FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Eleven: Watching You Without Me
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THE final five features…
I will run as part of this twenty-feature series marking the fortieth anniversary of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love on 16th September are about the aftermath. The legacy of the album, its promotion and some discussion also around photography of Bush shot in 1985. After this feature, I only have three more songs to cover from the album. Those are Jig of Life, Hello Earth and The Morning Fog. However, the fourth track on Hounds of Love’s second side, The Ninth Wave, is on my mind today. I want to go deeper with Watching You Without Me. Following the intense Waking the Witch and its terror, this is a shift of pace and sound. That track was voice coming to Kate Bush’s heroine. Imploring her to stat awake. Others that seemed like hallucinations. Her being judged as a witch and put on trial on the water. It is a frantic and busy song that has a similar energy to Jig of Life, though the moods and lyrics are very different! Coming in the middle is this more serene and meditative song. One that is also haunting and upsetting. Family of the woman adrift at sea looking at the clock and wondering where she is. Not one of the most popular or talked-about songs on Hounds of Love, I do think that Watching You Without Me is a pearl. Beautifully composed and with typically remarkable production, I will once more come to Leah Kardos’s 33 1/3 Hounds of Love book that goes into detail when it comes to this song. Go and buy the book, as it gives us context and background to Hounds of Love and talks about its legacy. Watching You Without Me was among the ten songs from Hounds of Love (Mother Stands for Comfort and The Big Sky were omitted) that were performed during Kate Bush’s twenty-two Before the Dawn dates in 2014. I am going to come to Leah Kardos’s words soon. Before that, here is some interview archive, where Bush discusses the beautiful and desperately sad Watching You Without Me:
“Now, this poor sod [laughs], has been in the water for hours and been witch-hunted and everything. Suddenly, they’re kind of at home, in spirit, seeing their loved one sitting there waiting for them to come home. And, you know, watching the clock, and obviously very worried about where they are, maybe making phone calls and things. But there’s no way that you can actually communicate, because they can’t see you, they can’t you. And I find this really horrific, [laughs] these are all like my own personal worst nightmares, I guess, put into song. And when we started putting the track together, I had the idea for these backing vocals, you know, [sings] “you can’t hear me”. And I thought that maybe to disguise them so that, you know, you couldn’t actually hear what the backing vocals were saying.
Richard Skinner, ‘Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love. Radio 1 (UK), aired 26 January 1992”.
Waking the Witch ends with a rescue helicopter overhead that implores the woman to get out of the water. Though, and I never understand why, they do not rescue her. Perhaps it is a hallucination again or they could not pick her up. It is one of those cliches when it comes to films and shows that involves someone at sea or an island. The helicopter overhead and them waving frantically and it flying past. After the exhilaration and energy of Waking the Witch, Watching You Without Me “blinks awake in a different realm”. This is one of the calmest tracks on Hounds of Love. Up there with And Dream of Sheep. I love the musical dissection from Leah Kardos. She notes how there is “a minimal LinnDrum rhythm, augmented with side-stick backbeat and a syncopated floor tom by Stuart Elliott, Bush’s voice mumbles a quick oscillation across a 5th, sounding like a car engine that won’t start – a trapped utterance glitching between repelling magnetic fields”. I will talk more about the lyrics to end. However, the composition is fascinating. So different to anything else on Hounds of Love, it is an album so varied, yet it all hangs together! “The music rocks back and forth between B♭ and C (the same chord relationship, ♭VII to I, of ‘The Big Sky’) like a hypnotist’s swinging watch”. Leah Kardos how Stuart Elliott’s percussion has this ticking motion. Simulating a watch. A family waiting for their daughter to return maybe. The percussive pulse is just slightly below sixty beats per minute. A wonderful consideration that adds this sense of urgency. Of time ticking and there being this infinite wait and sense of the unknown. Seconds seem like hours to the family! For the woman on the water, she is longing to be safe and rescued. She would love the boredom or familiarity of being in that house – where people wait not knowing the fate of their loved one. Leah Kardos notes, before the main vocal starts, that we are “in a liminal space between life and death, wakefulness and sleep; Bush is trapped in limbo”.
The lyrics are hear- aching and painful. That sense of stress and uncertainty. Not knowing where this woman is. Little do they know the extent of the drama she has already faced! Bush does not deliver the lyrics in this strained and hyperactive way. The fact that she sings in this almost resigned or wistful way adds extra punch and gravity to Watching You Without Me. Consider these lines: “You watch the clock/Move the slow hand/I should have been home/Hours ago/But I’m not here/But I’m not here/You can’t hear me/You can’t hear me/You can’t feel me/Here in the room with you now/You can’t hear what I’m saying/You don’t hear what I’m saying, do you?”. Words that might seem personal to this situation but I think we can all relate to in some form or the other. That sense of loss. When someone dies and you notice the space left vacant. Bush sings “There’s a ghost in our home/Just watching you without me/I’m not here”. This is the point when some theorise the heroine died at sea and that mention of a ghost relating to death rather than an absence. That Jig of Life is either dying thoughts or happened after she had passed. And it is a futile rally cry for strength and survival. One of the most mysteriously, intriguing and compelling songs Kate Bush ever wrote, Leah Kardos explains how “With the soft whine of radio static and morse code ‘SOS’ message the song bursts out of its trance at 2’19” to a bright Hindustani teental rhythm, complete with hand cymbals (a rare exception to Hounds Of Love’s no-cymbals rule)”. The lead vocal where Kate Bush sings “Don’t leave me/Don’t Leave Me” is sung backwards and double-tracked at the octave. The tutti strings by Michael Karmen are especially striking and stirring. Kardos says how the backwards singing recalls The Dreaming’s backwards vocals on Leave It Open. “and the spoken South Indian taal rhythm (konnakol) across the coda of ‘Get Out of My House’ (performed by Esmail Sheikh)”. I think some of the backwards vocals was inspired by The Beatles and how they would often put in backwards vocals with messages in them that, when played forward, would provide this treat for listeners (or a shock in some cases!).
Around about the 2’48” mark, there is this backwards vocal that is hard to discern. Bush might be singing “We really see” or “releasing”. Leah Kardos has played it forward and it could be Bush singing over and over “be silly”. A lovely detail and a mysterious element so the song. Also, that backwards vocal seemingly from a ghost. A spirit from another world. An auditory hallucination and sign of a mind lost at sea that is exhausted and fevered. Maybe losing help of salvation and life. Just as we feel the action will quiet even more to a close, there is that return to the chopped vocals of Waking the Witch. There is this harrowing plea for help: “Listen to me/Help me baby/Talk to me”. It is not the first time that Bush had explored communication between the spiritual realm and reality. However, unlike Wuthering Heights (from 1978’s The Kick Inside) and Houidini (from 1982’s The Dreaming), Kardos rightly points out how, on Watching You Without Me, Bush lets you feel “the frustration and loneliness of insurmountable distance”. Things would change after this song. We then get the boost of energy and hope on Jig of Life before the contrasting Hello Earth and The Morning Fog. The former is a longer and more operatic and grand song where we think the heroine is watching above down at this spec in the ocean. The finale is this shorter and jumpier song that seems cheerier. The heroine saved (or was she?) and thankful. The chance to kiss the ground and let her family know how much she loved them. The same family who might have lost hope during Watching You Without Me. Did that ever happen and were they truly reunited?! Those who saw Bush in 2014 for Before the Dawn would have sensed that mix of emotions. Seen the action unfold. I was not here. They were watching her without me! It makes me so sorry I did not witness Watching You Without Me performed live…
IN London in 2014.