Several songs touched on broadly political themes – land rights, terrorism – but the album always returned to the predicament of the individual. The tongue-twisting ‘Suspended In Gaffa’ was another quest for personal fulfilment, speaking intriguingly of the girl lurking in the mirror “between you and me,” a vivid image of self-doubt and alienation.
Three tracks in particular plotted a path towards the sounds and techniques she would explore further on Hounds Of Love. ‘Night Of The Swallow’ is full of foreboding and shadows, an exquisite match of light and dark, and the deliriously beautiful mix of Baroque balladry and traditional Irish instrumentation is something she would return to several times in the future. Inspired by Paddy’s deep interest and her own background, Bush was well ahead of the game in incorporating Celtic textures into her music. The likes of the Waterboys and Elvis Costello wouldn’t follow suit until several years later.
The combination on ‘All The Love’ of crisp technology and the very pure, human sound of a choral voice pre-empted a similar juxtaposition on ‘Hello Earth’, while ‘Get Out Of My House’ was the one song on The Dreaming where Bush really got hold of a propulsive rhythm by the scruff of the neck and rode it over simple chord changes. In contrast to the choppy, see-sawing rhythms elsewhere on the album, where the groove is rarely sustained for longer than a minute, this track in particular pointed towards her next bold move. Indeed, her original idea of creating a pounding rhythmic record was only partially realised. Paul Hardiman points out that, pre-CD, “sequencing Side A and Side B was hugely important.” Musically, The Dreaming starts with brisk brio but slows to something close to a lament, the closing clatter of ‘Get Out Of My House’ notwithstanding.
The trio of songs at the centre of Side B formed the album’s deep emotional heart. The last of these, ‘Houdini’, was another spectacular song of the supernatural, based on the true tale of Bess, the wife and assistant of renowned escapologist and illusionist Harry Houdini, attempting to communicate with her husband following his death in 1926. Houdini was a committed debunker of spiritualist frauds and séance-scamming hucksters, so he and Bess had devised a code – ‘Rosabelle, believe’, recounted in the song – to ensure she knew that it really was him. In January 1929, the Detroit News reported that Bess had succeeded in contacting Houdini via a séance, but she later came to believe that their code had been betrayed and it was a trick. This barely credible tale of loss, love, sorrow and super-naturalism could hardly not have appealed to Bush, and she battled with the song throughout the album sessions. In the end it still required comprehensive footnotes to explain itself, but the power and feeling in the music – Is love really stronger than death? Perhaps there are some things we can never escape from? – was unmistakeable. The sepia-tinted album cover, shot by Jay and credited to his studio, Kindlight, was also inspired by the song. Bush portrays Bess hiding a tiny gold key in her mouth to slip to her husband as she kisses him before his show, in order to facilitate his escape.
On The Dreaming Bush pulled off her own feat of escapology, slipping loose from the chains of her past. It is a remarkable document in which she at times achieves her long desired feat of becoming the music, as though all we are hearing are not drums, or bass lines, or guitars, but different parts of Bush herself fragmenting into sound, an aural depiction of all her varied (and, in this case, largely negative) emotions. Hugely exciting, but by no means an easy listen. There is a barely contained hysteria in the music that isn’t merely attributable to the dark matter of the songs, but also comes from the vast amount of information, a sense of sonic overload. For all her desire to build space around her songs there is a – compelling – claustrophobia hanging over the proceedings. It is not, as many critics have claimed, over produced; it is simply overloaded. “The trouble with that album is, I think, that in a lot of ways she was using everything she recorded,” said Del Palmer. “Over the years she learned to know what can work and what won’t, and be a bit more discerning.”25
It’s a relatively straightforward process to listen to The Dreaming today and, working backwards, hear how it slots into the great continuum of Bush’s music. At the time, however, it was a truly radical departure. Listen to ‘Blow Away’ and ‘Get Out Of My House’ back-to-back and you get some idea of the strides she made in under two years. She wanted it to be an album that took time to sink in, for the beauty and intricate detail of the songs to emerge slowly. She saw it as a “long lasting album. My favourite records are the ones that grow on you, that you play lots of times and hear something different.”26 That process took more time than she may have thought. To the casual listener, The Dreaming sometimes sounded less like a collection of songs than a series of experiments.
