FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the Hounds of Love launch party at the London Planetarium on 9th September, 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Hogan/Getty Images
Sixteen: The Album's Promotion, Launch Party, and Bringing It to the Stage
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I am going to bring in…
a couple of promotional interviews for Hounds of Love. Talk about its launch party – that took place on 9th September, 1985 -, and conclude with some words about Kate Bush bringing this album, and especially The Ninth Wave, to the stage in 2014. However, as Hounds of Love was released on 16th September, 1985, it is almost forty. It is wroth going back four decades and the promotion Bush was doing. This was an album that did not break her in America, though it did get her a lot of positive reviews. It reached thirty in the US Billboard 200. An album that has been reissued, remastered and performed almost in its entirety on the stage, you wonder what else you can do with it. I shall end with that. I would love to see the album’s songs covered, reworked and remixed for its fortieth anniversary. Artists and producers taking a song and making them their own. However, let’s start with a couple of interviews. In 1985, many thought that Kate Bush was done. That her career was over. Consider the sound of 1982’s The Dreaming and how experimental it was. Many were not expecting another album, let alone one that was both commercial and ambitious. Her most acclaimed work. Journalists having to interview Kate Bush without realising (in some cases) how good the album was. That this masterpiece would be unleashed. I am going to start out with this interview from Keyboard/Totally Wired/Songwriter that was published in early 1985. Bush not only discussing the new album and having her own studio. We learned about some of the technology and keyboards that she had to work with:
“Your vocal arrangements are often complex enough to suggest that a keyboard instrument was involved in coming up with the parts. Is this the case?
"Sometimes the backing vocals just come in automatically as part of a song when I'm writing it. Other times, maybe it won't be until I've recorded the main voice and a few events in the song. And then I'll think it needs something there. Those are really the two extremes: I either come up with the backing vocals in the initial writing, or I hear a hole that needs filling. Whether I build up a really thick, grand vocal depends on the song. If the song needs that, then I'll just overdub the voice and build the vocals up. If it's a very intimate song between the singer and the subject matter, then you'd write it with just one voice."
You process your voice quite a bit.
"I'm sure there are quite a few people like me who really prefer the sound of their own voice when it's affected a bit. To hear your own voice absolutely straight with nothing on it can be very painful. Again, it depends on what the songs are about."
Where do you work your songs out?
"I've had a home studio for the last few years. For this album, we put together a master home studio. The difference it makes is fantastic. The obvious difference is that we're not paying a phenomenal amount of money every hour for a London studio. That makes you feel so much more relaxed. The amount of pressure that the studio situation puts on you is quite surprising. You also feel a lot freer to experiment."
We understand that before, you'd do the demos and often not be able to duplicate the same feeling in the studio.
"I think that's one of the most impossible things to do, and everyone in the business must have it happen to them. You do a demo and it's the song, the spontaneity of how you put it down, that little inflection in the voice there, or something in the demo says it all. Even though the vocals are rough and the drums are out of time, it's got the feel of the song. Them you come to master it and it's not there. It's too fast or too clean. It's just not the same. Trying to recreate the moods of something you did so spontaneously can be so impossible. What we've done on this album is make the demos the masters. We demoed in the studio so that there were no demos anymore. They've transformed into the masters."
When you started working with electronic instruments, did you start listening to what other people were doing?
"Yes, you can't help but hear other people's electronic music. music is an inspiring thing to hear. But unfortunately, 99% of my time is eaten up listening to my own and nothing else. And then, it's only listening to what I'm working on at that moment. When I'm finished, I go through these big phases of listening to other people's stuff. It's so exciting."
Who do you listen to at those times?
"I'm particularly into a label called Windham Hill. That's beautiful music--absolutely gorgeous. And there's a German label called ECM that has a lot of jazz-rock music. One of my favorite artists there is (bassist) Eberhard Weber. He's fantastic [Weber appears on The Dreaming]. I find that the most enjoyable thing for me to do when I get in from the studio, other than listen to music, is to watch videos. My ears are so tired. You get such a form of concentrated listening--you've got to listen for clicks and drums and the voice...So when you get back, you want to rest your ears and let your eyes watch rubbish for half an hour."
