FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s The Dreaming at Forty
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pierre Terrasson
Indoor Voices: The Terrifying and Electrifying Get Out of My House
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EVEN though I have looked at this song…
a few times before, because The Dreaming is forty on 13th September, it is a good moment to revisit the album’s closing track. I often wonder whether Bush had more than ten tracks planned for The Dreaming. The songs are quite dense in their own way. They are busy and full of life, so it might have seemed liker overkill to put too many tracks in there. Like Never for Ever (which had eleven tracks), it is quite lean in that sense. I can imagine there were other tracks thought about and tested that never made it. I just wonder what else was considered and whether Bush had planned a longer album. What we got in 1982 was astonishing! Perhaps ten songs it the exact right amount. There is no denying the fact that Get Out of My House was the only track from the album that could close it. It is one of Kate Bush’s most exceptional and urgent tracks. It is mad and scary. It is a world away from anything anyone would have associates with her! The Dreaming is an album where she proved she was an ‘artist’. The songs have an integrity, sophistication and originality that defied radio playlists and any critical prediction. I want to go into Get Out of My House. Before that, here is some interview archive where Bush discussed the jaw-dropping final track from her fourth studio album:
“The Shining' is the only book I've read that has frightened me. While reading it I swamped around in its snowy imagery and avoided visiting certain floors of the big, cold hotel, empty for the winter. As in 'Alien', the central characters are isolated, miles (or light years) away from anyone or anything, but there is something in the place with them. They're not sure what, but it isn't very nice.
The setting for this song continues the theme - the house which is really a human being, has been shut up - locked and bolted, to stop any outside forces from entering. The person has been hurt and has decided to keep everybody out. They plant a 'concierge' at the front door to stop any determined callers from passing, but the thing has got into the house upstairs. It's descending in the lift, and now it approaches the door of the room that you're hiding in. You're cornered, there's no way out, so you turn into a bird and fly away, but the thing changes shape, too. You change, it changes; you can't escape, so you turn around and face it, scare it away. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, October 1982)
The song is called 'Get Out Of My House', 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. (Rosie Boycott, 'The Discreet Charm Of Kate Bush'. Company (UK), 1982)
It's meant to be a bit scary. It's just the idea of someone being in this place and there's something else there... You don't know what it is. The track kept changing in the studio. This is something that's never happened before on an album. That one was maybe half the length it is now. The guitarist got this really nice riff going, and I got this idea of two voices - a person in the house, trying to get away from this thing, but it's still there. So in order to get away, they change their form - first into a bird trying to fly away from it. The thing can change as well, so that changes into this wind, and starts blowing all icy. The idea is to turn around and face it. You've got this image of something turning round and going "Aah!"' just to try and scare it away. (Kris Needs, 'Dream Time In The Bush'. ZIgZag (UK), 1982)”.
I have covered a few different songs on The Dreaming ahead of its fortieth anniversary on 13th September. There are underrated singles and tracks that are particular dear to me. I wanted to highlight once more the epic and pulsating closer Get Out of My House, as it is one of the best things Bush has ever recorded. Through her career, horror and suspense has very much been in the mix. In fact, The Dreaming has several songs where we look at the terrifying and suspenseful (Houdini and Pull Out the Pin among them). I think Bush had dreams of going into psychology as a child. This fascination with the mind and what scares us. Someone who gravitated towards the haunted and darker, it all comes to the fore in Get Out of My House. Her debut single, Wuthering Heights, has this sense of being possessed and ghostly. Get Out of My House takes that and makes it bigger and even more electric. I have said before how not releasing Get Out of My House as a single is a missed opportunity, as I could imagine Bush directing the video and her acting in it! Imagine the scenes as she sings “So I run into the hall/(Lock it!)/Into the corridor/(Lock it!)/There's a door in the house/(slamming!)/I hear the lift descending/(slamming!)”. How about when Paul Hardiman unleashes “Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Hee-haw-hee-haw-hee-haw-hee-haw...”?! The lyrics on Get Out of My House are some of Bush’s very best.
PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Rapport
Her use of language and the way that she can almost create these music videos through words is extraordinary. I am not sure exactly when the song was written. Perhaps influenced by an especially tense period, it would be really interesting hearing early takes; how this remarkable song came together. It sounds like it took a lot of work to get all the different strands to fall in place! It is wonderful to listen to The Dreaming and discover all these textures and sounds in the one album. It is testament to Bush’s remarkable songwriting and production that everything works together like it does. Forty years after its release, The Dreaming is an album that still sounds incredible and fresh. Undoubtedly influencing so many other artists, I do hope that songs like Get Out of My House is played on the radio in celebration. I don’t think I have heard it before, in spite of the fact the album has been out for forty years! It is not surprising, as Bush’s music is often reduced to a few well-known hits. I still get shocked and moved when I hear Get Out of My House. It is such a dizzying song that buckles the knees and makes the mind wander, imagine and step inside the song. It is a song that everyone should embrace, should you…
DARE you to enter.