. Not contentment," she pauses, "but pleasure”.
That combination of a young woman who was feeling claustrophobia and definitely reflects some of that tension and strain together with her need to diversify and maybe have a bit of time to work on other projects. The Dreaming was certainly an important moment in her career. It would be three years until she released Hounds of Love. Not that this was a long gap but, after such an intense period, the need to rest and spend building a studio and being closer to home meant that people were asking whether she had disappeared. I am going to investigate and spotlight all of the tracks from The Dreaming closer to its fortieth anniversary. Today, I was eager to highlight how, by the time Bush was recording The Dreaming, she must have felt such pressure! Not that she ever wanted fame, but the glare of the media and the promotional circuit had definitely got to her. Although you can hear some crisis and anxiety in The Dreaming, I also think that it is an album where Bush was taking charge and wanted to change the way her career was conducted. To an extent, that did begin to happen. After the success of Hounds of Love, she was in a more powerful position and had this incredible successful album under her belt. Whether a transition between a sheltered and stressful era and the beginning of a new one, or the sound of a young artist putting all of her emotions into an album, The Dreaming is fascinating and important. I hope that it gets a lot of attention in September when it turns forty. Her 1982 underrated masterpiece is an album where she wanted to…
BREAK free.