FEATURE:
Inside A Book of Dreams
Kate Bush’s Supreme Cloudbusting at Thirty-Eight
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THIS is a single…
I did not get opportunity to celebrate when doing a run of Hounds of Love pieces. This is because the album’s second single, Cloudbusting, was released on 14th October, 1985 – almost a full month after Hounds of Love was released. I have covered this classic before. However, as Hounds of Love is back in my mind and this is an important song to mark, I am coming back to it briefly. I will bring in a few articles/interviews where Kate Bush spoke about the inspiration behind one of her most beloved singles. I want to spend some time with a video with a unique edge. Before I get more into Cloudbusting and its impact, here is Kate Bush discussing a truly phenomenal song:
“This was inspired by a book that I first found on a shelf nearly nine years ago. It was just calling me from the shelf, and when I read it I was very moved by the magic of it. It's about a special relationship between a young son and his father. The book was written from a child's point of view. His father is everything to him; he is the magic in his life, and he teaches him everything, teaching him to be open-minded and not to build up barriers. His father has built a machine that can make it rain, a 'cloudbuster'; and the son and his father go out together cloudbusting. They point big pipes up into the sky, and they make it rain. The song is very much taking a comparison with a yo-yo that glowed in the dark and which was given to the boy by a best friend. It was really special to him; he loved it.
But his father believed in things having positive and negative energy, and that fluorescent light was a very negative energy - as was the material they used to make glow-in-the-dark toys then - and his father told him he had to get rid of it, he wasn't allowed to keep it. But the boy, rather than throwing it away, buried it in the garden, so that he would placate his father but could also go and dig it up occasionally and play with it. It's a parallel in some ways between how much he loved the yo-yo - how special it was - and yet how dangerous it was considered to be. He loved his father (who was perhaps considered dangerous by some people); and he loved how he could bury his yo-yo and retrieve it whenever he wanted to play with it. But there's nothing he can do about his father being taken away, he is completely helpless. But it's very much more to do with how the son does begin to cope with the whole loneliness and pain of being without his father. It is the magic moments of a relationship through a child's eyes, but told by a sad adult. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, 1985)
'Cloudbusting' is a track that was very much inspired by a book called A Book Of Dreams. This book is written through a child's eyes, looking at his father and how much his father means to him in his world - he's everything. his father has a machine that can make it rain, amongst many other things, and there's a wonderful sense of magic as he and his father make it rain together on this machine. The book is full of imagery of an innocent child and yet it's being written by a sad adult, which gives it a strange kind of personal intimacy and magic that is quite extraordinary. The song is really about how much that father meant to the son and how much he misses him now he's gone. (Conversation Disc Series, ABCD 012, 1985)”.
I have said how it was a bit of a mystery and travesty that Cloudbusting only got to number twenty in the U.K. The first single from Hounds of Love, Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) got to three. The fact that Donald Sutherland appeared in the video should have seen it get higher on the chart! Maybe there was that excitement in August 1985 that Kate Bush had ‘returned’ with this amazing song. Perhaps used to the Hounds of Love album by the time Cloudbusting arrived, it is a shame it only scraped the top twenty and hasn’t had the same resurgence Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) did – thanks to Netflix’s Stranger Things. I will get to the video for Cloudbusting and why, Tom Taylor of Far Out Magazine wrote a feature last year about the song. He also muses that the line “I still dream of Orgonon” means. What is Orgonon?! Actually, it was the home, laboratory and research centre of the Austrian-born psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957):
“There’s a pretentious argument out there that every song is from a true story or book in some shape or another, but if that’s the case, then it can be easily asserted that barely any capture the feel of the tale from which they are based as perfectly as Bush with her 1985 release ‘Cloudbusting’. It was the second single from the iconic Hounds of Love record, which somehow only peaked at a disappointing 20 in the UK charts.
Though the euphoric feeling of the cello-driven anthem could be experienced by a blade of grass, the question remains: What is it about, and what mystic tale does it draw upon? Although it might sound fantastical on the surface, and the meaning remains obscure as a result, Bush rather fatefully crafts a pastiche out of snippets from the Peter Reich memoir A Book of Dreams. In short, Bush’s anthem is a bittersweet collage of the loving relationship between a radical philosopher and his son.
