FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty
ART CREDIT: rosabelieve
Eighteen: Kate Bush’s Genius As a Producer
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WHEN people speak about…
Kate Bush, as I have said numerous times, do we ever mention her production talent? Bush co-produced 1980’s Never for Ever and produced solo from 1982’s The Dreaming on. I think every album she produced is absolutely fantastic. However, everything came together for Hounds of Love. EMI were not keen for Bush to produce the album. The Dreaming did not sell huge amounts, though it was a chart success. The label almost handed the album back. Fearful that a follow-up would not be commercial and could end her career, can we forgive EMI for having cold feet and doubts?! Bush was adamant that she wanted to produce her own music. You can see why. She would not be able to work with anyone because she is a singular artist who writes her own music. She would have to compromise and she would have control taken away. Hounds of Love would not have worked and been as good if someone produced with Kate Bush or produced without her. Although it took longer to record than EMI would have liked, Hounds of Love is a masterpiece. It is not a case of there been twelve straight tracks. There is an awesome first side that included timeless tracks. Then the second side, The Ninth Wave, that is conceptual and is very different to the first side. The skill and focus needed. Hugely ambitious and with so many different lyrical and musical themes to execute, it is wonderous that Bush pulled it all off! Few other producers would have had that talent and passion!
It is said that Bush had copious notes. Details about every song breaking them down. Technical notes and all these instructions. Not only is Bush’s production genius evident when you hear the overall sound and how ahead of its time it sounds and how timeless it is now. Bringing together all those musicians and making it all hang together. Although there would have been assistance with orchestral, vocal and string arrangement, it is Bush’s production brilliance that makes everything on the album sound so captivating and original. In the 1980s, it was rare for women to produce their own albums. Maybe more common today, I don’t think that women were encouraged to produced. Most female artists worked with male producers. I think Kate Bush is one of the best producers ever and definitely among the most distinguished and accomplished of the 1980s. We do not acknowledge that enough. We think of Hounds of Love and its brilliant songs. The songwriting and vocals. However, Kate Bush’s production is not really spotlighted. I am going to round up soon enough. However, when I interviewed Leah Kardos last year – who is the author of the 33 1/3 book on Hounds of Love -, I asked her about Bush’s production and whether it was under-discussed:
“I think many people do not discuss Kate Bush as an innovative and incredible producer when they speak of Hounds of Love. Do you feel she is under-appreciated as a producer?
She is absolutely, criminally underrated as a producer. Not only in terms of her technical and aesthetic achievements, and the ground she broke as a mainstream adopter of cutting-edge music technologies, but also in terms of her vast influence in pop music culture. There is a dearth of female producers in pop music, period. Back then and today, the situation hasn't really changed much. As you've seen, I devote quite a chunk of space in my little book to yell about what an elite and historically important producer she is. If I had more space I would have written even MORE about it”.
The final of twenty features I am writing about Hounds of Love at Forty is its legacy. I will bring in quite a few different sources. However, in 2021, DJ discussed how Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love influenced the evolution of Electronic music. As a producer and songwriter, Bush perfected her experiments in sampling technology, drum machines and synthesisers. A major reason why she hugely influenced and affected Electronic music is because of her role and instincts as a producer. An innovator and ground-breaker, there are so many reasons why Hounds of Love is massively influential and remains this adore masterpiece. Kate Bush front and centre as producer is perhaps the most important:
“Even today, ‘Hounds Of Love’ remains one of the most perfectly poised electronic music records, an album where digital technology and acoustic instruments blend into an entirely seamless cyborg mix, with technology employed as a means to an end, rather than as a destination in itself. If ‘Hounds Of Love’ is overlooked as a pioneering electronic album, then maybe that’s the point: It flourishes as a beautiful whole, a gorgeous work of art that doesn’t call attention to its composite parts or the hard labor behind it.
‘Hounds Of Love’ is quite the opposite of many early electronic music records, where the electronics were designed to draw attention to their new glittery selves and show off the world of machine possibilities. On ‘Hounds Of Love’, everything is subsumed into the music. For Bush, the Fairlight was a new “tool” for writing and arranging, as she explained to Option magazine in 1990, “like the difference between writing a song on a piano or on a guitar.”
The use of the word ‘tool’ is critical: The Fairlight was important for what it did, not what it was. And what it did was to open up Bush’s world to a new range of sonic possibility, as she explained to Option like a proto-Matthew Herbert: “With a Fairlight, you’ve got everything: a tremendous range of things,” she said. “It completely opened me up to sounds and textures and I could experiment with these in a way I could never have done without it.”
What is perhaps most striking about ‘Hounds Of Love’ is that, rather than settling down into a new electronic habit, Bush used her new digital equipment in a number of different ways, depending on the song’s demands. ‘Running Up That Hill,’ the album’s gorgeous opening song, uses a subtly propulsive, rolling tom pattern on the LinnDrum (the work of Bush’s collaborator and then romantic partner Del Palmer) that lays alongside cello samples from the Fairlight, which Bush manipulated to create both the main riff and backing strings.
One could think of Kate Bush’s major influence on electronic music, though, as something almost subliminal. You would be hard pressed to name many records that sound like ‘Hounds Of Love’, because recreating the sound at the time would have needed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, while today the relentless advance of electronic music technology means that the sounds of the LinnDrum and Fairlight have been replaced with newer gear. Besides, who has the talent to come up with a ‘Hounds Of Love’?”.
As there will be features and retrospection about Hounds of Love ahead of its fortieth anniversary on 16th September, how many will focus on Kate Bush and her production? She is one of the all-time great producers. In her book, Leah Kardos discusses the production: “The production of Hounds of Love was strikingly original for its time: poised, elemental, ethereal. And it’s worth taking a moment to shout about how this unique sound was innovated by a woman and created during a time when very few female creators had access to hi-tech recording equipment and facilities”. She goes on to say that “When Kate Bush hit a new commercial peak with Hounds of Love, she had virtually zero female peers doing it the way she was”. There is no doubting the fact that EMI should have had faith in her as a producer. As Leah Kardos goes on to say: “With Hounds of Love, Bush’s craft as a producer turned towards mastery. It is a significant mark on the map of her career where her technical prowess rose to meet the demands of her exacting artistic vision. Her unique and sensitive approach to the production of Hounds of Love is one of the reasons it endures, and it still sounds utterly remarkable today, nearly forty years after it came out”. Kate Bush is most definitely one of the greatest and most important producers…
WHO has ever lived.