For the musicians, recording the backing tracks for the songs was a process somewhat akin to assembling furniture when the instructions are in Aramaic and written in disappearing ink. A typical session on a song such as ‘Suspended In Gaffa’ could be a long, strange affair. Bush would first play the song on the piano and the drummer and bass player would drop in and try to follow. Then the questions would start. The drummer might ask, ‘You know the second time we go to the fifth section, something strange happens there and I end up on the wrong beat.’ Where most musicians deal in conventional verse, chorus, bridge structures, Bush’s songs – though not always lacking choruses – were often split into several distinct sections, sometimes in different time signatures. The musicians would be constantly writing down where the changes fell and frantically matching them to the lyrics. Bush would play the song again and everyone would concentrate intensely, trying to find a way of playing such a choppy piece of music as seamlessly as Bush seemed able to sitting at the piano. Often the entire ensemble collapsed into exasperated hysterics.
“I did a lot of editing together of different takes and it got very confusing at times,” says Launay. “Eventually you’d get there but it would be really complicated. I don’t think she had any realisation of how complex her songs were – to her they were very simple. She would explain things to the different musicians who came down, not in terms of notes, but in terms of the feeling she wanted to get across.”
She sat in the control room, watching intently as they played parts over and over again, trying to capture what she wanted. For much of the album Bush, as producer, was fighting the creeping suspicion that many of the musicians were looking at her and thinking, ‘God, does she really know what she’s doing?’ Some of them were indeed having doubts along those lines. Hers was neither a conventional nor terribly ‘musical’ way of working, and it was hard work for the session players, even those who had played with her for several years. “I did a lot of the routining for the songs on that album, but I just stepped aside in the end, I think I walked away,” says Brian Bath. “I felt a bit superfluous to what was going on. After five hours of playing the same bit you think, ‘What do I do? Am I going anywhere, is anything happening?’ Some of the stuff was just overdone. The Dreaming, to me, was just a massive noise, I couldn’t really listen to it.”
Other loyal servants agreed that too much choice might just as well have been no choice at all. “She was thinking more in terms of production and using unusual sounds,” says Ian Bairnson, who appeared on ‘Sat In Your Lap’ and ‘Leave It Open’. “That’s what people did when the technology thing went off like a bomb: ‘They’ll never guess what this is!’ There was Midi stuff, drum machines, Fairlights, and if you’ve got the money there it is. She had all these tools to play with and in some ways it was too much.”
The fact that she was not quite in mastery of the technology was both thrilling and time consuming. Once the basic tracks were laid down it was a question of digging away at the songs and letting her imagination loose on the machines, exploring the freedom that allowed her and Launay to indulge every single idea she had, often chasing their tails and ending up back where they started. Bush’s stated desire was for the music to be “experimental and quite cinematic”,10 and Launay felt that his job was to capture the essence of the films playing over and over again in her mind.
“We were always sat in front of this desk, just me and her, and at the end of the desk there were two huge bars of Cadbury’s milk chocolate and this huge bag of weed,” he recalls. “I think it helped make her imagination real. On ‘Houdini’, the lyrics to that were all very clear and when you’re working on those songs you’re there. It’s like working on a film, it’s extraordinary. I saw Sweeney Todd recently and that film made me think of Kate Bush: Olde Worlde London and England, a lot of superstition, gruesome tales, and tales of love. Musically you could tell she was in this world. The way she would communicate was very much like an excited kid: ‘How do we make those characters and the feelings they have into the music?’ ‘Can we do this, can we do that?’”
On a cover of Donovan’s ‘Lord Of The Reedy River’, one of the first things she and Launay recorded, specifically intended for the B-side to ‘Sat In Your Lap’, she wanted to sound like she was floating down a river as she sang, like some doomed heroine trapped in a pre-Raphaelite painting, so she descended to the disused swimming pool in the basement of the Townhouse in order that her voice could be recorded reflecting off the water.
