FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during the shooting of the video for And Dream of Sheep, a song that is part of her suite, The Ninth Wave/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
Eight: And Dream of Sheep
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I am going to come…
to Leah Kardos’s 33 1/3 book, Hounds of Love, and what she says about Kate Bush’s And Dream of Sheep. I am embarking on a twenty-feature run to mark Hounds of Love’s fortieth anniversary on 16th September. I have written about every song on the first side. Now, we flip the record over and look at the first song from the second side: the majestic and cinematic The Ninth Wave. One of Bush’s most-streamed and popular songs, And Dream of Sheep, has been performed live. It was actually filmed. A filmed piece that was shown on a screen during the 2014 Before the Dawn residency shows, she was filmed from the point of view of an overhead camera. Bush slips under the water at the end of the song. This article from The Guardian provides more details:
“In the lead-up to her 22-date run of sold-out Before the Dawn performances in 2014, Kate Bush spent three days submerged in a tank filled with water. Not for some new-age cleansing ritual, but to create a sense of authenticity while shooting the video for And Dream of Sheep, a song about a woman who is lost at sea.
This realism however, became more tangible than Kate had initially imagined. According to a spokesperson for the artist, she spent so long in the water during the first day of filming that she contracted mild hypothermia, but recovered after a day off and carried on filming. “Everyone agreed it had added to the authenticity of the performance,” they said.
Recorded at Pinewood Studios, the video for the track – which features the musician strapped to a lifejacket, hoping to be rescued – was created for her unexpected return to the stage, during which she performed The Ninth Wave, her 1985 song cycle that the Guardian described as “disturbing, funny and so immersive that the crowd temporarily forget to applaud everything Bush does”.
For And Dream of Sheep, Kate Bush travelled to Dublin in the spring of 1984 for some amazing sessions. Also part of those sessions was given up to Jig of Life (a song that features later on The Ninth Wave). Dónal Lunny later recollected how Bush asked him to play the single whistle note at the end of the track over and over again for three hours as she was searching for just the right ‘bend’ in the note.
Prior to getting to Leah Kardos’s interpretation and analysis of And Dream of Sheep, below are some interview examples where Kate Bush talked about a hugely important song. One that opens The Ninth Wave. The heroine adrift and wanting to be somewhere cosy and safe where she can fall asleep. Little does she know that her experience being stranded in the water is about to endure and get much worse:
“[The Ninth Wave] is about someone who is in the water alone for the night. ‘And Dream Of Sheep’ is about them fighting sleep. They’re very tired and they’ve been in the water waiting for someone to come and get them, and it’s starting to get dark and it doesn’t look like anyone’s coming and they want to go to sleep. They know that if they go to sleep in the water they could turn over and drown, so they’re trying to keep awake; but they can’t help it, they eventually fall asleep – which takes us into the second song. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, Issue 18, 1985)
An engineer we were working with picked out the line in ‘And Dream Of Sheep’ that says ‘Come here with me now’. I asked him why he liked it so much. He said, ‘I don’t know, I just love it. It’s so moving and comforting.’ I don’t think he even knew what was being said exactly, but the song is about someone going to sleep in the water, where they’re alone and frightened. And they want to go to sleep, to get away from the situation. But at the same time it’s dangerous to go to sleep in water, you could drown. When I was little, and I’d had a bad dream, I’d go into my parents’ bedroom round to my mother’s side of the bed. She’d be asleep, and I wouldn’t want to wake her, so I’d stand there and wait for her to sense my presence and wake up. She always did, within minutes; and sometimes I’d frighten her – standing there still, in the darkness in my nightdress. I’d say, ‘I’ve had a bad dream,’ and she’d lift bedclothes and say something like ‘Come here with me now.’ It’s my mother saying this line in the track, and I briefed her on the ideas behind it before she said it. And I think it’s the motherly comfort that this engineer picked up on. In fact, he said this was his favourite part of the album. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, Issue 21, 1987)”.
I will end this feature by including the live version of And Dream of Sheep from the Before the Dawn residency. Leah Kardos opens her section about And Dream of Sheep by noting how The Ninth Wave opens in the same tonality as the final song from the album’s first side, Cloudbusting. It is fascinating how Kardos talks about the notes and gets deep into the music and composition. For example, “The melody across the opening lines is marked by the distinctive upward interval of a perfect 5th; the words leap up from E to B (‘Little Light’), the vocal melody underlined by bright, ringing, [piano octaves. The 5th is immediately restated (‘shining’), from a lower B up to F#”. Kardos writes, regarding one of Hounds of Love’s most beautiful and important songs, how, throughout, there is this “upwards extension of the melody is the urgent blink of wakefulness; the sloping, softened melodies that curl downwards to the tonal resolution are the figures that lull Bush’s protagonist to the irresistible comfort of slumber”. I have always though that And Dream of Sheep is a dream in itself. Maybe a woman who is having this dream about being lost at sea. Or the song in which our ill-fated heroine is taken by the water and everything that goes after is a dying thought or did not happen. That sounds grim, though The Ninth Wave compels each listener to provide their own interpretation. Leah Kardos continues by saying that the “harmonic progressions waver between minor energy in the ‘A’ phase, circling around the similar chords relationships of ‘Cloudbusting’ and ‘Running Up That Hill’, C#m7 to A6 then B (i- VI -♭VII); in the ‘B’ phase, the music feels comfortable and assured with grounded harmonies that are vaguely familiar to what we’ve heard on ‘Hounds of Love’ and a similar pedal point tethering the emotion firmly in position: E (flashes of E6, F#m/E then B/E”. That sublime and soothing magic is observed by Kardos.
It is interesting that in the breaks between verses that there are various voices. The radio transmission of a coastguard. Bush’s family appear in various moments on Hounds of Love. Hannah, her mother, can be heard saying “come here with me now”. This soft and reassuring line is what she would say to her young daughter whenever she had a nightmare. I love learning more about the notation and compositional elements. A real depth and forensic look in the way few other people have provided. It shows songs like And Dream of Sheep in a new light. Kudos to Leah Kardos! She writes how the “arrangement is led by piano, and the texture is predominantly organic, with a brief flash of orchestration that swells dramatically through the words ‘sound of engines’”. Bouzouki and multitracked whistles are “tender and reassuring”, whilst Bush’s vocal “delicate and dramatic, wrapped in artic Quantexc reverb; you can almost feel the chill mist on her breath”. This feels like one of her most personal songs. A genuine fear of being on the water and not knowing what is beneath. You will roll over if you fall asleep and drown, so this is her trying to stay awake against impossible odds and a lack of hope. Rather than neatly segueing into the next song on The Ninth Wave, Under Ice, Bush sings with “a descending, wilted voice, the music stalls on the dominant B7 over E – the song has no ending, but rather it connects directly to the nightmare hallucinations of ‘Under the Ice’”. As I move to Under Ice next in my look inside Hounds of Love, its songs, the album cover and aspects around its legacy, I reflect fondly on And Dream of Sheep. It is a track that connects with so many listeners. And Dream of Sheep is the starting point of…
A brilliant, nerve-shredding and emotional suite.