FEATURE:
Coming in with the Golden Light
Why a Fortieth Anniversary Edition of Kate Bush’s The Dreaming Would Be Fascinating
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ON 13th September…
the biggest Kate Bush anniversary of 2022 takes place. That date marks forty years since her fourth studio album, The Dreaming, was released. Prior to that, the album’s eponymous single turns forty on 26th July. Both the single and album have a somewhat difficult reputation. Whilst The Dreaming is an album that has grown in stature and fondness since its release, many find it too experimental, inaccessible or strange. Compared to the following album, 1985’s Hounds of Love, there is a section of people who overlook The Dreaming. There have not been any anniversary editions of Kate Bush albums. There have been remasters but, in terms of putting an album out with extras, The Dreaming is the one that would prove the most fascinating. With Bush producing alone, she was expanding on what she released on Never for Ever. More layered and complex than anything she had released to that point; I can only imagine how many demos and alternate takes are in the vault. This is something that I have asked before. I wonder whether there is an archive that has yet to be distributed. I know that there are a lot of Kate Bush fans that would love to see a reissue of The Dreaming on its fortieth anniversary. I am endlessly fascinated by the period where Bush was embarking on solo producing and putting together an album that would be unlike anything she had ever done.
Songs such as Leave It Open, Get Out of My House and Suspended in Gaffa must have started life very differently to how they ended up. There will be a lot of new perspective as we head towards September and a stunning album turning forty. If you are unfamiliar with the story of The Dreaming, The Quietus wrote about it in 2012. The sheer work and commitment Bush put into realising the album is amazing:
“If Never For Ever captured her at a crossroads, the next record would make no compromises. In December 1980, she went on Paul Gambaccini’s radio station and played a selection of her favourite music. Steely Dan and John Lennon got played, Zappa and Beefheart were left-field favourites but the music was largely culled from music beyond rock’s spectrum: whale song, Celtic harpist Alan Stivell, classical selections and the soundtrack from Peter Brooks' Meetings With Remarkable Men. As she talks about the music of the last mentioned, The Contest Of The Ashoks, & how it "vibrates through the valley", it is hard not to think of the aural landscapes that were imminent. Along with the studio wizadry giving her work the requisite ‘oomph’, Bush was ready to expand her palette more fully away from traditional European/ pop musical modes. Brother Paddy, alumni of London College of Furniture, had already subtly coloured her work with arcane instrumentation. The traditional band set up failed to conjure the adequate images and emotions she was hankering for.
Assembled over the course of a year (back then an inordinately long time) with a revolving cast of engineers and recording locations, The Dreaming, her fourth album, was born of an exhaustive and exhausting gestation. It’s as if the studio itself became the same kind of amalgam of womb/ airless bunker so powerfully evoked in 'Breathing'. Del Palmer, Bush’s then partner and musical sounding board, talked of "coming up" from the windowless Advision studio while Bush herself referred to just "watching the evening news before returning to the dingy little treasure trove to dig for jewels". At one point, all three of the legendary Abbey Road Studios were utilized for the sessions. Soon after promoting the album, Bush was diagnosed with nervous exhaustion and it was three years until the release of 1985’s triumph, Hounds Of Love.
The album was not without its obstacles. She talked of a terrible case of writer’s block. Initially she recruited Hugh Padgham, due to the Gabriel/Collins connection. While she praised the engineer, he seemed both unsympathetic to her madcap approach (and allegedly her then fondness for pot, according to Graeme Thomson’s excellent bio, Under the Ivy). Either way he was committed to working for The Police & recommended his assistant Nick Launay. The pair, bonded by their experimental curiosity and youth, proved to have a more productive simpatico. They mic’d up corrugated iron tunnels around drum kits in an attempt to mimic ‘canons’. The Dreaming melts the gap between pre- and post- punk, Launay having worked with both PiL and Phil Collins, shared Bush’s disregard for the old/wave divide. As early as 1980, Kris Needs noted her ability "to break down musical barriers and capture true emotion". On The Dreaming, proggy shifting time signatures and textures vie with a wild energy and the kind of poly-rhythms deployed on another Launay job, PIL’s Flowers Of Romance (1981). Another engineer, Paul Hardiman, had worked with both Rick Wakeman and on Wire’s seminal first three albums.