To create the spacey metallic background sound on ‘The Dreaming’ she plugged a guitar and a piano into a harmoniser which was set an octave higher and connected to a reverb plate fed back into the harmoniser, resulting in the note going up and up and up in octaves until it went so high you couldn’t hear it. This effect was used on several songs. “It was an approach of: plug things in, play a few notes, see what it does, work out how you can manipulate the instrument you’re playing to work with those effects, and you end up with something unusual and different,” says Launay. For the drums they miked up 12-foot long strips of corrugated iron to make them sound like cannons firing from across a valley.
Partly inspired by Bush’s trip to Australia as a child (she ‘met’ a kangaroo and Paddy ‘met’ an emu, she recalled, both referenced in the song) and again in late 1978, ‘The Dreaming’ focused on the plight of Australian Aboriginals, their land exploited for ore to make plutonium and their people abandoned to the ravages of alcohol (“Devils in a bottle”), although her assertion in an interview that there were only “about two thousand aborigines left”11 suggested a certain lack of factual rigour. The song was built on the bones of a hard rhythmic tattoo, and marked her first collaboration with the Australian singer, painter and TV personality Rolf Harris. Bush had loved Harris’ ‘Sun Arise’ since she was a youngster and still cites it today as a seminal piece of ‘world music’. The song was a key inspiration for ‘The Dreaming’, prompting her to write a part for didjeridu on Fairlight and invite Harris into the studio to play it. She was hoping to have a blow herself, but was denied. “I went up [to the studio] the day the didjeridu arrived, and she wasn’t allowed to play the thing, which was deeply upsetting for her,” says Brian Southall, by now director of corporate PR at EMI. “Women aren’t allowed to play didjeridu, it’s Aboriginal law, and she wanted to emancipate the didjeridu for all women around the world, God bless her! It was great fun.” Harris taught Paddy how to play it instead.
At one point Robert Palmer, working next door, came in to say hello and throw a few kind words her way. “Every time somebody made a compliment about her music she would look like a deer caught in the headlights,” says Launay. “She’d literally say, ‘Wow!’ and blush. I don’t think she was aware of her talent. She is a genius, but it’s a kind of innocent genius.”
Because she was using a commercial studio owned by Virgin Records, Bush was at the mercy of their schedules. The Townhouse had other bookings and Launay was needed elsewhere, so the sessions moved to Abbey Road for several weeks in July and August, where she worked with house engineer Haydn Bendall, whom she first met when he was working on Roy Harper’s Universal Soldier. They recorded ‘Pull Out The Pin’ and ‘Night Of The Swallow’ during the sessions, which Bendall recalls as being “fragmented, difficult, very long hours. Everyone worked very hard.”
At one point during the recording of ‘Night Of The Swallow’ the musicians utilised all three Abbey Road studios at once: as Stuart Elliott’s played drums in Studio Three, the sound was fed through speakers into Studio One, where the ambience echoing through the cavernous hall was also taped, while the results were simultaneously recorded on the console in Studio Two. Afterwards she flew to Dublin and spent a day in Windmill Lane, working all night to record members of traditional Irish band Planxty (a long-cherished favourite of Jay and Paddy) and The Chieftains playing Bill Whelan’s exquisite arrangement for the song. And then straight back to the studio in London.
Perhaps unsu
rprisingly there followed a kind of crisis where Bush felt she was becoming lost in the woods of her own imagination, and struggled to locate the trail of breadcrumbs leading back to her initial inspiration. “I seemed to be losing sight of my direction, I wasn’t really sure what to do next,” she said.12 As the sole arbiter of the album’s progress, the responsibility sometimes weighed heavily but “she [was] very stoical about that,” says Bendall. “She doesn’t give up and she’s extremely tenacious.” A spontaneous visit to Loch Ness on the sleeper seemed to clear her mind, and she returned after a spot of monster-hunting with renewed focus. In the period leading up to Christmas 1981 she worked at home, concentrating on the songs, changing lyrics, creating backing vocals, making sure this wasn’t simply going to be an exercise in style over substance.