Why do you sometimes use other musicians to play certain keyboard parts on your records? Listening to your piano playing, you wouldn't have any trouble covering the parts that they play.
"Well, I don't play the Synclavier. I play the Fairlight, but I didn't have a Fairlight of my own until the last album, and that was only towards the end of it. In fact, that's why I had to get people in. I had to hire their Fairlight and Synclavier and I had to have them play it as well-- until I had my own."
What do you have in your studio?
"We have a Soundcraft mixing deck, a Studer A-80 tape machine, lots of outboard gear, and Q-lock. We normally use 48 tracks now, even if it's for a vocal idea or something. 24 tracks doesn't seem to go anywhere with me. And the Fairlight, of course. We have a room simulator called a Quantec, which is my favorite. It would be lovely to be able to draw the sort of room you wanted your voice to be in. I think that's the next step”.
I want to highlight one more interview before moving on because, sadly, it was pretty typical. In terms of the language used and some of the patronising and condescending language! Maybe not reserved to male journalists, there was this somewhat sneering and belittling tone. However, whilst there is plenty of that here from Melody Maker’s Ted Nico, we do get some typically professional and interesting answers from Kate Bush. Someone who had to encounter so many inept and insulting interviews.
“Over the past two years the name Kate Bush has once more receded to the back of the common consciousness, joining the smoldering ember of The Buzzcocks, et al - set for the scrapyard. Yet once more she has confounded the rumour-mongers who had already pronounced her the Lady Lucan of pop, missing presumed dead. Once more she has created an album to besot and bewitch the coldest of hearts. Once more she has come out of her isolated refuge with the charm of a siren, and the innocence of a child. Ms. Bush is incapable of growing old, she has merely grown up.
But what, you ask, has sister Kate been doing during this hiatus, this self-imposed exile? As usual Kate explains much, but reveals precious little, slamming the doors of privacy with a single coy look.
"After the last album, I had to promote it, and that took me to the end of '82, so it hasn't really been that long. My life is quite extreme really; I go from a very isolated working situation, to going out and promoting my work and being very much a public creature. After you've ben through months of that kind of over-exposure, you're left feeling a bit shell-shocked. I need to take some time off and go somewhere quite different to write this new album. I didn't want to produce it in the wake of The Dreaming."
A wise move. Music vogues move with such alacrity, that two years off can finish off a career. In fact, such a time-span is the beginning and the end of most groups lifespan!
"I didn't really bother thinking about that sort of thing. I spent the time seeing films, seeing friends, building my own studio, and doing things I hadn't had a chance to do for ages."
Things? You couldn't elaborate on what these strange and wondrous things would be. Trout fishing? Hang-gliding? Hamster hunting?
"I found an inspirational new dance teacher," Kate replies with growing enthusiasm. "The teacher's energy made me really enthusiastic about writing again."
And once again the conversation turns back to the studio. Kate talks about her beloved studio a great deal - a great deal more than she's willing to chat about herself. She really doesn't have any hobbies, mainly because they wouldn't be beneficial to her work - the subject around which her entire universe evolves. The one exception is an avid interest in archery. And even this she has turned toward work, with the cover shot of the new single, believing it to be symbolic of Cupid's bow - an image which ties the threads of the single together.
And so, naturally, we turn to Kate's new album, Hounds Of Love, and the current success of the new single. Another new departure? Another rebirth? Another quest for new pastures?
"Yes, I wanted something new, and to begin with it was extremely difficult. All the songs I seemed to write sounded too much like the last album. I've never seen any point in repeating things you've already done before. I think it's a dangerous thing not to search for new ways of approaching songs. Too many people sit and think 'it'll just come to me', instead of getting off their arses and going for it."
Kate, of course, is far too polite to name names...
