FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty
takes me to the last song on the first side of Hounds of Love. I am doing a twenty-feature run to mark the album’s fortieth anniversary on 16th September. I am looking At Cloudbusting today and will then do a feature about 1983 and Kate Bush recharging. Then I shall start working through the tracks on the second side, The Ninth Wave. The second single from Hounds of Love, Cloudbusting was released on 14th October, 1985. I would have though Bush would release the title track before Cloudbusting. However, I can see why she wanted Cloudbusting to follow Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). One of her most popular songs, it features the late Donald Sutherland in the video. I shall come to a feature soon that explains why Donald Sutherland became involved in the video for Cloudbusting. He and Kate Bush got on so well. The part in the video where she sheds tears was for real, as this was Sutherland essentially leaving the set and video. Bush playing Peter, the son of Sutherland’s Wilhelm Reich. The shot of Sutherland being arrested and taken away in a car and driven off was his actual goodbye I think. Bush’s real emotions coming through in the video. It is a magical video from an album that sported a few of them! I will start out with some interview archive, where Bush discussed Cloudbusting. Like all of the song features for Hounds of Love, I will refer to Leah Kardos’s 33 1/3 book, Hounds of Love. I will also reference Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Let’s start out with some archive from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia -
“‘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.
It’s a song with a very American inspiration, which draws its subject from ‘A Book Of Dreams’ by Peter Reich. The book was written as if by a child who was telling of his strange and unique relationship with his father. They lived in a place called Organon, where the father, a respected psycho-analyst, had some very advanced theories on Vital Energy; furthermore, he owned a rain-making machine, the Cloudbuster. His son and he loved to use it to make it rain. Unfortunately, the father was imprisoned because of his ideas. In fact, in America, in that period, it was safer not to stick out. Sadly, the father dies in prison. From that point on, his son becomes unable to put up with an orthodox lifestyle, to adapt himself. The song evokes the days of happiness when the little boy was making it rain with his father.
Yves Bigot, ‘Englishwoman Is Crossing The Continents’. Guitares et Claviers (France), February 1986
If I’ve got this right,he believed that sexual energy was positive, usable energy that he tied in with his concept of orgone energy. He upset a lot of people selling orgone boxes, saying they could cure cancer and stuff. He ended up being arrested and put in prison. I knew nothing about Wilhelm when I read the book,which was his son’s experience of all this, written from a child’s point of view with a tremendous innocence and sadness. Years ago, I just went into a shop and picked it off the shelf, and really liked the title and the picture on the front. I’d never bought a book before which I hadn’t known anything about;I just felt I’d found something really special. And nine, 10 years later, I re-read it and it turned into a song. When it was finished, I wrote a letter to Peter Reich saying what I’d done. It was important to me in some way to have a sense of his blessing because his book really moved me. He sent me back such a lovely letter. It was an incredible feeling of returning something he’d given to me.
I won’t quote all of Leah Kardos’s information about Cloudbusting. However, it is a fascinating part of the book. I love how there were live strings recorded for this song by the Medici Quartet who were extended to a sextet via overdubbing). “Their parts were arranged for the ensemble by Dave Lawson, who had helped realize the string arrangements for ‘Houdini’ on The Dreaming. Aside from a brief moment when the sextet stretch out in curvaceous countermelody during the second verse (‘On top of the world’ at 1’16”), the group mostly remains focused on the obsessive staccato bounce”. There are a lot of interesting observation around the instruments and vocal layers. Bush, as producer, Bush layered up her own voice but also the tones of Brian Bath, John Carder Bush (her brother) and Del Palmer (her engineer and then-boyfriend). “Paddy Bush’s basso profundo can also be heard harrumphing along with the bouncing pulse of the coda”. Bush was not quite sure how to end the song. The cloudbuster sound that you hear was a decoy to mask the “petering out of the drums and strings”. Bush came up with the idea of this steam engine closing the song. Del Palmer was the steam. “And we got a whistle on the Fairlight for the “poop poop”. There are some haunting images and memories on Cloudbusting “Watching a parent forcibly taken away. Peter Reich, now a man, is haunted by memories of his dad (‘Every time it rains, you’re in my head’) and still clings to the feeling of magic that he felt as a child (‘I just know that something good is going to happen’)”. I am going to end with a bit more from Leah Kardos and some detail from Graeme Thomson. However, the video is worth talking about. Last year, CLASH published a feature that explored why Donald Sutherland became involved in the video for Cloudbusting:
“The song is a pivotal moment on the English artist’s internationally successful ‘Hounds Of Love’ album, and came back with a memorable video. The lyrics took inspiration from the 1973 Peter Reich memoir A Book of Dreams, with the song honing in on the relationship between Peter and his father, the psychiatrist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich.
