Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  It was hardly on a par with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor breaking cover on some paparazzi-plagued Roman strada, but in the carefully calibrated world of Bush’s personal life it marked a quantum leap. When she launched Hounds Of Love at the London Planetarium in September 1985 she arrived hand-in-hand with Del, the first time they had ever appeared in public as a couple, and she opened up tentatively in interviews, revealing how she would cook an evening meal and they would watch trashy Saturday evening game shows or films taped off the television, or how he gifted her an antique pocketwatch for her birthday. Del, in turn, would talk touchingly about the fact that there were “two Kates: there is the girl at home I love and there is Kate the star. I must admit I sometimes wonder what she sees in me….”12

  For those who could scarcely imagine the woman in the ‘Babooshka’ video or singing ‘Get Out Of My House’ as a happily domesticated creature, tending to her man and her marigolds, she was keen to (over) emphasise their status as “Mr and Mrs Boring! At home Del and I just potter about, being ordinary. We give cuddles and we have rows, all that. Del and I argue a great deal – over songs – but we consider it healthy. Who wins? Normally, I do. I’m not the shy, retiring, fragile butterfly creature I sometimes read about. My relationship with Del is very stable. We work together, we live together, it works so well for us. That can be a very intense set-up, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s all very close and direct.”13

  Bush kept the house in Eltham as her London base, but she spent less and less time there. When she was in residence she was often to be found in her private dance studio, a large room suffused with natural light, fitted out with an elegant wooden floor and a mirrored wall for choreography. Taking up dance again was highly significant. After the ‘Tour Of Life’ she had stopped dancing to any disciplined degree, simply lacking the time. She would call up her dancers for videos or television appearances and they would hastily assemble a routine (on one memorable occasion, choreography for the ‘There Goes A Tenner’ video was thrashed out in the goods van of a train travelling between London and Manchester) but she missed the regular interaction, that discipline of taking classes with a tutor. Learning rather than simply doing always opened up something within Bush and her music. “Not only did I feel I needed to be fit again,” she said, “but I really wanted the stimulus and inspiration that comes from true teachers.”14

  Her closest dance partner, Stewart Avon Arnold, was unavailable, busy with his own projects, and so she started taking private classes in London with Dyane Gray-Cullert, a Detroit born African-American with an impressive CV in many respected European dance companies. Like Robin Kovac, Gray-Cullert’s background was in Martha Graham technique and contemporary dance, although she also taught Bush ballet, something that led directly to the choreography for the ‘Running Up That Hill’ video.

  Significantly, when she returned to sustained dance instruction her writing seemed to gain an extra dimension and her songs positively took flight. She had unearthed the sound and textures she wanted on The Dreaming but it was a subterranean album, dark and inward. It had been a necessary step, a purging of sorts and a powerful platform for further progression, as well as a triumph on its own terms, with a certain kind of twisted beauty, but the music – and its creator – had in the process lost some of its vivacity and spring. Bush has always found inspiration in the grotesque, the weird and unsettling, but out and out bleakness doesn’t suit her. Synaesthetically speaking, The Dreaming was an album of gloomy browns, deep dark reds, blacks and blinding whites, full of soil and sand and dust. Hounds Of Love, on the other hand, was to be decked out in greens, light blues, dusky purples and silvers. It was to be the bright mirror image of its shadowed predecessor, where the window to the natural world is wide open. “After the demanding lands that my last set of songs took me to, I had to think again about where to go,” she said. “Maybe somewhere a little sunnier.”15

  The experience of finding a symbiosis of her creative pursuits and her home environment took her back to some of her happiest times. “For me it’s like 1976,” she wrote to her fan club in the summer of 1983. “It was a particularly special year, when things were full of adventure. I was dancing every day, and singing and writing all night. I feel in many ways that ’76 and this year are linked together, for me.”16

  The move to the countryside and return to dance helped to clear away much of the cloud-cover hovering over her music. The final breath of fresh air was a return to making music at East Wickham Farm. She was painfully aware that the degree of autonomy she was afforded by EMI came at a shockingly high price: £90 per hour, to be precise, the going rate for hiring Abbey Road. Given the frequent round-the-clock sessions for The Dreaming, this meant the outlay routinely weighed in at well over £1,000 per day. It was a crippling overhead, while an awareness of the clock ticking also tended to make her creative muscles seize up.