"If you get out and go for things then those things will come to you. I think it's too easy to wait and expect things just to come to you."
A certain Mr. M. Thatcher said similar words, but this time they ring with verity. Must be her smile. Kate's new studio, hidden away in the overgrown wilds of Kent, enable her to exorcise the ghosts of The Dreaming without sending EMI executives into prolonged thromboses over the expense of the operation.
"The pressure of knowing the astronomical amount studio time cost used to make me really nervous about being too creative. You can't experiment forever, and I work very, very slowly. I feel a lot more relaxed emotionally now that I have my own place to work and a home to go to."
Sitting on floor cushions, drinking cups of tea, I can't help thinking if things got any more relaxed they'd be sound asleep. Speak more of the new material Kate. Speak words of love...
"This time I wrote a lot of songs and just chose the best ones to put on the A side of the album. I like to think there's not a song there that's been put there for padding. Sometimes people get the impression that if you take a long time over something that you're literally going over the same piece again and again, and instead of making it better, you're making it worse. I hate to think I've ever done that.
This striving for perfection might well be cause by fears about disappointing her audience or her pet cats. The longer the wait, the greater the expectation.
"There are always so many voices telling me what to do that you can't listen to them. All I ever do is listen to the little voices inside me. I don't want to disappoint the little voices that have been so good to me."
Of course not. The finely-tuned songs that made the final selection on the album differ greatly from the diversions of previous albums. They are all love songs (sigh) using elemental imagery that form a cogent and cohesive panoply of emotion. A search and struggle to secure some sort of meaning. The discovery that although you can strip away everything form a person, there will always be a residue of love awaiting resurrection. Sounds mawkish doesn't it? Jane Austin world have loved it. All those over expressive vocals and delicate orchestrations channelled into such pathos. Sounds risible, doesn't it?
Yet the songs' style and eloquence rise above bathos through their haunting overtones. Phantasmagorical voices tilt the rose-coloured world off its trite axis with jagged eerie phrases. Outside observations are slanted metaphors revealing states of mind. No longer are we presented with the eclectic collage of The Dreaming whose continual shifts and spirals allowed an escape with diversity. No longer is the entire story of Houdini crammed into three minutes, until a new fable takes up the torch. Now the texture is more subtle, the production more adroit, and the mesmerism unrelenting.
"The last album contained a lot of different energies. It did take people to lots of different places very quickly and some people found that difficult to take. I think this album has more of a positive energy. It's a great deal more optimistic.
"I rather think of the album as two separate sides." How astute. "The A side is really called Hounds of Love, and the B side is called The Ninth Wave. The B side is a story, and that took a lot more work - it couldn't be longer than half an hour, and it had to flow. This time when you get to the end of one track, what happens after it is very affect by what's come before. It's really difficult to work out the dynamics within seven tracks. The concept took a long time."
Whoops! There goes that word again. Concept - a word mauled by the memory of Floyd, flares, baked lentils and chronic boredom. It took some time to extract my nails from the ceiling and climb back down to earth. It took even longer to summon up the courage to ask what this concept might entail. Kate looks upset that I'm not jumping up and down with ecstasy.
"It's about someone who comes off a ship and they've been in the water all night by themselves, and it's about that person re-evaluating their life from a point which they've never been before. It's about waking up from things and being reborn - going through something and coming out the other side very different."
Sounds suspiciously like The Ancient Mariner revisited...
"Oh no! It's completely different. It ends really positively - as things always should if you have control."
And Kate certainly has that. From the writing, recording, performing, production of her tunes to the choreography on the accompanying video. As usual the visual imagery is gleaned from a wide variety of sources: from the films of Godard, Herzog and Coppola, to The Book Of Dreams, yet their accretion with Kate's own personal fears and desires is shrouded in mystery.
"There are many films that you don't think much of at the time, but weeks afterwards you get flashbacks of images. Sometimes films like Don't Look Now and Kagemusha have really haunted me. You don't necessarily steal images from films, but they are very potent and take you somewhere else - somewhere impossible to get to without that spark."