The video was shot by Julian Doyle, and dreamed up by Kate Bush working in tandem with Monty Python co-founder Terry Gilliam. In the striking clip, Donald Sutherland takes the role of Wilhelm Reich, and Kate Bush plays Peter.
Initially, however, the actor had absolutely no interest in the shoot. Approached multiple times, he set back multiple rejections – until Kate Bush personally knocked on his door to ask.
“I wanted it to be a piece of film rather than a video promotional clip,” Bush told MTV in 1985. “I wanted it to be a short piece of film that would hopefully do justice to the original book and let people understand the story that couldn’t really be explained in the song. So we wanted a great actor. We thought of Donald Sutherland.”
The 1985 edition of the Kate Bush Club newsletter contains the full story, with Donald Sutherland detailing his initial refusal. “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,” Sutherland said.
Learning that he was staying at the Savoy Hotel in London, Kate Bush decided to intervene. “I opened it. There was no one there,” he recalled. “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?”
Kate Bush explained the song’s lyrics and narrative in detail, emphasising the connection to Wilhelm Reich – whose work Donald Sutherland was familiar with while filming Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento. “Everything about Reich echoed through me,” he explained. “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 okay and we made ‘Cloudbusting.’”
“She’s wonderful, Kate Bush. Wonderful. I love that I did it,” Sutherland continued. “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.”
For her part Kate Bush told MTV: “Whenever we were acting, he was my father. I just had to react to him like a child. He made it very easy”.
Leah Kardos writes how Cloudbusting is one of “those rabbit-hole songs that can lead listeners to an inspirational source text (A Book of Dreams) and further on to the wild worlds of Reich and his maverick research. But the song also functions meaningfully in the larger structure of Hounds of Love. It transports us to the world of dreams and nightmares. It is the sound of the rain promised in the clouds of ‘The Big Sky’. After successful mastering the watery weather at the end of ‘Cloudbusting’, the tables are quickly turned when the listener flips that record over. In moments, Bush will be at the mercy of the elements, helplessly adrift in a drowning dream”. I never realised how water on the first side leads to the endless expanse of the ocean on the second side. The childlike glee of the sky and potential flood-creating black in the sky. The idea of busting clouds to make it rain. All this curiosity and wishing leads to this nightmare extreme. Another fascinating thread one could explore around Hounds of Love. The elements and nature and how elemental and instrumental they are. Graeme Thomson notes in Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush how Bush was haunted by A Book of Dreams. “She had contacted Peter Reich to explain her motives in writing ‘Cloudbusting’ and to express the wish that she hoped that he approved of the song; in a neat, serendipitous touch, she received his reply while they were working on the track at the farm”. That was East Wickham Farm, in a studio Bush had built by her family home.
Haydn Bendall (he was the chief engineer at Abbey Road Studios for the recording of The Dreaming, Hounds of Love, The Sensual World and The Red Shoes). Peter Reich sent a letter back approving of the track when Bush was recording her vocal. Bendall tells how it was a privilege witnessing Kate Bush standing in front of a microphone: “We’re used to effects in the studio and computer graphics in films, but when you’re faced with raw talent it’s still stunning. She’s quite softly spoken and laughs a lot and is very joyous, but she takes on these different personae when she is singing – she’s an actress as well as a singer”. Graeme Thomson writes how Cloudbusting is a “wonderfully balanced song, both sad and strangely ecstatic, and filled with a real understanding of a child’s love for a parent; for don’t we all, as children, want to believe that our parents can perform miracles and cosmic sleigh of hand?”. Thomson notes how Cloudbusting could be an ode to her own inspiring and supportive father. Also, when it was performed live for 2014’s Before the Dawn residency, it was a tribute to her own son, Bertie. Her family and the love and support of her family runs right through Hounds of Love. Her own siblings and parents appear at various moments. Cloudbusting might be inspired by another family and does not seem personal, though I think that it had personal meaning for Kate Bush. That takes us to the end of side one of Hounds of Love. I will flip to The Ninth Wave soon. Before that, I will return to Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush when discussing 1983 and why that was a reset moment for Kate Bush. Reaching number twenty in the U.K., I always think Cloudbusting deserved better commercially. I would advise people to read this feature about the story of Hounds of Love. Until the next fortieth anniversary feature for Hounds of Love – before its anniversary on 16th September -, I would encourage everyone to listen to…
ONE of Kate Bush’s greatest tracks.