FEATURE:
Kate Bush: Something Like a Song
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pierre Terrasson
All the Love (The Dreaming)
__________
TO break up…
my Kate Bush features, I am going to start a new series. I am not certain how many I will publish. It is me looking inside particular songs. I am starting out with a song of hers that is not discussed much. From 1982’s The Dreaming, All the Love is one of my favourite tracks of hers. One that has an interesting story to it. In terms of the inclusion of answerphone messages that we hear. Perhaps the most affecting and haunting part of the song, it is interesting how they wound up included in the mix. I am going to come to an article from Dreams of Orgonon. I will finish by look at some of the lyrics. However, first – and something I have included before –, is Kate Bush talking about the song. One that I don’t think she ever performed live. It is one of those great what-ifs. Especially when it comes to songs from The Dreaming, not everything was performed live by Bush. You wonder how she would have mounted a song like All the Love:
“Although we are often surrounded by people and friends, we are all ultimately alone, and I feel sure everyone feels lonely at some time in their life. I wanted to write about feeling alone, and how having to hide emotions away or being too scared to show love can lead to being lonely as well. There are just some times when you can’t cope and you just don’t feel you can talk to anyone. I go and find a bathroom, a toilet or an empty room just to sit and let it out and try to put it all together in my mind. Then I go back and face it all again.
I think it’s sad how we forget to tell people we love that we do love them. Often we think about these things when it’s too late or when an extreme situation forces us to show those little things we’re normally too shy or too lazy to reveal. One of the ideas for the song sparked when I came home from the studio late one night. I was using an answering machine to take the day’s messages and it had been going wrong a lot, gradually growing worse with time. It would speed people’s voices up beyond recognition, and I just used to hope they would ring back again one day at normal speed.
This particular night, I started to play back the tape, and the machine had neatly edited half a dozen messages together to leave “Goodbye”, “See you!”, “Cheers”, “See you soon” .. It was a strange thing to sit and listen to your friends ringing up apparently just to say goodbye. I had several cassettes of peoples’ messages all ending with authentic farewells, and by copying them onto 1/4” tape and re-arranging the order, we managed to synchronize the ‘callers’ with the last verse of the song.
There are still quite a few of my friends who have not heard the album or who have not recognised themselves and are still wondering how they managed to appear in the album credits when they didn’t even set foot into the studio. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, October 1982”.
I would take issue with what Dreams of Orgonon say. Calling this a song that a dirge that is unloved. A holdover and maybe a filler track. I am going to include some of their observations. However, I wanted to highlight the article as I would refute the claim it is a weak track on The Dreaming. It is an incredible song that has not got the love it deserves. In terms of what Kate Bush said about All the Love: “I wanted to write about feeling alone, and how having to hide emotions away or being too scared to show love can lead to being lonely as well”. This is something we can all identify with. She articulates these feelings and emotions perfectly:
“Sonically, “All the Love” sounds like a callback to Never for Ever, to the point one wonders if the song is a holdover. The song’s centering of melody over rhythm is an aberration on the rhythm-preoccupied Dreaming, with Stuart Elliott’s drums quietly accentuating things rather than taking a “lead instrument” role. The relatively high position of Del Palmer’s bass playing in the mix also feels superannuated and reminiscent of “Blow Away (For Bill)” or “Egypt,” some of the oldest songs in Bush’s studio career. “All the Love” has some flourishes characteristic of the mid-80s — the sampling of phone conversations is the sort of thing Pink Floyd or The Smiths did around the same time (see The Wall, “Rubber Ring”). Nonetheless, “All the Love” sounds old, an adscititious swan song for Bush’s early style.
There’s certainly a callback to the subject matter of Never for Ever, nominally catastrophes that damage and alienate families. While Never for Ever’s songs are largely narrative, The Dreaming deals with Modernist techniques of abstraction, dissociation, and stream-of-consciousness, shifting the dramatic arena to the human mind. “All the Love” is social, even amusingly caustic in its distance from human living. Its lyrical triumph, “the first time I died…”, setting up an account of a person whose deathbed experience includes “good friends of mine” who “hadn’t been near me for years.” Where the hell have you been? Why are you doing this performative fraternal visitation now? The answer comes as “we needed you/to love us too/we waited for your move.” We’re given a set of people (or perhaps just one faction) who struggles to love people and relate to them properly.