At this moment it is difficult to see how such a placid, genteel, and downright normal musician could ever produce songs like "Get Out Of My House" and "Sat In Your Lap". Perhaps some strange transformation takes place over when she is asleep!
"Yes, I have very strange dreams you know. Over the years I've collected the most incredible star cast of them. Very famous people come and visit me."
Curiouser and curiouser...
"Peter O'Toole came round to dinner last week and my mum met him and thought he was wonderful. Keith Moon often comes round for tea as well. I have a lot of vivid dreams, most of which I can't mention. The images I get from them sometimes bleed into my songs”.
Navigating a plethora of interviews and having finished this enjoyable but hard production, Hounds of Love was ready for the world. I do think that the choice was ideal. Even though it is not there anymore, on 9th September, 1985, Kate Bush launched Hounds of Love at the London Planetarium on Marylebone Road. She looked fantastic dressed in purple! Matching the album cover’s colours and accompanied by her then-boyfriend Del Palmer. He engineered the album and played on it. A perfect location to launch this dazzling album that is very much about nature, the natural world and the wider universe. Songs like Hello Earth take us above the clouds and have us look down from space. I think that, technically, the Hounds of Love launch party was in the Laserium. There was a lot of press focus on Kate Bush and the fact that arrived arm in arm with Del Palmer. It was not known by all that they were an item. Rather than celebrate this wonderful album, there was a lot of chatter about her love life! However, it was an eventful and successful night. A drunk Youth (who played bass on the album’s track, The Big Sky) called Palmer a “wally”. Youth (Martin Glover) was jealous and was probably acting out of anger and envy when he called Palmer that. Some of the press coverage for that launch was not kind. Many feeling Bush was this air-headed ingénue. Focusing on her looks and sexuality. The jealous Youth. It was not just him. Others who worked with Kate Bush definitely had to hide feelings of attraction. One musician stopped working with her entirely because he was besotted. However, what comes out of that launch party is how confident Bush looked. Knowing what she was about to release into the world. The Laserium witnessed this wonderful event where one of the greatest albums ever was unveiled. I wonder whether the entire album was played or they got snippets. Not a lot has been written about it. It was a huge moment in her career. One where she almost had to bounce back from some of the disappointment that surrounded The Dreaming. That it did not have this major success story and some felt Kate Bush was past her best.
THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with Del Palmer at the London Planetarium on 9th September, 1985 during the launch party for Hounds of Love/PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Hogan/Getty Images
I do think that there is further potential for The Ninth Wave especially. Never filmed and put on the small or big screen, it was finally mounted for Before the Dawn in 2014. Kate Bush always saw that suite as a cinematic piece, but it was never realised. Almost thirty years later, she finally brought it to the stage. However, I do feel that it can go beyond the stage and onto a cinema screen. However, what was realised in 2014 in front of adoring fans over twenty-two nights was a huge accomplishment. When reviewing the live album of Before the Dawn in 2016, this is what Pitchfork wrote about Hounds of Love and how it translated to the stage:
“In Act Two, Bush realized her long-held desire to dramatize “The Ninth Wave,” the conceptual B-side of 1985’s Hounds of Love, which documents a woman’s dark night of the soul as she fights for life while lost at sea. While her “husband” and real-life son Bertie McIntosh blithely carried on with domestic life inside a tiny, sloping living room set, a video depicted Bush stranded in dark, choppy waters (now released as the “And Dream of Sheep” video). Moments later, the real Bush reappeared on stage to fight sinister “fish people” who carried her body off through the aisles. The whirring blades and desperate search lights of a rescue helicopter descended from the Hammersmith Apollo’s ceiling, illuminating and buffeting the crowd. Despite some hammy dialogue, it was staggering, and in sharp contrast to Act Three, which focused on Aerial’s second side, “A Sky of Honey.”