Much of the press reaction was positive, if often baffled, awarding Bush a critical kudos she had previously lacked. Colin Irwin’s review in Melody Maker was perhaps the most thoughtful, capturing the mixture of awe and confusion many felt about the record. ‘Mind boggling,’ he wrote. ‘Always an artist of extremes, Bush has allowed her highly theatrical imagination to run riot, indulging all her musical fantasies, following her rampant instincts, and layering this album with an astonishing array of shrieks and shudders. Initially it is bewildering and not a little preposterous, but try to hang on through the twisted overkill and the histrionic fits and there’s much reward, if only in the sense of danger she constantly courts.’
Within EMI the mood was far less sympathetic or forgiving. You could see their point. There was a hint of petulance about The Dreaming, a bit of, ‘Look, I told you I was an artist’ about its determination to go to extremes. There was no ‘Babooshka’, no ‘Wow’, nothing even close in terms of commercial accessibility. It was dense and demanding, with no easy entry point. Not only did the single feature Rolf Harris on didjeridu and Percy Edwards pretending to be a sheep, but the album ended with a cacophony of braying donkeys. “I think it got to the point of the nearest album we ever returned to the artist,” says Brian Southall. “There is a clause in all contracts that gives the record company the right to refuse, or return, or object. From conversations I had, that was the closest EMI got to returning an album in my time.”
Bob Mercer had left his position in 1980 to become an executive at EMI Films, depriving Bush of a key ally within the company. Luckily she found another in David Munns, a former product manager who had left EMI UK in 1979 to work for EMI-Canada, but returned in 1982 as head of A&R and marketing for EMI UK, a position with a far-reaching remit. According to Southall, it was Munns who effectively made the unilateral decision to accept, if not actively support, The Dreaming. “Without question he was very powerful,” says Southall. “If he got behind something he had the authority to make it work. He was always an advocate of Kate’s and made an enormous difference to her career, because there was a danger of her falling off the radar.”
His loyalty to Bush was unequivocal and very useful. From a commercial point of view EMI had every reason to be concerned. Radio play for any of The Dreaming material was sadly lacking, with EMI undertaking an almost apologetic attitude to their campaign. Bush’s personal profile, however, remained high. She undertook a sizeable amount of press for the record, partly because she believed in it and partly because she knew it needed her backing, and was still willing to turn up on children’s television programmes and lukewarm talk shows, even consenting to a Radio One roadshow appearance, the Holy Grail of banality, but to little material effect. The Dreaming debuted at number three in the album charts but fell swiftly, selling only some 60,000 copies compared to The Kick Inside’s million plus, a steep and significant commercial decline between albums one and four. Following the success of ‘Sat In Your Lap’, released a year previously, the UK singles from the record also flopped dramatically. ‘The Dreaming’ limped to 48, receiving largely negative reviews and struggling to secure airplay, while the expensive video, co-directed by Bush, was all but ignored. It was, in truth, a supremely odd and bloody-minded choice of lead single, turning Bush
’s calling card, her remarkable voice, into a nasal Australian twang and containing, by conventional standards, no clear hook. The follow-up, ‘There Goes A Tenner’, disappeared into the brine without leaving even a ripple. “It’s questionable that EMI ever sold the amount of Kate Bush records that they could have done and should have done,” says Bob Mercer. “But that was because of her, not because of EMI.”
Had it been a question of simple number-crunching Bush may have begun to find life a little more difficult but Munns, to his credit, could see the bigger picture. This was not so much a decline in fortunes as an indication of what an anomaly ‘Wuthering Heights’ had been in the first place. As Brian Southall points out, “If you’re dealing with Duran Duran you’re talking about commercial records, [and] you can go back and say we need a couple of hits on this. You can’t argue that with Kate because it wasn’t part of her make up to start with. You can’t go back and say there’s no 3½ minute pop single on here. She’d say, ‘I know. I didn’t write one.’”