The final, interminable sessions were completed with engineer Paul Hardiman, now available, beginning at Odyssey Studios in the autumn of 1981 and completed at Advision Studios on Gosfield Street (hence the ‘Gosfield Goers’ credited on ‘The Dreaming’) between January and May 1981. Hardiman had pre-punk experience with groups such as Yes, ELP, Slade and Fleetwood Mac, but he had also worked recently with experimental punk band Wire on their first three albums, Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154. He was an innovative, somewhat eccentric presence with a highly attuned sense of the ridiculous, and his patience and understanding were a vital part of getting the album finished. “I understood the long haul,” says Hardiman. “As Kate is a snail-paced perfectionist, you [knew you] were in for the long run, which was OK.” Bush and Palmer both had a great deal of affection for him.
Although perhaps three quarters of what can be heard on the album had already been completed, these long sessions provided the all important top line: finalising lyrics, adding instrumentation, textures, new players, miking up a car door for the opening ‘Bang!’ on ‘The Dreaming’, stripping away, adding, subtracting.
In particular, she worked relentlessly on the vocals. Still lazily stereotyped as ‘hee-hee’ high and squeaky, Bush felt the way she had previously used her voice lent her music an association of sweetness and light that undermined much of her more serious lyrical intent. She wanted, she said, to give her voice “some balls”.13 Having recorded guide vocals at the Townhouse and Abbey Road, she now re-recorded the master vocals in sections, a highly intricate process considering that many of the songs utilised five or six completely different voices which required not only a different physical approach from her as a singer, but also different textures and production techniques. “It took weeks to do the vocals,” she said. “Especially because we were having to find the right effects and ambience for each voice.”14
Finding the precise timbre to communicate the emotions of the lyrics was an imperative. For ‘Houdini’ she did all the things singers aren’t supposed to do – drank a pint of milk, ate two bars of chocolate – to build up mucus in her throat and make her voice match the “spit and gravel in the thought.”15 A similarly exact marriage of vocal sound and song subject can be heard on the sobbing chorus of ‘All The Love’; in the desperate roar of “I love life!” on ‘Pull Out The Pin’; in the soaring tension of ‘Night Of The Swallow’ and the primal scream of ‘Get Out Of My House.’ Deeper, stronger, abandoned yet supremely controlled, it is the range and shifting textures of her voice, amid all the surrounding techno-fuss, that is the album’s greatest triumph. It was almost like hearing a girl becoming a woman.
Advision became a hermetically sealed environment, running to it own strange yet inevitable sense of time and logic. “Every night we ate take-away food, watched the evening news and returned to the dingy little treasure trove to dig for jewels,” Bush recalled.16 Del later talked about “coming up”17 from the windowless basement studio as though they were on a submarine. “Musicians were not around most of the time,” says Hardiman. “After their particular overdub was finished that was it until next time. The only constant was Del. One came with the other.”
During these long final sessions the fabric of reality started to warp and fray. The last two months coincided with the Falklands War, and they would surface occasionally to be greeted with a downward spiral of grim news. Del would look over at Hardiman and tell him they were both going to be called up for action. Towards the end Bush “was exhausted, and on nothing but a grape diet,” says Hardiman. She would work a minimum of 15-hour days at the studio then go home and listen to rough takes of the day’s work to establish what she needed to do tomorrow, and even during meal breaks at the studio she would be tinkering with the Fairlight in the control room. It was all consuming, leaving room for nothing else. “When I come out of the studio,” she said, “I feel like a Martian.”18
The sessions became “hours of crippling tedium with occasional bursts of extreme excitement,”19 and they resorted to unusual methods to keep spirits afloat. Hardiman created the character ‘My Dad’, which involved wearing a bald ginger wig he had bought in Wall’s Carnival Stores on Caversham Road in Reading. At moments of crisis, ‘My Dad’ would arrive and don a pair of polystyrene cups with the bottoms removed (or, as Hardiman calls them, ‘sound enhancing ear attachments’) which, when fitted over the wig, helped delineate the sound. “In times of ear fatigue these helped enormously,” says Hardiman, adding. “I am not making this up. They added focus to the session.”