It’s a shame that the terror of “Hounds of Love” gets swapped for sentimental optimism, but the band recreate that album’s second half to sound as avant-garde and bracing as any current young outsider.
“Jig of Life” is the midpoint of Before the Dawn, and its crux. It forms the part in “The Ninth Wave” where Bush’s character is exhausted of fighting against drowning, and decides to succumb to death. A vision of her future self appears, and convinces her to stay alive. “Now is the place where the crossroads meet,” she chants, just as her (then) 56-year-old voice channels her 27-year-old one. Despite her alleged taste for burning one, Bush’s voice has gained in power rather than faded with age. It’s deeper now, and some of the songs’ keys shift to match, but it’s alive and incalculably moving, still capable of agile whoops and tender eroticism, and possesses a newfound authority.
Both Acts Two and Three take place in transcendent thresholds: “The Ninth Wave”’s drowning woman is beset by anxiety and untold pressures, with no idea of where to turn, mirroring the limbo that Bush experienced after 1982’s The Dreaming. That suite’s last song, the cheery “The Morning Fog,” transitions into Aerial’s “Prelude,” all beatific bird call and dawn-light piano. The euphoric, tender “A Sky of Honey” is meant to represent a perfect day from start to finish, filled with family and beautiful imperfections. “Somewhere in Between” finds them atop “the highest hill,” looking out onto a stilling view, and Bush’s eerie jazz ensemble anticipates the liminal peace of Bowie’s Blackstar. “Not one of us would dare to break the silence,” she sings. “Oh how we have longed for something that would make us feel so… somewhere in between.”
Purgatory has become heaven, and in the narrative Bush constructs through her setlist, “A Sky of Honey” represents the grown-up, domestic happiness that staves off the youthful fears explored on Hounds of Love. For her final song, she closes with a rendition of “Cloudbusting,” a song about living with the memory of a forbidden love, which is even more glorious for all the hope that it’s accumulated in the past 30-odd years”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush captured in a moment during Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave that she performed during her Before the Dawn residency in 2014/PHOTO CREDIT: Gavin Bush/Rex
Hounds of Love’s translation to the stage was a success. Not sticking rigidly with the album sounds and being entirely faithful to the 1985 version, there was this opportunity to give the songs new life and an older voice. Hounds of Love’s title track was not as exhilarating and electric as on the album. However, it still enraptured audiences. Bush adapted the melody line and threw in a new line (“Tie me to the mast”). The visual representation of the songs was a true highlight. If songs on The Ninth Wave could only be imagined, on stage, there was this whole new life. On Watching You Without Me, there was this mini-set on the stage. “Lamps flickered and a television slide from one end of the building to the other”, as Graeme Thomson writes in Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Jig of Life was this tour de force. On Hello Earth, “a huge buoy, bathed in red light of the emergency flares, ascended from the waves”. Whilst Bush is struggling against the waves and fighting for survival, “a couple of stagehands assembled a short ramp that led up from the floor of thew auditorium to the right hand side of the stage. As the song’s stunningly sombre choral passage rang out, an inert Bush was lifted from the waves, carried slowly down the ramp and into the audience”. The Morning Fog, as Graeme Thomson notes, was a gesture of gratitude. One which transcend The Ninth Wave and reflected Bush’s feeling to the audiences. She smiled and gestured to them when singing the line on The Morning Fog, “I love you better now”. I am skimming through what Graeme Thomson writes but, as that was only the end of Act I – and we still had the entirety of Aerial’s A Sky of Honey to come –, Bush had staged “one of the most extraordinary pieces of imaginative theatre ever staged by a popular musician”. I would read the entirety of what he says about Before the Dawn and Hounds of Love. Bush also performing the singles, Cloudbusting, Hounds of Love and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). A staggering achievement and dazzling theatrical spectacled. I will leave things there. In a future feature, I am going to talk about the legacy and impact of Hounds of Love as we celebrate this masterpiece’s fortieth anniversary…
ON 16th September.