  Once again taking a lead from Peter Gabriel, who had recently built his own studio, pre-Real World, at his home in Ashcombe House, near Bath, Bush invested heavily in fitting a professional 48-track studio in the barn at the farm, in the spot where she used to poke away at the old church organ after school and later bashed through the songs for Lionheart with the KT Bush Band. The decision had a pleasing synchronicity, another return to a solid, enduring love. She was involved in the design and conditioning, and Dr Bush played an active role, building parts himself, overseeing and advising. It wasn’t quite state of the art, but it was sufficiently well appointed, featuring a Soundcraft mixing desk – later replaced with an SSL board – two Studer A80 24-track machines, plus compressors, emulators, a Fairlight and a Quantec room simulator.

  Del was beginning to develop aspirations as an engineer. Aided by Paul Hardiman’s generous mentoring, The Dreaming had marked the beginning of his move away from simply being a bass player towards becoming more involved in the technical aspects of Bush’s records, an ambition he would pursue further on Hounds Of Love. Bush, too, had become comfortable around technology, very much au fait with the terminology and the purpose of all the gadgets, although at this stage she was rarely hands on. “She’d know how to manipulate sound if not actually do the twiddling herself,” says Haydn Bendall, who engineered much of Hounds Of Love. “She’d come up with lots of suggestions like, ‘Maybe we should compress that, maybe we should expand that, maybe we should gate that or put a pre-delay on the reverb or use a Lexicon reverb.’ She knew what sounds were available, but I – or Del or somebody else – would kind of be the mechanics. And she had an incredible audio memory. She’d remember a take she did on a vocal where one particular word was great, or that on track 13 there was this great sound.”

  The struggles with The Dreaming and its poor commercial performance had forced her to reflect on her aims: yes, she concluded, I want to produce my own albums and, no, I don’t really care about being famous or selling millions of records. I just want to be allowed to do the work. It did not happen without a fight. “It was felt that my producing Hounds Of Love wasn’t such a good idea,” she later recalled. “For the first time I felt I was actually meeting resistance artistically.”17 Once again David Munns was an invaluable ally who cleared her path and ensured she was left alone to deliver the finished product when she was ready. Beyond her contact with him, her relationship with EMI by this stage was cool and distant. There was a definite sense of raised stakes, that after The Dreaming she had to deliver something both commercially viable and artistically profound.

  Completed in the autumn of 1983, her new studio became a private study, a place where she could write and create at will according to her own natural rhythms rather than the exaggerated pace of the record industry. The clock stopped ticking, the meter was no longer running. Most importantly, it was a happy and supportive place in which to work. Where Advision and Townhouse had been dark, dingy caves lacking any natural light or sense of time – places where the real world all too easily ceased to matter – the farm studio was physically and
emotionally connected to the life she was singing about. Windows looked out to the grounds where she danced and dreamed as a child, while one of the recording booths was the old stable, with the flagstone floor intact. The family were always popping in and out.

  “We’d be there doing a track and suddenly Jay would turn up to say hello, sit there for 15 minutes and nod,” says Charlie Morgan, who returned to the fold to drum on several songs on the album. “Then Pad would come in and start talking to Kate about some mandolin part he had an idea for, and Kate would say, ‘OK, let’s put that down tomorrow.’ And then suddenly Hannah would come in with a tray stacked high with teapots and cakes and we’d all have a cup of tea. And then Dad would come in and say, ‘What’re you going to eat tonight? I’ll go and get a take out, what do you fancy, do you want some Indian, or a Chinese?’ Someone would drive off and pick up a curry – it was all so conducive to creativity.”