The Dreaming was the real game-changer. Back in 1982, it was regarded as a jarring rupture. "Very weird. She’s obviously trying to become less commercial," wrote Neil Tennant, the future Pet Shop Boy, still a scribe for Smash Hits. He echoed the sentiments of the record-buying public. Even though the album made it to number three, the singles, apart from 'Sat In Your Lap', which got to 11 a year before, tanked. The title track limped to number 48 while 'There Goes A Tenner' failed to chart at all. It was purportedly the closest her record label, EMI had come to returning an artist’s recording. Speaking in hindsight, Bush observed how this was her "she’s gone mad" album. But The Dreaming represents not just a major advance for Bush but art-rock in general. Its sonic assault contains a surfeit of musical ideas, all chiselled into a taut economy.
Bush had pirouetted into public consciousness to such an extent that in May 1981, she was asked to play the wicked witch in Wurzel Gummidge. Campy light entertainment was still knocking at the door, still smitten with her theatrical excesses. However, the following month, 'Sat In Your Lap' unveiled Bush’s new aesthetic. Inspired by attending a Stevie Wonder concert, it’s a violent assertion of creative control, a final nail in the coffin of the so-called elfin pop princess. Pounding pianos and tribal drums dominate, frazzled synth brass puffs steam as Bush’s vocals veer from clipped restraint to harnessed histrionics, at times rushing by with Doppler effect. The lyrics scratch their head in search of epistemological nirvana, a pursuit akin to the arduous process of making the album. "The fool on the hill, the king in his castle" goes searching for all human knowledge and the more he discovers, he realizes the less he knows.
The Dreaming’s disparate narratives frequently seem to be tropes for Bush’s quest for artistic autonomy and the anxieties that accompany it; the bungled heist in There Goes A Tenner, the ‘glimpse of God’ in 'Suspended In Gaffa', even the Vietnamese soldier pursuing his American prey for days in 'Pull Out The Pin'. "Sometimes it’s hard to know if I’m doing it right, can I have it all?" she sings in 'Suspended In Gaffa', a Gilbert and Sullivan-esque romp in 6/8, as reimagined by Luis Bunuel. (She was also asked during the album’s recording to appear in a production of The Pirates Of Penzance). A peculiar mix of self-doubt and pole-vaulting ambition characterizes many of the songs here.
The proviso Bush had for The Dreaming was that everything was to "be cinematic and experimental". Movies inform The Dreaming as much as any musical influences. When describing 'Pull Out The Pin', she synaesthetically blurs the vocabulary of music with that of film, referring to wide shots and "trying to focus on the pictures" between the speakers. The song’s evocation of the Vietnam forest, "humid... and pulsating with life" is astonishing; all queasy protruding Danny Thompson double bass lines, musique concrete, Chinese drums and a distorted guitar sounding like a US soldier’s scratchy transistor. Much of these sounds were collated by drummer Preston Heyman in Bali. With its foliage of samples and cultures converging it nods to My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, the landmark Byrne/Eno collaboration recorded in 79 but released in 81.
Something of the disarming menace in Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock hangs over The Dreaming’s darkest corners, 'Leave It Open' and 'Get Out Of My House'. Both are sublime slices of musical madness; bad acid trips through broken lives, controlled cacophony, post-punk pantomime. Oddball novelty Napoleon XIV’s ‘They‘re Coming To Take Me Away Ha-Ha’ was a childhood favourite and its disturbed comedy gets the serious treatment. 'Get Out Of My House' repositions A.L. Lloyd’s reading of the metamorphic folk tale of romantic resistance, 'Two Magicians' in the domestic asylum of Stephen King’s The Shining. It ends the album in a resounding bray of donkeys and drum talk, as absurd and harrowing as Lynch soundtrack.
These are thunderous drumscapes with spectral atmospherics blowing through them, as if the gated reverb’s quiet/loud dynamic amounted to a modus operandi unto itself. The madwoman in the attic gets a modern jolt, Gabriel’s 'Intruder' is now the occupant too. 'Leave It Open' is an exorcism of 'In The Air Tonight': edgy tension exploding into more thunderous gated drums. Both songs are about how "we open ourselves up and close down like receptive vessels", often at the wrong times. Bush was already beating a retreat from the invasion of fame.