Another unlikely source of inspiration for ‘My Dad’ was the Star Turn On 45 Pints series of records, a Geordie pub singer spoof of the Stars On 45 medleys that were all the rage at the time. The closing minutes of ‘Get Out Of My House’, where Bush and Hardiman take on the role of ‘Eeyore’ and begin braying like donkeys was, says Hardiman “based on the ‘You Are The Sunshine Of My Life’ segment of Star Turn Pints On 45, in itself a parody of the Stars On 45 single ‘Stars On Stevie’, a gallop through the hits of Stevie Wonder which was a hit in February 1982. “It was obviously ‘My Dad’ singing the part of Eeyore,” says Hardiman. “Thinking back, Eeyore was an early version of the lead vocal sound we refined for some of Hounds Of Love.” From tiny acorns, indeed.
In other words, it was a long, strange, thoroughly exhausting trip. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done,” according to Bush at the time, “Even harder than touring. It was worrying, very frightening.”20 Even mixing took months. She had decided on a digital mix using Advision’s console, but “we had a lot of problems…. editing was the main one, it was so time consuming.”21
The Dreaming was finally completed on May 21, 1982, cut by Ian Cooper at the Townhouse on June 4 and released on September 13, 1982, almost exactly two years to the day after Never For Ever. It’s a bewitching album, Bush’s first truly unified record in intent if not always in sound, a shedding of several skins and a punishing process of reinvention. The lyrics return again and again to conflict and claustrophobia, destruction and flight, battling inhibitions and barriers. “It was about how terribly cruel people could be, what we do to ourselves, what amount of loneliness we expose ourselves to,” she said of the album. “It was a searching, questioning album and the music did tear you from one point to the next.”22 The troubling ‘Leave It Open’ – another “hee haw” moment, another gun song – encapsulated the album’s bleak message: “Harm is in us.”
The Dreaming did not sound like the work of a happy person; indeed, it seemed to be the consequence of a woman intent on making herself suffer unnecessarily for her art, who mistrusted her natural optimism and her outwardly straightforward life. “I’ve always felt … that in order to write something, you know, that has meaning … that you should be unhappy, that you should be in some kind of torment,” she said.23 There was a definite whiff of the determinedly tortured about The Dreaming. Even a relatively lightweight track like ‘There Goes A Tenner’, a comedy crime caper narrated in Bush’s soft, sing-song cockney, had a murky subtext. The Ealingesque story of amateur robbers plotting their ‘big job’ but being stricken with paranoia when the time comes to execute their plans, it requires only a small interpretive leap to h
ear it as a subconscious comment on Bush’s own feelings of fear and insecurity as she sets about producing her own record. Beyond a quest for spiritual knowledge, the opening roll of ‘Sat In Your Lap’ also speaks of creative frustration, veering rapidly from pleasure at the incremental gains she has made (“My goal is moving near”) to a gloomy realisation of how far she remains from achieving fulfilment (“Then it disappears”).
‘Get Out Of My House’, inspired by reading Stephen King’s novel, The Shining, about a building that is possessed, brings the inanimate to life and in doing so lends a shocking solidity to Bush’s hidden anger, giving full voice to a woman who has been intruded upon and has had her privacy and sanctuary violated. It works as an indirect comment on the invasive nature of fame, and remains one of the most effective and disturbing examples of Bush dramatising her Id, giving living expression to her darkest fears and latent instincts. Then again, many people simply laughed when they heard it.
Every song was in some way extraordinary. ‘All The Love’ opens with the casually brilliant, almost quintessential Bush line, “The first time that I died …” and laments the difficulty of expressing love and letting others in. It ends with a heartbreaking litany of warm, familiar voices saying ‘goodbye’ on the telephone – these are the voices of Bush’s friends and family, taken from real phone messages – while the singer hides behind her answering machine, contemplating “all the love we should have given.”
On ‘Pull Out The Pin’ – musique concrete meets Jimmy Bryant in the Asian jungle – Bush proved yet again that she is truly a poet of the senses, vividly capturing the darker forces that animate humanity and the stark terror of warfare in a song about Vietnamese soldiers who can literally sniff out their American opponents because they reek of the west: sweat, cologne, tobacco and “Yankee hash.” You can almost feel the heat and taste the humid stench spilling from the speakers as the song scythes through the undergrowth. “I think that the essence of all art is sensuality,” she said,24 and she has spent her working life proving it. Moving. Breathing. Humming. Dreaming. Feeling: the sensual world.
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