There seems to be some concession of wrongdoing, admitting she wasn’t the most forthcoming to her friends (“but I know I have shown/that I stand at the gates alone”). But she tempers this with an admission that the emotional distance was mutual: “I needed you to love me too.” There’s even a sort of “if I could start again” concession, as the character asserts the inevitability of reincarnation (or afterlife?) with “the next time I dedicate/my life’s work to the friends I make/I give them what they want to hear.” Its grief for a lost, atemporal past binds itself to the effluvium of old and new styles “All the Love” embodies. In the words of Bauhaus, “all we ever wanted was everything. All we ever got was cold”.
I am going to come to some more positive words regarding the gem that is All the Love. Pitchfork said the following when they reviewed The Dreaming in 2019: “All the Love” is the stunning aria of The Dreaming—a long snake moan on regret. Here she duets with a choirboy, a technique she’d echo with her son on 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. The lament trails off with a skipping cascade of goodbyes lifted from Bush’s broken answering machine, a pure playback memento mori”. Graeme Thomson, in Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush, he notes how All the Love opens with the “casually brilliant, almost quintessential Bush line, “The first time that I died…”. He notes how the songs ends with a “heartbreaking litany of warm, familiar voices saying ‘goodbye’ on the telephone”. The singles and successful songs gets plenty of attention. However, when we think about the lesser numbers from Kate Bush, they are not talked about and played that much. I am going to end with a feature from Far Out Magazine from back in March. They wanted to shine a light on a very underrated Kate Bush track. In fact, they named All the Love as her most underrated:
“Beginning with an audible sigh from Bush and a tumbling piano hook, the track’s secret melodic weapon sets out its stall early. Del Palmers’ snake-charming fretless bass almost works as the track’s lead instrument, decorating the song with enchanting melodic phrases as Bush mourns the fact that we often don’t express our love for others until they’re gone. It’s an all-timer vocal performance from Kate as well, demonstrating her astonishing control without ascending to the histrionics she can sometimes be guilty of.
Then, from time to time, everything drops out, and the first of two avant-garde masterstrokes make themselves known. A choirboy with a soprano purer than driven snow vocalises those who’ve been lost, singing “We needed you to love us too” in a manner just as haunting as Cathy’s ghostly pleading on the Yorkshire moors. The second takes up the last third of the song in a slightly more conventional way but leaves you just as shaken.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush singing copies of The Dreaming in September 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pete Still/Redferns
Bush herself put it better than I ever could in a 1982 essay she wrote for her fan club’s newsletter. She said, “I was using an answering machine to take the day’s messages and it had been going wrong a lot, gradually growing worse with time. This particular night, I started to play back the tape, and the machine had neatly edited half a dozen messages together to leave ‘Goodbye’, ‘See you!’, ‘Cheers’, ‘See you soon’.”
She had the bones of ‘All the Love’ written, but suddenly, she had the perfect ending to a song about missing loved ones. She went on to say, “It was a strange thing to sit and listen to your friends ringing up apparently just to say goodbye. I had several cassettes of peoples’ messages all ending with authentic farewells, and by copying them onto 1/4” tape and re-arranging the order, we managed to synchronize the ‘callers’ with the last verse of the song.”
What a song it leaves. One that has since been overshadowed by the majesty of The Dreaming as a whole, but in my opinion, deserves a place right at the top of the charts”.
If you have not heard All the Love then I would encourage you to do so. The whole of The Dreaming too. It is a magnificent album featuring ten eclectic and engrossing numbers. Not as odd and out-there as some tracks, it is one of the more accessible moments. However, this being Kate Bush, there is always something distinct and genius that elevates it above the ordinary. The chorus, or refrain, that is sung by choirboy Richard Thompson, is striking "We needed you/To love us too/We wait for your move”. My favourite verse from All the Love is the following: “The next time I dedicate/My life’s work to the friends I make/I give them what they want to hear/They think I’m up to something weird/And up rears the head of fear in me/So now when they ring/I get my machine to let them in”. I love the different goodbyes that we hear at the end. The versions of that word; the intonations and inflections. Those different voices are ghosts in the machine. It is a really emotional thing to listen to. One of those pearls of a Kate Bush song that does not get enough credit. I wanted to start this new series by looking at this undervalued masterpiece. From the sublime The Dreaming, this song is…
AMONG her absolute best.