  This was how she had always wanted to work; you can see her striving for the ideal as far back as Lionheart, but it was beyond her reach at that time. As soon as she had built her home base and peopled it with her most loved and trusted supporters, the relationship between her life and her work became far more harmonious. And a great gust of fresh air blew through her music.

  There was to be a marked shift in the recording process this time around. Working from home with a piano, a Fairlight, a Linn drum programme and her voice, recording onto an eight-track Soundcraft desk and tape machine, Bush and Palmer worked up much of the album in the Kent countryside between the summer and autumn of 1983. These were not traditional demos, early scratchings to be referenced but ultimately discarded in favour of re-recorded versions. Instead, they were kept and built upon at East Wickham Farm for the final versions. In this way, the demos from the home studio morphed into the masters, and the initial spark of emotion and inspiration in each song could be preserved. The writing and recording processes finally dissolved into one another, a much longed for development: using the Fairlight as her primary compositional tool, Bush was now creating in sound and had ceased to distinguish between the two.

  The first song to arrive was ‘Running Up That Hill’, composed in the summer of 1983 in her music room, looking out through the window to the valley below. The track’s most instantly recognisable components – the riff, that searing Fairlight part, and the rumbling electronic drums, programmed by Del – were present from the very beginning, located right at the heart of the song.

  Originally called ‘A Deal With God’, the song spoke passionately of Bush’s impossible wish to become her lover, and he her, in order that they could finally know what the other felt and desired. It was a sobering comment on misfiring communication and the impossibility of men and women ever really understanding one another, and yet – in capturing the basic human need to strive for compatibility – it was not without hope nor optimism. ‘Running Up That Hill’ was another artful and wholly original take on gender roles and relationships, but it also worked as a wider artistic statement. The reason Bush has always so vigorously resisted being defined by her looks, her background and her sex is because she craves a 360 degree perspective as an artist. She has sung as a child, a ghost, a man, a woman, a donkey…. She is eternally seeking to ‘swap places’ because she desperately wants to cover all possible angles of available experience.

  ‘Running Up That Hill’ took her an evening to write. The component parts of her next composition, ‘Hounds Of Love’, were also assembled quickly, inspired by one of her favourite films, the 1957 British horror flick Night Of The Demon, a lip-smacking tale of a Satanic occultist unleashing a demonic yet terrifyingly ill-defined beast on those he curses. Many of the other tracks – ‘And Dream Of Sheep’, ‘Under Ice’, ‘Watching You Without Me’ – also came relatively easily. Contrary to the evidence suggested by the yawning gaps between her records, Bush is not necessarily a slow writer; it is capturing the nuances of texture and mood that takes so much time. “I remember Paddy saying she often writes an entire album quite quickly, but then spends ten years recording it!” says Colin Lloyd-Tucker, who sung on The Red Shoes and has frequently collaborated with Paddy Bush. “It used to drive him mad – ‘Oh for God’s sake, Kate!’ I don’t think she has ever struggled with the songwriting process, it’s a natural thing for her.”

  The alternative version of ‘Hounds Of Love’ featured on the This Woman’s Work box set offers a tantalising glimpse into her writing process. The significant elements are already present – the scything string figure (performed here on Fairlight, later replaced with cello), the deep, irresistible drum rhythm – yet the song is clearly in its infancy: the lyrics are sketchy and the melody isn’t yet fully formed, but it’s almost there. Between this version and the finished article, however, lay over a year’s intensive work; God, for Bush perhaps more than any other artist, lies buried deep among the details, in some strange pagan future where earth and EQ meet. Making a record is not a quest to achieve technical perfection; it’s far more mysterious and explorative than that. “It’s about selection rather than musicianship,” says Youth, the former Killing Joke bass player who appeared on the album. “She’s after the currency of ideas reflected in the music rather than academic virtuosity.”