An embarrassment of riches then, bestowed upon an unworthy rabble. The Dreaming was released to a baffled public but the more open-minded sectors of the music press acknowledged Bush’s achievement. Despite many laudatory notices, watching Bush and Gabriel’s respective appearances on Old Grey Whistle Test confirms what she was up against. Gabriel is afforded due reverence as an art-rock renaissance man, Bush, on the other hand, while covering roughly the same ground, is ever so slightly mocked. Behind her unwavering propriety, irritation smoulders. As with her appearance on Pebble Mill, the usually sympathetic Paul Gambaccini constantly frames the music in context of its radio playability or lack thereof. Bush looks bewildered and more than a little wan. The music she had created was no longer so easily assimilated by daytime TV.
Another tour was talked about but never transpired. She left London. At her parents East Wickham home she created a 48 track studio and returned three years later with the masterpiece Hounds Of Love, knocking Madonna’s Like A Virgin off the top spot. It elevated her into the pantheon of greats, a grand dame of Brit-pop at the tender age of 27. The first side with its consistent rhythms, arresting hooks and l’amour fou turned her into a hi-tech post hippy hit machine. The singles’ videos were glossy excursions, some of them conceived on film rather than video. By the 'Hounds Of Love' promo she was directing herself. Another area the "shyest megalomaniac" wrestled control of. 'The Ninth Wave' was another tribute to her imaginative powers, the song suite being the sexy, acceptable face of prog rock. She even had a hit in America. Although she had to change the name from 'A Deal With God' to 'Running Up That Hill'.
But it was The Dreaming that lay the groundwork. It ignited US critical interest in her (including the hard-assed Robert Christgau and the burgeoning college radio scene finally gave Bush an outlet there. Hounds Of Love, remains the acme of this singular talent’s achievements. It uses ethnic instrumentation while sounding nothing like the world music that would be popularized through the 80s. It is a record largely constructed with cutting edge technology that eschews the showroom dummy bleeps associated with synth-pop. At the time, she talked of using technology to apply "the future to nostalgia", an interesting reverse of Bowie’s nostalgic Berlin soundtrack for a future that never came. Like Low, The Dreaming is Bush’s own "new music night and day" a brave volte face from a mainstream artist. It remains a startlingly modern record too, the organic hybridization, the use of digital and analogue techniques, its use of modern wizadry to access atavistic states (oddly, Rob Young’s fine portrait of the singer in Electric Eden only mentions this album in passing).
For such an extreme album, its influence has been far-reaching. ABC, then in their Lexicon Of Love prime, named it as one of their favourites, as did Bjork whose similar use of electronics to convey the pantheistic seems directly descended from The Dreaming. Even The Cure’s Disintegration duplicates the track arrangement on the sleeve and the request that ‘this album was mixed to be played loud’. 'Leave It Open'‘s vari-speed vocals even prefigure the art-damaged munchkins of The Knife vocal arsenal. Field Music/The Week That Was arrayed themselves with sonics that seem heavily indebted to Bush’s work here. Graphic novelist Neil Gaiman even had a character sing lyrics from the title track in his The Sandman series. John Balance of post-industrialists Coil confessed that the album’s songs were all ideas that he later tried to write. But Bush got there first. And The Dreaming remains a testament to the exhilarating joy of "letting the weirdness in”.
I still think a lot of people fail to grasp the brilliance of The Dreaming. It is such an impressive and detailed album. One needs to come back time and time again to get to the bottom of it. Having some of the early sketches and various takes would show how Bush approached producing such a dense and wide-ranging album. It is a masterful album from an artist who was determined to deliver something that was true to her. No compromises. Before I finish off, this review highlights the fact that The Dreaming sees Bush ascend to almost thespian-like levels regarding vocal layering, her array of characters and impressions:
“'This house is full of m-m-my mess'
Kate Bush may not be the first artist to leap to mind when thinking in terms of the Unsung. As a unique and pioneering solo female talent Bush has become well-established as a widely valued eccentric in mainstream, popular music. However, of all her albums ‘The Dreaming’ is the least loved by critics and public alike; generally written off in overviews of her work as an impenetrable mess of experimentation and self-indulgence. This received wisdom needs debunking. ‘The Dreaming’ is an important work which spans the divide between her earlier piano and vocal dominated albums and the denser, electronic and ethnic eclecticism of the albums which would follow. Unlike the unity of each of the vinyl sides of the following ‘Hounds Of Love’ album, this album is made up of individual tales confined to their own tracks. ‘Pull Out the Pin’ sounds like a massively condensed precursor to ‘The Ninth Wave’ which would expand to fill the second side of ‘The Hounds Of Love’; ‘There Goes A Tenner’ tells the tale of a botched bank heist, which in lesser hands would have filled 20 minutes of a concept album. This is a ten-sided album with hardly a breath between each side.
