FEATURE:
Kate Bush: Something Like a Song
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Rapport
Pull Out the Pin (The Dreaming)
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I am revisiting …
Pull Out the Pin, as I feel it is one of the standout tracks from Kate Bush’s fourth studio album, The Dreaming. I am reading Tom Doyle’s book, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. There is a chapter on Pull Out the Pin. I will come to some other feature about the song. However, it is worth quoting some of what Doyle says. He argues how Pull Out the Pin might be the first full realisation of the cinematically-minded sound Kate Bush was striving to achieve on 1980’s Never for Ever. It is such a dense and beautiful song. Though it is also quite dingy. You can pretty much smell the song! In terms of the sweat, tobacco and mud. So many great things to highlight, though the late Danny Thompsons’s “snaking double bass and Brian Bath’s choppy guitar” are up there. Doyle notes how Bush drops herself into the action, casting herself as “a dirt-bellied, patiently stalking Viet Cong soldier”. I think there was this feeling from the press that Bush was not politically-minded or she was not as serious as other artists. It was a sexist attitude, but I feel there was always this venom aimed at her. This simple Pop artist that was a bit weird, where was the relevance and depth?! A couple of tracks from Never for Ever did have a political angle. Army Dreamers and Breathing. Pull Out the Pin continued that. Before continuing looking at Tom Doyle’s writing, it is worth looking at the inspiration behind the song. This is what Kate Bush wrote for the Kate Bush Club newsletter in October 1982:
“We sat in front of the speakers trying to focus on the picture – a green forest, humid and pulsating with life. We are looking at the Americans from the Vietnamese point of view and, almost like a camera, we start in wide shot. Right in the distance you can see the trees moving, smoke and sounds drifting our way… sounds like a radio. Closer in with the camera, and you can catch glimpses of their pink skin. We can smell them for miles with their sickly cologne, American tobacco and stale sweat. Take the camera in even closer, and we find a solitary soldier, perhaps the one I have singled out. Sometimes a Vietnamese would track a soldier for days and follow him, until he eventually took him. This soldier is under a tree, dozing with a faint smile and a radio by his side. It’s a small transistor radio out of which cries an electric guitar. I’d swear it was being played by Brian Bath, but how could that be, way out here on our stereo screen. I pop the silver Buddha that I wear around my neck into my mouth, securing my lips around his little metal body. I move towards the sleeping man. A helicopter soars overhead, he wakes up, and as he looks me in the eyes I relate to him as I would to a helpless stranger. Has he a family and a lady waiting for him at home, somewhere beyond the Chinese drums and the double bass that stalks like a wild cat through bamboo? The moving pictures freeze-frame and fade – someone stopped the multi-track, there’s more overdubs to do”.
I do love the lyrics for Pull Out the Pin. So evocative and distinct. This is my favourite passage: “You learn to ride the Earth/When you’re living on your belly and the enemy are city-births/Who need radar? We use scent/They stink of the west, stink of sweat/Stink of cologne and baccy, and all their Yankee hash“. Tom Doyle observes how Bush creates this vocal ventriloquism. Her voice is electronically double-tracked. It goes from calm to sinister. This idea of different personalities and emotions coming through in one song. Bush’s music always has this slightly sinister edge I think. Think back to her debut single, 1978’s Wuthering Heights. Ghostly and dark, there are so many incidents of Bush inhabiting the ghastly, spectral, sinister and unnerving. Doyle writes how David Gilmour provides a vocal counterpoint and has never sounded “so coolly menacing, and never up to this point had Bush sounded so deeply immersed in such an unlikely role”. It is that Floyd connection. You can say Breathing was her most Floyd-esque song. Pink Floyd a band she loved growing up. I actually think there are songs from The Kick Inside (1978) that are influenced by the band. Though Pull Out the Pin could be her most Pink Floyd moment to this point in her career. It was this method-like approach to a song. Bush almost an actor immersing herself in what she is singing. The Wall, released in 1979, was a Pink Floyd album that impacted Bush heavily. The helicopter effects in Pull Out the Pin coming from that album in terms of bringing in various effects and sounds. Not the only time Bush used a helicopter sound. It is perfect for Pull Out the Pin as it adds this visual dynamic. You can listen to the song and get a real sense of warfare in Vietnam.
I am not sure whether Bush’s allegiance as it were was to America or Vietnam. I think she was fascinated by this idea of smalling out the enemy. Being able to detect soldiers through scent. Pull Out the Pin is not Bush rallying against the Vietnam War and her decrying war. I guess that is implied. I think she was just fascinated by this documentary she saw and wanted to write a song about it. I did want to end by quoting from an interview in ZigZag from 1982. This sense that there was this leap from Never for Ever to The Dreaming:
“The Dreaming was a brave step. Not easy enough for the radio so it stiffed. But Kate stands by it as a necessary trailer for the breadth and progress of her strange new album. She can be a pop star or go on and break ground way beyond the Radio One rhino enclosure where feeding time is all glossy white soul and those covers. The Dreaming can't even be spotted in the hills. It pulses with new shapes and guises, voices crawl over your ears and gnaw the brain like beautiful maggots. The drums are enormous, the spaces cavernous. Few songs have an actual chorus [This is absolutely untrue. All ten songs on The Dreaming follow various kinds of traditional verse-chorus-bridge structures.], but each has its own atmosphere and theme, from a macabre look at Vietnam to pure horror. Life and death.
I was bowled over by the new depth and range in Kate's voice. The new deep one on The Dreaming contrasting with the airy familiar. A cracked rasp slicing through Houdini, defiant scream frazzling Pull Out the Pin while a nest of demons burst out of the stomach on Get Out of My House. Backwards and beyond Leave It Open.
"This is the first time that I actually enjoy listening to my voice," says Kate modestly as we talk on an EMI sofa. "It's a big breakthrough. Though Never For Ever was getting there, it was really compromise all the way, because I couldn't do any better at the time. I think it's the vocal chords as you get older. They do something. I can actually put some balls into my voice for the first time. It's exciting!"
The songs are longer and more open, less defined, with a different feel on each. [The songs may be more complex, but they are not less "defined".] Kate welcomes this outsider's first impressions, however garbled mine come over.
Tilts head: "It's like a progression. I've never written songs long as these before. Before they were like three minutes. They all had quite a different process. The idea was to go into the studio each night, put on the rhythm box machine and write something on the spot. Every night I was getting a song, even if it wasn't much good. There'd be an idea I could use in another song.
"It was all spontaneous initially, and became very thought out afterwards. Before, it probably worked the other way. We'd spend ages writing songs, and get it all down quick in the studio”.
Pull Out the Pin is a Kate Bush song that is not discussed a lot. In terms of new listeners, are they aware of gems like this?! It is such a work of wonder. Kate Bush produced The Dreaming and I feel wanted to make an album more cinematic and experimental. Where she could use the Fairlight CMI more and add something deeper into her music. As a singer, this was her at her most versatile and interesting. Her voice somewhat lower and gravelled at times. Giving songs more grit and this masculine energy. Bush seeing herself as this solider and sniffing out the enemy. It is such an interesting idea for a song. One that showcased Bush’s endless genius and imaginative approach to songwriting. If there are better songs than Pull Out the Pin in her catalogue, there are few songs that are so immersive and cinematic. A compelling track from…
A music innovator.