She was an artist, not a pop star. Sometimes the two concepts would meet in the middle, more often they wouldn’t. Munns accepted this as fact. “This is my favourite artist in the world,” he said. “But for someone like her it’s sometimes a lonely road and that can be difficult for people to understand. Make a record that’s a bit obscure and some people in the company may start to say things to the artist that aren’t sensible. Well, EMI and Kate just lost the plot for a while.”27
With The Dreaming the genie was well and truly out of the bottle. Bush had staked her claim, marked her territory. If she was a little bruised and disappointed by reactions to the record, it didn’t alter her opinion of the work. She had revelled in the freedom. Although at times undoubtedly she had missed the steadying influence of Jon Kelly, she declared The Dreaming to be her favourite album by far, the first occasion where she had come close to hearing her own ambitions reflected back at her. It was the record where she delivered on the promises she had made to herself while making Never For Ever, the moment where she absolutely disappeared into the limitless possibilities of the studio, and the music.
Everything she had went into it. It had cost her a fortune, way beyond the advance she received, took her a year of almost solid recording, hopping around studios and between engineers, and it had pushed her to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. The record company hated it and it killed her as a singles artists for four years. It was the album that nearly sank the ship, her “she’s gone mad”28 record, but the experience simply made her more convinced and determined than ever about the need to conduct her career in her own way. It was a decisive moment. Hereafter, all attempts at identifying signs of the performer Bush had been on the ‘Tour Of Life’ and the albums that preceded it are akin to staring at another country. The Dreaming was a definitive act of secession from all that had gone before.
9
A Deal With God
“WHEN she got into the studio to do music she was like a Yogi,” observes Stewart Avon Arnold. “She was completely lost to the world.” Bush had travelled deep within herself while making The Dreaming, emerging to find herself cut adrift from a life that needed some urgent attention. The studio had become an inclement micro-climate, a hostile, self-contained ecosystem fuelled by smoke, chocolate, fast food – she was “lasting three months on Chinese takeaways during the last part of the album,”1 she said – and far too little sleep, a place where she cultivated an absolute fixation with what she was doing to the detriment of almost everything else. The only reason she was able to maintain a relationship with Del, presumably, is because he was right there beside her in the eye of the storm.
In early June 1982, as soon as the album was mastered, she had gone to Jamaica for a break but failed to unwind. “It was a real culture shock,” she said. “I went from this dingy little London studio with no windows to absolute paradise. I could barely stand it. Even the sound of the birds was defeaning.”2 She returned to immediately undertake heavy promotion. Having conceived, rehearsed, performed, co-directed and shot the extremely complex video for ‘The Dreaming’, she was back on the bandwagon again, making personal appearances in Glasgow, Newcastle and Birmingham, miming to ‘Suspended In Gaffa’ and ‘The Dreaming’ on French, German and Italian TV. When she finally jumped off the treadmill in early November she disappeared from public view almost completely. Houdini strikes again.
During the next two-and-a-half years Bush registered only the faintest readings on the radar. Band Aid and Live Aid, the most visible and culturally significant music events of the decade, occurred in late 1984 and July 1985 respectively and found room for every star, megastar, has-been, once-was and might-be in the global rock and pop firmament; nevertheless, both occasions passed off without even the merest whiff of Bush’s involvement. She wasn’t invited to participate, although she claims that, had she been asked to perform at Wembley Stadium, “I would have said yes, I’m sure.”3 Perhaps. The fact that she didn’t even have to consider whether or not to sing in front of a live audience of 82,000 and a television audience of 400m viewers only goes to show how far from shore her ship had sailed.*
During her prolonged absence there were mischievous media rumours of nervous breakdowns, plastic surgery – “were those pin-tucks around those pixie ears?” asked Sounds, presumably safe in the knowledge that the answer was ‘no’ – and colossal weight gain, backed up by photographs of her “ballooned” to “18 stone”. The reality was less dramatic. At 5‘ 3″ and a little over seven stone, any additional weight was always going to be hard to hide; after months of largely sedentary work and poor eating habits Bush did, indeed, occasionally appear a little heavier, with more than a hint of an extra chin and rounded cheeks.
