FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Thirteen: Jig of Life
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ONE of the most exciting…
and joyful tracks on Hounds of Love, I often thing of this as the sister song to The Big Sky. If you want to pair songs from the first side and The Ninth Wave, I would say that Jig of Life does connect with The Big Sky. In the sense that there is a childlike wonder and link. The Big Sky sees Bush giddily excited looking at the clouds and imagining what could be. One that is shaped like Ireland. Jig of Life, to me, is the woman/Bush stranded at sea and her family and friends speaking to her. Urging her to wake up. I am going to come to Leah Kardos and her book, Hounds of Love. She shares some interesting analysis about the song’s themes and the composition. Before I get there, this article from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia shares an interview from 1992 where Bush spoke about Jig of Life:
“At this point in the story, it’s the future self of this person coming to visit them to give them a bit of help here. I mean, it’s about time they have a bit of help. So it’s their future self saying, “look, don’t give up, you’ve got to stay alive, ’cause if you don’t stay alive, that means I don’t.” You know, “and I’m alive, I’ve had kids [laughs]. I’ve been through years and years of life, so you have to survive, you mustn’t give up.”
This was written in Ireland. At one point I did quite a lot of writing, you know, I mean lyrically, particularly. And again it was a tremendous sort of elemental dose I was getting, you know, all this beautiful countryside. Spending a lot of time outside and walking, so it had this tremendous sort of stimulus from the outside. And this was one of the tracks that the Irish musicians that we worked with was featured on.
There was a tune that my brother Paddy found which… he said “you’ve got to hear this, you’ll love it.” And he was right [laughs], he played it to me and I just thought, you know, “this would be fantastic somehow to incorporate here.”
Was just sort of, pull this person up out of despair.
Richard Skinner, ‘Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love. Radio 1 (UK), aired 26 January 1992”.
There is a lot to explore regarding Jig of Life. It is a song that Bush recorded in Ireland, at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin. There is a lot to love about the track. Bush’s brother John reciting a poem. Doing the narration and affecting an Irish accent. The rush you get from the composition. Uillean pipes, fiddles and bouzouki among the instruments that creates this frenzy. In terms of the narrative of The Ninth Wave, we are now past the point where there is much sign of hope. The heroine has expended so much energy and had to face such an ordeal. Struggling to stay awake and afloat, this is the moment when these voices come to her. Hallucinations and delirious auditory flashes. The connection to Ireland is important. Bush’s mother was Irish and there is that ancestry and connection. The antepenultimate song on the album, we then lead to Hello Earth and the finale, The Morning Fog. There is a lot I did not know about the song. As Leah Kardos begins: “The starting point for ‘Jig of Life’ took inspiration from the ceremonial music of Anastenaria, a centuries-old ecstatic dance and fire-walking ritual performed during religious feasts in Greece and Bulgaria. The music, inspired by a rare recording that Paddy Bush had found and shared with his sister, is characterized by repetitious, deep rolling rhythms and whirling figures performed on violin and tsabouna (Greek bagpipes)”. That is the origin and inspiration that only Kate Bush could be associated with! I do love to explore the origins for the songs on Hounds of Love. How The Ninth Wave’s title relates to the name of a poem from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King: the ninth wave. There is also a tie to The Coming of Arthur:
“Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame’
Kate Bush uses ‘the ninth wave’, inspired by ‘The Coming of Arthur’, as well Aivazovsky's iconic 1850 painting ‘The ninth wave’ which shows a group of people shipwrecked at sea, as a metaphor for the final wave before drowning, a moment which becomes the anchor of the album and provides its framing narrative”.
Bush was inspired by the music of Anastenaria, as “people worked themselves into a trance state through the hypnotic quality of the music”. Lifting those rhythmic musical qualities of the style, we notice that in the first section of Jig of Life. “Based on the Greek dhrómi mode (on a root of A), the tonality is mostly minor but with idiosyncratic instability on the second degree (B)”. I have quoted some of this text when I explored The Ninth Wave earlier this year, though I am returning now as Hounds of Love turns forty next month. Focusing on this extraordinary song, Bush is visited by a vision of her future self. One that urges her to stay awake and to live. It is this sort of vision that one might experience if they were dying or lost at sea There is so much poetry and folklore in the song. Leah Kardos observers how “the mention of ‘the place where the crossroads meet’ evokes once again the image of Hecate, the goddess in Greek mythology who is often depicted flanked by two dogs and sometimes shown with a triple-formed face that sees the past, present and future simultaneously”. I wonder if Hecate inspired the cover of Hounds of Love, where Bush is photographed with her two dogs, Bonnie and Clyde. There is a mix of Greek mythology and Ireland in Jig of Life. Taking from her mother’s homeland, John Shehan’s fiddle has this “deft melodic turn” that helps intensify the music “to a boisterous jig that’s thrillingly physical ands full of blood”. Bush travelled to Dublin to work with these musicians who were arranged by Bill Whelan.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
As involved and captured by the jig as we are, it suddenly stops. Bush repeats the words “’I put this moment… here’”. Her brother John’s voice cuts in with “’Over here”’ and the opening ceremonial theme strikes up once again”. There was an idea to pitch John Carder Bush’s voice higher to make it sound like a woman. That would have given his poem different meaning and impact. Maybe good that this never happened! Kardos ends her section on Jig of Life by writing how it is “A magical and affirming moment of temporal self-care; the powers of mothers from the past and future rallying at the crisis point to help Bush choose to live”. One of the deepest and most intriguing lyrics from Hounds of Love comes during Jig of Life: “And to your little boy and to your little girl/And the one hand clapping/Where on your palm is my little line/When you’re written in mine/As an old memory?”. Jig of Life seems like the final part of the middle. Two tracks in the first act, three in the second, and then two to end. From here, we move to the epic and stirring Hello Earth before a brief burst of sunshine and redemption from The Morning Fog. Jig of Life could be the dying voices our heroine cannot react to as she has fought too long. It could be – and I like to think so – the spirit and kick that she needs to stay alive and not give up hope. A transformative and pivotal moment from The Ninth Wave, it causes my pulse to race and heart skip in time…
EVERY time I hear it.