Having trained in Vienna with Sigmund Freud, Peter’s father Wilhelm Reich, arrived in the US in 1939, where his books and ideas about human sexuality gained a substantial audience. Therein he set about making the world a better place by extolling the power of sexual liberation and the eternal force of Orgone Energy. However, his mission was viewed as subversive by many, and this threw up difficulties.
Nevertheless, the stress of surveillance and other issues only strengthened his bond with his son and at their rural home in Rangley, Maine, they set about world-changing experiments. In their vast open garden sat a Cloudbuster. This giant telescope-like construction was connected to little more than hollow pipes. Nevertheless, it was asserted that this machine could channel live-giving Orgone energy and that energy could break up clouds, influence weather and summon UFOs.
This might sound wild on the surface, but in Peter Reich’s emeber-glowing memories, it was little more the sort of loving bond that makes the world go around in a whirlwind of wonder. As Joan and Erik Erikson opine in an appraisal of the memoir: “Nature offered a wonderland of sensory stimuli, parents allowed freedom and gave devoted care, and other visiting adults supported his physical playfulness with amused appreciation.”
Continuing: “But as his father’s ally, he became enmeshed in a star wars fantasy too ‘far out’ to be reconciled with reality. Love, loyalty, and the loss of father and his guiding purposes demanded resolution. … But the much-loved land and tensely experienced sensory memories have endured and are described with such authentic simplicity. If more of us could remember childhood with such clarity of recall, adulthood could be both enriched and clarified.”
Reich’s works, once widely respected, were now viewed as obscene by some, but as Peter Reich says, “I loved my dreams more than reality.” Whether that was a good thing or not is something that he wrestles with throughout the book, but it never resides as a regret. After all, there is a call for wonderment in the world. Kate Bush’s art has always sought that same sense of primordial exultation—the book stirred that same feeling in her.
Sadly, the eudemonia of days spent dreaming by the cloudbuster would end in tragedy. Wilhelm Reich’s obsession that Orgone Energy could be a cure created issues. He crafted and sold energy harnessing devices that would improve your sex and cure all sorts of ailments. While many celebrities purchase these devices and Sean Connery and Norman Mailer swore by them (and there is even an argument that they were central to kickstarting liberation), the government were less keen on the philosopher asserting that could cure cancer”.
I want to move on to the video. I have sourced this feature before. It is important to highlight DAZED and their 2015 celebration of an iconic song and huge video. One of Kate Bush’s most important moments, Cloudbusting is cinematic, beautiful and paired with this staggering and wonderful video. DAZED collected together some key players - Donald Sutherland, director Julian Doyle and editor Terry Gilliam, with additional insights from Peter Reich:
“Kate Bush (excerpt from a Kate Bush Club newsletter, 1985): “I was inspired by a book that I first found on a shelf nearly nine years ago. It was just calling me from the shelf, and when I read it I was very moved by the magic of it. It’s about a special relationship between a young son and his father. The book was written from a child’s point of view. His father is everything to him; he is the magic in his life, and he teaches him everything, teaching him to be open-minded and not to build up barriers... But there’s nothing he can do about his father being taken away, he is completely helpless. But it’s very much more to do with how the son does begin to cope with the whole loneliness and pain of being without his father. It is the magic moments of a relationship through a child's eyes, but told by a sad adult.”
Terry Gilliam: “Kate called me to direct the video and I said, ‘No, how about Julian (Doyle)?’ They had a great time shooting, but somewhere in the editing a conflict developed and I became the mediator. Kate knows exactly what she’s doing, she knows what she wants. She’s the sweetest person on the planet but she’s absolute steel inside!”