There was similarly loose tittle-tattle about her attending drug rehabilitation clinics in either France or the Caribbean; the lyrics to parts of Hounds Of Love – “poppies heavy with seed … take me deeper and deeper;” “cutting out little lines;” “spitting snow;” “speeding” – were later cited as evidence that she had developed a serious habit. Hard drug addiction was the stock rumour in the Eighties when a pop star had the audacity to take longer than a year between albums: Elvis Costello endured similar treatment in 1985 when, according to press reports, he was either a junkie or an alcoholic. He was neither, and nor was Bush. Not one of the scores of sources interviewed during the research for this book has ever seen her consume a Class A drug, and she has never been much of a drinker. In the snowbound Seventies and Eighties, where cocaine use was routine and rife, her predilection for the occasional joint seemed almost quaint. Tea (up to 20 cups a day), chocolate and cigarettes have been her most enduring vices, but work has always been her addiction. It took her six months to recover from the experience of making The Dreaming. “I was just a complete wreck, physically and mentally,” she said. “I’d wake up in the morning and find I couldn’t move … eventually I went to see my Pa.”4
Dr Bush diagnosed stress and nervous fatigue and prescribed a rest cure. Body and mind needed her attention. She did as she was instructed, reconnected with her family and friends, many of whom she hadn’t seen in over a year, went to the movies, bought a VW Golf and began to drive herself, spent quality time with Del and her cats, caught up with her music listening, mostly classical, went for walks, and generally pottered about doing small, important things. Gardening and cooking became therapeutic pursuits. She stocked up on fresh fruit and vegetables and instead of takeaways she prepared at least one healthy meal a day. Even this simple task gave her life a domestic focus, a sense of calm routine.
During this period she implemented three major life changes, later recalled as some of her “best decisions”.5 One was to move out of London to the countryside; another was to take up serious dance instruction again and to overhaul her diet; and the third was to build her own studio, this time to professional specifications. As these changes took shape, life and music began to roll in tandem once again, creating a happy, healthy, almost
idyllic context within which she set about creating her greatest work: Hounds Of Love.
Bush and Palmer moved into a seventeenth-century farmhouse in the Kent countryside in 1983, not far from Sevenoaks and within easy commute of Wickham Farm and central London. She described her new home in typically romantic terms. “One day we suddenly stumbled across it and a back door had been left open so we were able to go inside,” said Bush. “I’m sure there’s a kind of force, a magnetic energy saying, ‘Come in, we’re meant for each other.’”6
London had become a negative influence. She spoke of the “air of doom” hanging over 1981 and 1982,7 and although she turned the sometimes oppressive energy of a big city into a positive creative force on The Dreaming, she sought a fresher, cleaner source this time around. “The stimulus of the countryside is fantastic,” she said. “I sit at my piano and watch skies moving and trees blowing and that’s far more exciting than buildings and roads and millions of people.”8 In 1983 she spent a “summer out of the house, something I didn’t do for several years,”9 and began to appreciate simple pleasures. “She bought the cottage down in Kent, and suddenly you’d ring up and she’d be gardening,” recalls Brian Southall.
Slowly, she relaxed back into a rounded life, searching for a balance she had struggled to maintain since 1978. The changes coincided with a new resolve concerning her involvement with Del. While still firmly holding to the opinion that “I don’t feel our relationship is anything to do with anyone other than us,”10 she no longer actively sought to keep it secret. On one extremely rare occasion during this period she lifted her head above the parapet, during a radio phone-in on July 29, 1983, the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday. She was asked by the typically brash, brass-necked DJ why ‘we never hear any dirty gossip about you and fellas, Kate?’ “Well it’s probably ’cause I’ve got a very nice fella,” she replied with a laugh. “His name’s Del…. Del from Kent.”11
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