The girl’s imagination then drifts back to the present day, and she visualises her own home (‘Watching You Without Me’), her loved ones “watching the clock,” waiting for her return as she gazes unseen at her own life like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, invisible, cut off and powerless to communicate. “You can’t hear me,” whisper the backing vocals, in the album’s saddest, most bereft moment. The vigorous ‘Jig Of Life’ turns the mood of the narrative around, pounding along like a dose of spiritual CPR, letting in some hope. It’s another visitation, this time from the girl’s future self, an old lady begging her younger incarnation to “let me live,” showing her the riches that await: her two future children, her long, vigorous life. This is the place “where the crossroads meet,” where her destiny is decided.
On the magnificent, deeply moving ‘Hello Earth’ the camera – for this suite is essentially a cinematic conceit – pans away from the water and travels up into the sky, from where Bush gazes down on the scene and contemplates our planet, underscoring our individual insignificance in the face of the enormity of earth, and earth’s insignificance in the face of the universe, and through it all the terrible power of nature, storms gathering, the wind whipping, the sea a “murderer of calm”. Finally, ‘The Morning Fog’ details a new morning and an act of emotional rescue, the vaporous haze a benevolent force sweeping in from the waves and bringing the girl back to land, back into her life, thankfully alive and filled with reaffirmed love.
It need hardly be stated that ‘The Ninth Wave’ works much better as an allegory than a literal story. We do not learn, for example, how the girl is rescued – there is no conventional conclusion to the narrative, little in the way of mechanics, only a profoundly satisfying emotional afterglow. Beyond the confines of its rather skittish narrative, ‘The Ninth Wave’ is a psychological travelogue through a supremely dark night of the soul, documenting a tiny figure adrift in a sea of powerful blackness. It’s a distillation of 25 years’ worth of Bush’s fascinations, nightmares and recurring obsessions: the sea, witchcraft, death, the supernatural, the dangerous power of the senses, feelings of exclusion, the thin line between reality and fantasy – if, indeed, there is any line at all, for don’t we all exist most completely and vividly within our own minds?
“I can’t be left to my imagination” is the key line, for above all ‘The Ninth Wave’ is a panicky swim through the murky waters of the human psyche. Bush creates a stark dramatic scenario – being lost at night at sea – to suggest that what lies within our heads and hearts is more terrifying than anything the world can throw our way; and yet therein also lies our most precious and creative resources. Even at her most elemental, the transformative power of our inner senses takes paramount place in her work. A veritable gift to the armchair psychologist and amateur analyst, it’s tempting to hear ‘The Ninth Wave’ as a highly stylised, oblique dramatisation of much of the difficulties Bush had undergone in 1981 and 1982 before emerging happier in 1983, moving out of isolation and back into the world. Tempting, but no doubt overly simplistic. Whatever the underlying motivation, capturing on tape its highly complex eddies and flows was by far the most demanding part of the recording process.
Bush played the new tracks to Paul Hardiman on October 6, 1983, on his first visit to the newly constructed farm studio. Hardiman, who had been working with The The and Lloyd Cole & The Commotions since The Dreaming, engineered the first stages of the album and was immediately impressed by how much progress had already been made. “The first time I heard ‘Running Up That Hill’ it wasn’t a demo, it was a working start,” he says. “We carried on working on Kate and Del’s original. Del had programmed the Linn drum part, the basis of which we kept. I know we spent time working on the Fairlight melody/hook but the idea was there and also I think the pad, the wind/train sound, was there plus guide vocals.”
Sessions began in earnest at Wickham Farm on November 4, starting with the transfer of the home studio eight-track recordings to the farm’s two 24-track masters. Between November 7 and December 6 they worked on the backing tracks. Stuart Elliott came in to add drums, either working ‘with’ the existing Linn drum – on ‘Running Up That Hill’ he overdubbed a snare part, for example – or replacing it but closely following the programmed pattern.