  “It’s experimental, but within that I don’t think she’s diverted or goes off on tangents,” says Haydn Bendall of her recording process. “Maybe she doesn’t know exactly what notes, or exactly what sounds or harmonies or melodic structures or dynamics she wants to use, but I believe she has an extremely clear impression of the atmosphere she wants to create. How she achieves that involves the experimentation, but she has an incredible, innate sense of what works for a song. [On Hounds Of Love] we were using Fairlight and Linn drums a lot, and they’d come out with these funny little sounds which you might think weren’t very interesting, and she’d say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful, isn’t that great?’ She’d make it great, and in a way that’s the mark of a genius, to make something fabulous out of a simple idea. She’ll just have a little kernel of an idea that would develop into a huge blossom.”

  ‘Running Up That Hill’ was the gateway to the new record, and most of the rest of the material was written and in reasonable shape by the end of 1983. Aside from the 12 songs on the album, during the sessions she recorded ‘Burning Bridge’, ‘Under The Ivy’, ‘Not This Time’, as well as versions of the traditional tunes ‘My Lagan Love’ and ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’. There may have been several more that have never surfaced. “From what I remember I think we recorded at least twice as many tracks as ended up on the album,” says Charlie Morgan. “There was quite a rate of attrition, I know there’s a bunch of stuff I played on that never made it.”

  There was no shortage of quality material, but Bush had a very clear idea of what she wanted. As soon as she had written the breathtakingly beautiful ballad ‘And Dream Of Sheep’ and its companion piece ‘Under Ice’, she envisioned a record split into two distinct sides, one of strong individual ‘up’ songs and one of darker, interwoven pieces recounting the cinematic tale of a girl cast adrift in the sea at night following some kind of catastrophe, awaiting rescue, slipping in and out of consciousness, trapped between a waking nightmare and dreams that are even worse.

  She had been toying with the idea of writing an extended suite of music for some time, intrigued by the possibilities. “One of the first ideas I had [for the album] was to try a concept,” she said. “It was really the concept side that came first. I was a bit worried that it wouldn’t work, so until I’d written, say, four or five songs, I wouldn’t really know if it was going to be successful. I thought it was wise to just use one side of the album, so there would be half an hour to play with rather than going for an hour’s worth. And the other side, I thought it would be nice to balance with five or six completely different songs, not linked in any way, that were perhaps more positive and up-tempo, so there was a nice balance between the two sides.”18

  Stretching across seven songs on the recor
d’s second side, ‘The Ninth Wave’* was inspired by a lifelong attraction to the dark, deadly romance of water. She loved old black and white war movies, letting the countless images of soldiers being jettisoned from bombers into the sea below play on her imagination, while one of her favourite pieces of art – which she owns – is the Hogsmill Ophelia, a macabre, modernist satire on Millais’ more famous Ophelia featuring the disturbing image of a cracked doll drowned in sewage overspill. As early as 1978 in a teen magazine she had described her “strangest dream”: “I’m sitting on this raft in the middle of a gigantic ocean. There’s no land in sight – just limitless water – yet I have no fear and no desire to be rescued. Just a feeling of complete peace.” These stimuli, and no doubt many more, had been percolating for some time and fed subconsciously into the songs, though the final effect was far from peaceful.

  As a coherent narrative, ‘The Ninth Wave’ can withstand only the gentlest of examinations. The girl in the water is visited in real time by events around her, but also by memories, future projections, hallucinations and possible past lives; like most extended conceptual works of popular music, to make sense it requires rather a lot of caveats along the lines of ‘and then she fell asleep and dreamed about witches …’ Bush’s own explanation, given during a lengthy analysis on Radio One’s Classic Albums in 1991, can be encapsulated as follows: the story starts with the girl bobbing in the sea, fighting off sleep and sensory deprivation (‘And Dream Of Sheep’) with only the emergency light on her lifejacket illuminating the pitch darkness; she falls into restive sleep (‘Under Ice’) and endures jagged, discordant, vivid dreams of being trapped under ice. Her subconscious then slips back in time, passing through the voices of her childhood, both scolding and gentle, returning eventually to a bygone age of female persecution (‘Waking The Witch’), her predicament in the water recalling the historic barbarity of witch-ducking, where guilt was determined by whether the woman sank or floated.