Julian Doyle: “Kate came to me with a storyboard, which I remember had the sun coming up with a face on it. She was a lovely lady, with a great smile that she gave generously. I understood her influences – like, I knew immediately where ‘It’s coming through the trees’ (film sample on ‘The Hounds of Love’) came from and things like that. I also knew about Wilhelm Reich, because there was interest in him among the new women’s movement which was exploring the female orgasm and I was close to the women involved.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on the set of the video for Cloudbusting/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Donald Sutherland: “Barry Richardson, who was the hairdresser on Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, asked me if I’d do a music video with Kate Bush. I told him no and we went on to other conversations. A couple of days later there was a knock on my door. I lived in the Savoy Hotel (in London). On the river. Suite 312. I loved it there. So cosseted. So private. Only the floor butler rang the door. I opened it. There was no one there. I heard a voice saying hello and I looked down. Standing down there was a very small Kate Bush. Barry had told her where I lived. What can you do? She wanted to explain what her video was about. I let her in. She sat down, said some stuff. All I heard was ‘Wilhelm Reich’. I’d taken an underground copy of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism with me when I went to film (Bernardo) Bertolucci’s Novecento in Parma. Reich’s work informed the psychological foundations of Attila Mellanchini, the character Bernardo had cast me to play. Everything about Reich echoed through me. He was there then and now he was here. Sitting across from me in the person of the very eloquent Kate Bush. Synchronicity. Perfect. She talked some more. I said OK and we made ‘Cloudbusting’. She’s wonderful, Kate Bush. Wonderful. I love that I did it. (What do I remember) about doing it? I remember being in the car and the hill and them taking me, taking Reich, away and looking back through the back window of the car and seeing her, seeing Reich’s son Peter, standing there. And I remember the first morning on set seeing her coming out of her trailer smoking a joint and I cautioned her, saying she shouldn’t smoke that, it’d affect her work, and she looked at me for a second and said she hadn’t been straight for nine years and I loved her.”
Peter Reich: “At one point in the video, the federal agents in black suits pull from a file cabinet a newspaper article about a rainmaker. In fact, during a drought in 1953, blueberry growers hired Dr Reich to make it rain in blueberry country along the Maine coast. I was along for that rain-making operation in the summer of 1953 and helped crank the levers. No rain was forecast. A most vivid memory: being aroused in the early morning hours just before dawn and led to an open door to observe a steady rain. The incident with federal agents coming on our property occurred a couple of years later, that day in August 1956 when I ran up that hill. That was the summer the government burned several tonnes of Wilhelm Reich’s books and equipment.”
Julian Doyle: “I thought it should look like a real story – like a film, not a pop video. I wanted to point out the story was real, which is why I had Kate take out the book. I also wanted more time so I doubled up a section of the music. Kate lengthened it even more, then she wanted to change the edit. I thought they were mistakes – so in bringing in Terry (Gilliam) it stopped her making bad changes to the edit as she accepted what Terry said. The editing process is very difficult – as it goes on for some time you have to be quite stubborn in character, keeping a balance in being open but not changing (things) because you are bored with them. Someone like Eric Idle, who is extremely smart and quick-witted, is a disaster in the cutting room, because he gets bored quickly and soon wants to cut out every joke.
“I was pleased we got up early to get the (shot with the) sun rising behind Kate falling down. I was also pleased with the track to close-up (on Donald Sutherland) where he changes from smiling to worried and then I pan into light flare. (When Donald had finished shooting his scenes) I said to him, ‘We have finished with you, thanks – but I just want you to walk away down the hill towards the sun.’ He looked great taking off his jacket. The very last shot of the shoot was the very last shot of Kate punching the air. There are only seven frames before I cut.”
Peter Reich: “Watching it for the first time, and ever since, not infrequently, the video’s emotional power is overwhelming and enduring, even after 30 years – or 60 years, for me. I did meet Kate once or twice. She gave me a very British umbrella, how very appropriate, one rainmaker to another”.
@nurse_toughlove #duet with @nurse_toughlove #abortionisessentialhealthcare ♬ Cloudbusting - Kate Bush
I will round up now. 1985 was a hugely important one for Kate Bush. She released a new album after three years (1982’s The Dreaming was a success, yet EMI felt it was a little underwhelming commercially). She delivered a spine-tingling and wonderful lead single. Keeping the momentum going with Cloudbusting on 14th October, 1985, I am always shocked that this single did not get higher than it did! I feel there is this opportunity to use the track somewhere. Get it back in the charts. I know that Donald Sutherland has happy memories of the shoot. Kate Bush turned up outside his hotel room when he was staying in England for a film he was working on. The bravery and fortitude to stride up to this world-renowned actor and convince him to appear in her video! She knew what she wanted, and we witnessed this incredible tenderness between Bush and Sutherland. Clearly they respected one another and developed this friendship. Bush would have been twenty-seven when Cloudbusting was released, so it was almost like Sutherland was this alternate father figure. An amazing collaboration for this timeless classic. On its thirty-eight anniversary, I was keen to revisit it. Even though Cloudbusting was used in the eleventh episode of the third series of The Handmaid's Tale, it has not had the same sort of exposure and revival that Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) has. Almost thirty-eight years until Kate Bush released the truly wonderful and head-spinning Cloudbusting, I think that this ode to a rain-making device deserves its…
MOMENT in the sun.