An acute awareness and understanding of rhythm drove the entire record, particularly the first side. “It was obvious to me that Kate had finally found a groove,” says Hardiman. “On ‘Running’ we worked a lot on the Fairlight part which, incredibly, reminded me of the synth line in [Seventies disco-funk classic] ‘Atmosphere Strut’ by Cloud One. I [was] very happy to push the groove.” Hounds Of Love was indeed the album where Bush, finally, successfully married rhythm to melody. The songs had “a constancy of rhythm [that] perhaps wasn’t always there in previous albums,” she allowed. “When I was initially coming up with the songs … I would actually get Del to manifest in the rhythm box the pattern that I wanted. As a bass player I think he has a very natural understanding of rhythms and working with drums, and he could also get the patterns that I could hear in my head and that I wanted. It’s … through him that we started off with the rhythmic basis that was then built upon.”19
Her piano was becoming less of a central feature, but when it was showcased – ‘And Dream Of Sheep’, ‘Hello Earth’, ‘Under The Ivy’ – it had a rich, resonant texture, deep and sad, very much in tune with Bush’s maturing voice. Replacing the upright Bechstein of her home studio with a Grotrian-Steinweg grand for recording, she wanted “a live sound, reminiscent of Erik Satie, Chopin: the empty ballroom after the party when everyone has gone home.”20
After Christmas rough mixes were assembled with provisional lead vocals and backing vocals, in order to take the album sessions over to Ireland. Following the success of ‘Night Of The Swallow’ Bush envisaged more Irish instrumentation on the new album. Planxty keyboardist Bill Whelan travelled to the studio to hear the tracks and they agreed she would travel to Dublin in the spring of 1984 for extended sessions at Windmill Lane, where bouzouki, pipes, fiddles and whistles were added to ‘And Dream Of Sheep’ and ‘Hello Earth’. She was typically exact and demanding: Donal Lunny later recalled how Bush asked him to play the single whistle note at the end of ‘And Dream Of Sleep’ over and over again for three hours, searching for just the right ‘bend’ in the note. The main item on the agenda was ‘Jig Of Life’, based on a Greek tune Paddy – ever the musical archaeologist – had unearthed. Bush only finished writing the song in Whelan’s house in Dublin the day before the session, and it was recorded over the next few days with the cream of Ireland’s traditional musicians – Lunny, Liam O’Flynn, John Sheahan – jamming for hours, spinning the track into a delirium. “They started playing along with it and just reduced both of us to gibbering wrecks,” Del recalled. “It was such a magic moment.”21
Ireland was also where Bush finished the lyrics, tightening, adding lines and verses. She tends to write words in bursts, whole chunks arriving fully formed, but often the most time consuming part is plugging the small gaps in the fabric of the lyric, maintaining the initial mood. Appropriately enough for songs that were mostly composed looking out at the Kent countryside, the words were completed within reach of the salt and spray of the Irish sea, holed up with Del. You can hear it, too: Hounds Of Love is an album positively propelled by nature, soaked to its bones with a “tremendous stimulus from the outside.”22 This elemental rush isn’t present only in the words, with their countless references to big skies, rain, sun, clouds, white horses, ice, forming storms, wind and waves (there was, as Bush pointed out, “a lot of weather on this album”23), but also in the sound. The songs are swept along by a primal force, at times almost bestial in its power; a thrilling, thudding, irresistible pulse runs through the heart of the record.
