FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty
Three: Hounds of Love
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A song I have written about…
a fair few times, I want to revisit it for this run of features. Hounds of Love turns forty on 16th September. Because of that, I am embarking on a twenty-feature run that looks inside the songs and other aspects of Kate Bush’s fifth studio album. Rather than duplicate what I wrote before, I am going to go in a slightly different direction. Last time, I wrote about the song and referenced Leah Kardos’s 33 1/3 Hounds of Love. That was when discussing the title track. Released as a single on 17th February, 1986, I will briefly dip into Leah Kardos’s book once more. Kate Bush Encyclopedia have a lot of useful information about Hounds of Love. The interview archive is especially illuminating:
“[‘Hounds Of Love’] is really about someone who is afraid of being caught by the hounds that are chasing him. I wonder if everyone is perhaps ruled by fear, and afraid of getting into relationships on some level or another. They can involve pain, confusion and responsibilities, and I think a lot of people are particularly scared of responsibility. Maybe the being involved isn’t as horrific as your imagination can build it up to being – perhaps these baying hounds are really friendly.
Kate Bush Club newsletter, 1985
The ideas for ‘Hounds Of Love’, the title track, are very much to do with love itself and people being afraid of it, the idea of wanting to run away from love, not to let love catch them, and trap them, in case th hounds might want to tear them to pieces and it’s very much using the imagery of love as something coming to get you and you’ve got to run away from it or you won’t survive.
Although there has been a lot written about the Hounds of Love album, there has not been as much time dedicated to the title track. It is a single that reached number eight in the U.K. One of Kate Bush’s most successful single releases, it is a track that is widely played to this day. It contains some of her best lyrics. There are so many remarkable and standout passages. These lyrics are especially notable: “Among your hounds of love/And feel your arms surround me./I’ve always been a coward,/And never know what’s good for me/Oh, here I go!/Don’t let me go!/Hold me down!/It’s coming for me through the trees/Help me, darling/Help me, please!”. Hounds of Love is also important because it was the first music video Kate Bush directed solo. As many people know, the introduction of the song features a quote from a line spoken in the 1957 film, Night of The Demon, by Maurice Denham. Whereas for the remaining tracks on Hounds of Love I will dive more deeply into Leah Kardos’s book and also reference Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush, I will talk about Hounds of Love differently. One of the music notable elements of the song is how percussion is key in the mix. Primal and intense, it creates this fast heartbeat and rush. Leah Kardos notes how Kate Bush and Del Palmer (the album’s engineer, her former partner and musician on Hounds of Love) saw some gated compression tricks from Hugh Padgham from working out of Townhouse for The Dreaming. They would set up microphones a distance from the drums “so as to pick up an amount of indirect sound from the room”. Like Prince’s When Doves Cry, Hounds of Love has no bassline. Leah Kardos notes how the “lack of low-frequency instruments serves to highlight the elegance and power of its simple, intricately calibrated production”.
It might seem like a song where Kate Bush is being chased by hounds that want to rip her apart. She said in an interview how they may be friendly dogs that want to play and lick you. There is a sense of menace and drama working alongside something more playful. Leah Kardos concludes how Hounds of Love is an “exquisite anthem for the commitment-phobic that encapsulates something very honest about the ambivalence and intensity of romantic desire”. Graeme Thomson writes in Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush about the title track: “The rhythm track pounds like a heartbeat in the throes of panic-stricken ecstasy, while the scything strings add a manic, compulsive element to the chase. And after three minutes of enthralling will-she-won’t-she comes the magnificent climax: “I need la-la-la-la-la LOVE!”. After all the hide-and-seeking with Del, it’s hard not to hear this is a very personal declaration. It remains one of her most moving, magnificent realised songs”. It is no surprise that Hounds of Love is regularly voted as Kate Bush’s best tracks. I think it is the one that connects with people the most. Maybe the most universal and relatable songs she ever wrote. A fitting and sublime title track, this is a song that will continue to inspire and connect with people through the ages. I am going to wrap up soon. As I go through the remaining tracks on Hounds of Love, I am going to bring in various takes and perspectives.
For the second track on the album, it is fitting to end with some critical impressions. I have discussed single rankings and how Hounds of Love has come top a few times. I am including two examples now. This is what MOJO wrote when they ranked Hounds of Love first when discussing her singles last year: “No matter how refined the circumstances of its creation – built at leisure in Bush’s new 48-track studio – or how newfangled its production – still tangible in the hi-tech stabs and pads of Fairlight, and the crispness of Jonathan Williams’ cello – Hounds Of Love is red in tooth and claw, its breathless, atavistic fear of capture mixed with almost supernatural rapture. Love is thundering through the psychosexual woods, hunting down somebody terrified of what it means to surrender to another person. The song opens with a quote from British horror film Night Of The Demon but that’s the only moment it feels like theatre. From then on, Hounds Of Love maintains a dizzying emotional velocity, the relentless double drumming of Charlie Morgan and Stuart Elliott stamping down on the accelerator. Bush’s voice might dip and soften, but those drums are merciless, while the strident backing vocals, like a hunting horn call, goad her on if introspection threatens to slow her down. It never lets up, every line heightening the pitch, closing the distance between song and listener. It ends with a suddenness that makes it seem like she’s hit the ground and you’ve hit it with her, breathlessly waiting for an answer to the question: “Do you know what I really need?”.
When Stereogum rated Kate Bush’s ten finest tracks in 2022, they placed Hounds of Love in ninth: “Notably covered by the Futureheads, the vulnerable title track of Bush’s 1985 LP is “about someone terrified, who is searching for a way to escape something,” she said in an interview that year. “My voice, and the entire production, are directed towards the expression of that terror.” Accordingly, Bush gulps in fright and bellows dramatically, as thundering drums and cascading harmonic layers unfurl around her like a shrouded fog. It’s clear that what she’s experiencing is justified: The protagonist fears love and a relationship, she shared in another interview, and it’s a literal matter of life and death. “[The song is] very much using the imagery of love as something coming to get you and you’ve got to run away from it or you won’t survive”. As I move through Hounds of Love and its individual tracks, I will learn more about the album and its meaning. How each song is different and brilliant in its own way. I hope that I have done justice to the title track. The third single from the album – after Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and Cloudbusting -, Hounds of Love is a work of genius. A song that has been examined and discussed but is still under-explored. More people need to write about it. I hope that does happen as we get close to the fortieth anniversary of the album it is from. As a track and demonstration of Kate Bush’s talent, Hounds of Love is…
A staggering and towering achievement.