'This house is full of m-m-mistakes'
Often songs teeter on the verge of collapsing under the weight of the experimentation she explores, but to my ears she succeeds in mixing a palette which is unique (and notably became massively influential subsequently), and applies it with great concentration and density, but magically just avoids over-crowding and overloading the songs impasto.
'This house is full of m-m-madness'
Kate has often been quoted calling this recording her ‘mad album’, generally as some kind of journalistic justification for writing it off as a weird aberration. Why? Art embraces the insane all the time to push the limits of the audience. Without this dimension art would become just more bland pedestrian balm, and there’s always been more than enough of that around, indeed at times there is so much of it (such as in 1982 when this album was released) that it’s enough to drive anyone who thinks vaguely radically to the edge of insanity in order to make people simply feel SOMEthing. John Balance of Coil, no stranger to madness himself, once said: “I've got notebooks, this was about the time of The Dreaming, I'd write ideas for songs down and then when I heard The Dreaming they'd all be on the album. I think that possibly some kind of parallel psychic space is being carved up there.”* Or as Kate puts it in the backwards masked part at the end of ‘Leave It Open’: “We let the weirdness in.”
On this album Kate’s voices are more manifold than ever before or since. Perhaps this is one of the reasons people find this album hard to penetrate. ‘The Dreaming’ includes most of Kate’s best acting on record. Within each song Kate uses several multi-layered vocal techniques (the voice truly as instrument), sometimes heavily electronically treated, to express different emotional or narrative perspectives, which permit little access to who Kate Bush actually is and create a moment-form effect that’s positively schizophrenic: ‘That girl in the mirror / Between you and me / She don’t stand a chance of / Getting anywhere at all.’
'This house is full of, full of, full of, full of fight'
‘The Dreaming’ is the sound of Kate striking out. Fighting for her own artistic integrity in a sea of pop banalities. The opening track ‘Sat In Your Lap’ steps into the ring with flailing rhythm section punches, establishing Kate’s intention with its Faustian pact lyricism, and uncompromisingly strange instrumentation. She is greedy to push boundaries and gain enlightenment and knowledge by stepping over a threshold of normality into an unfamiliar landscape. Kate uses Fairlight sampling, sound effects galore, spoken voices, traditional and ethnic musics, backwards masking, unusual time-signatures and changes, and all manner of unlikely instrumentation. The more conventional instrumentation is often processed massively. Just when the listener thinks they are in more familiar Bush territory they can be left hanging in mid air (the choirboy sections of ‘All The Love’, the chamber orchestrated bridge in ‘Houdini’) or suddenly swept up by an Irish jig (Night Of The Swallow). If there is one over-riding lyrical impression it is of entrapment, incarceration, restriction and the accompanying yearning to escape and taste independence and freedom. The album cover and its allusion to the song ‘Houdini’ make this explicit. This is the source of the fight and passion in the album, culminating in the final song ‘Get Out Of My House’ which has to be one of the most passionate and intense songs in Bush’s catalogue. This is the sonic approximation of a furious psychic battle, with allusions to sorcery and exorcism. It sounds like she is destroying her voice as she sings most of the lyrics with a barking and spitting delivery, and repeatedly screams the title, then she leads a chorus of braying donkey impersonations by way of a closing gesture. This album may make some listeners laugh as they take its ambition as a gall to their sensibilities, but all great art polarises opinion anyway. And Kate Bush really meant it. Really”.
One of my favourite Kate Bush albums, I am going to write other features about The Dreaming prior to its fortieth anniversary on 13th September. There is this curiosity and yearning to see what is left in the cupboard. One can picture Bush piecing songs together and honing her work. Whilst the album that we have is the finished work, I don’t think getting a fuller picture takes away anything or distils the album. A fortieth anniversary reissue of The Dreaming would bring a magnificent album to new fans. I think that it would also…
OPEN up exciting new worlds.