As well as fascinated by our inner nature, Hounds Of Love – like Aerial – is smitten by Mother Nature, bursting with the rhythm of life. On the other hand, it is also a truly modern record, a
layered and artificial construct, using the best of Eighties technology and further removed from the standard ‘band in a room’ format than ever before. Often it was just Bush and Palmer working on sounds, with Hardiman and later Haydn Bendall coming in and out of the sessions. Into this tight-knit hub musicians arrived as and when required, according to what would “be good, karmatically,” as Del rather grandly put it.24 The Medici String Quartet became a sextet through the power of overdub on the session for ‘Cloudbusting’; John Williams added a beautiful guitar part – bright, shimmering dew drops of sound, like a bud bursting into a flower – to ‘The Morning Fog’; the Richard Hickox Singers filled the black holes in ‘Hello Earth’, their eerie voices slipping across the surface of the song like clouds scudding across the face of the moon.* She sent tapes of relevant tracks to her favourite electric guitarist, Alan Murphy, who came in and made a particularly effective contribution to ‘Waking The Witch’, and also added explosive counterpoints on ‘Running Up That Hill’.
Much fuss was made in 1984 over Prince’s hit single ‘When Doves Cry’, a dance record without a bass line. Hounds Of Love was in some ways even more groundbreaking; many of the songs have neither bass nor guitar. The pounding title track is built on the highly unconventional bones of two drum kits, cello, vocals and a snatch of dialogue – ‘It’s in the trees! It’s coming!’ – recreated from Night Of The Demon, a suitably stark setting for the definitive expression of one of Bush’s most consistent themes: the fear of being trapped by love, ripped to shreds by passion. Here, love is a prowling source of terror and the singer its quivering quarry, while the music is perfectly in sync with the subject matter. The rhythm track pounds like a heartbeat in the throes of panic-stricken ecstasy, while the scything strings add a manic, compulsive element to the chase. And after three minutes of enthralling will-she-won’t-she comes the magnificent climax: “I need la-la-la-la-la LOVE!” After all the hide-and-seeking with Del, it’s hard not to hear this as a very personal declaration. It remains one of her most moving, magnificently realised songs.
The bass, when it was featured, was democratically deployed, spread between Del, Eberhard Weber – “There’s God and then there’s Eberhard”25, according to Del – Danny Thompson and Youth. The latter, called in to play on ‘The Big Sky’, was particularly struck by Bush’s working methods. “Every individual musician would come down and play their parts separately: drums, and guitars, and bass,” he says. “It gives it a slightly futuristic atmosphere. It doesn’t have that natural dynamic arrangement and progression that you have with musicians playing together – it’s quite linear, quite flat, quite modern, in the way that a lot of people do today all the time. Then it was quite unusual, it was only people like Kraftwerk and Can who were doing stuff that was that linear. She’s a visionary, and she has a very clear idea of how she’d like to direct the scene at any time. She commands a great respect in the room and everybody is clearly looking at her to lead, and she’s very able to do that. She let me do what I liked, she gave me some direction, then she said, ‘Thanks very much, off you go’. Then she sort of chopped it up and arranged it in the Fairlight. I learned a lot from that, how to put a record together. Pete Waterman actually worked in a very similar way!”
Following Bush’s return from a month in Ireland, sessions continued with Paul Hardiman at East Wickham Farm between April 15 and May 24. Hardiman was booked to begin work on another project, so Haydn Bendall came in during the summer of 1984, working full weeks and half weeks over a period of six months. He recalls a fundamental difference in mood between these sessions and the ones he had engineered at Abbey Road for The Dreaming.
“We had lovely times,” he says. “You walked through the garden into the kitchen, and all the family’s business and conversations took place around this huge kitchen table. Paddy was always around, always involved, and the two dogs – Bonnie and Clyde, the hounds of love! There were pigeons and doves all over the place, and her dad smoking his pipe and her mum making sandwiches – it was idyllic. We spent a lot of the summer months there and I have very fond memories of that time together, but it was hard work as well. We weren’t just floating around, it was really hard, concentrated work, because when Kate works she’s incredibly focused. Nobody looks at the clock, and you find yourself doing the same thing for hours and hours and hours, but it was fun and exciting because you knew you were involved in something really special. I felt Hounds Of Love was something special then and I still do. Whenever I hear any one of those tracks I get a thrill.”
The tingling sensation that the music they were making was imbued with some kind of deep magic touched most of those working on the record. “It’s like a very old, almost Druidic thing,” says Youth of the album. “It has a mystical, Bardic quality, part of our Ancient British tradition. It’s not overt, it’s hidden, and I love that. That element synergised with cutting edge technology and a genius writer and you get a classic album. It was a great honour to work with her.”
The sessions were peppered with countless memorable moments. Bush wanted to add another layer of rhythm to ‘Jig Of Life’, and handed Charlie Morgan an array of Irish percussive instruments – the lambeg, the bodhran – and asked him to fill all 24-tracks with his clacking, beating and booming. “Each verse a bit more of me came in, until we ended up with an entire 24-track of me playing different drums,” says Morgan. “I came back from that thinking, ‘What have I done today?’ Just on cloud nine from being thrown the gauntlet and saying, ‘OK, we’re going to do something completely different here.’ I think Stuart [Elliott] and I did some of our best stuff we ever did with Kate, because there were no rules or barriers. It was pure creativity.”
Ensuring the vocals were right was, again, hugely time consuming. When the farm studio was built Bush had deliberately chosen not to install a glass window between the live room and the control room, instead relying on microphones for two-way communication. This was primarily to make her feel less self-conscious when she sang. She admitted to still needing to get “psyched up” to record vocals with the requisite emotional clout, and also to getting a “little drunk”26, which may have been a euphemism. “There was quite a lot of the ‘exotics’ going around,” says Youth. “She’s quite hippy-dippy, dreamy and ‘out there’ anyway, she’s a romantic for sure. She had quite a squeaky clean public persona and I was quite impressed that she was actually quite a ‘head’, she likes to get out of her body a bit.”
Youth lent his big, leggy bass sound to ‘The Big Sky’, a song that became the album’s unruly child. In the end, the finished version was light years away from the way the song had started. “It went through three different incarnations,” says Haydn Bendall. “It’s hard to know who did what, and it’s hard to know what we added or took away. Kate would work on a [track] for ages and ages and ages, it might cost a lot of money and a huge amount of time, but if she didn’t like it she’d scrap it but still retain faith in the song and record it in a completely different way with different people. She definitely controls it all, she’s in charge.”
‘The Big Sky’ encapsulated the twin forces that drove Hounds Of Love, diving headlong into the elements as well as building up a huge, rolling wave of rhythm. It’s an almost perfect pop song, as simple or as complex as you wish it to be, combining a beguiling childlike innocence, the aural equivalent of a big, bright crayon drawing* with an undercurrent of doom, hinting at an impending biblical flood (“Build me an Ark”). As Stewart Avon Arnold has noted, Bush has a fascination with the End Times. Here she suggests that, come Armageddon, the fools and the dreamers will be the ones who escape.
From its very inception, ‘Cloudbusting’ was blessed with a synchronicity that Bush must have appreciated. The song was inspired by A Book Of Dreams, a memoir Bush had bought in 1976 – that pivotal year again – in Watkins occult bookshop in central London, written in 1973 by Peter Reich about his father, Wilhelm Reich, a well-known Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was a colleag
ue of Freud in the Twenties and, in later years, Einstein. Reich attracted much controversy for his unconventional techniques (he would frequently ask patients to strip to their underwear) and his belief in a ‘primordial cosmic energy’ called Orgone, which he described as blue in colour and which, he claimed, could be seen by the naked eye. Reich believed Orgone was the essential life force that we often incorrectly identify as God, an all-powerful cosmic energy which streams through the universe and the body, particularly present during times of sexual stimulus and orgasm.*
Reich also posited the existence of Deadly Orgone, a negative force that counteracted Orgone, causing, among other life-sapping effects, dry weather and desertification, a catastrophic quenching of the life flow. In response, he developed a 10-foot-tall ‘cloudbuster’ machine, an ungainly marriage of metal tubes and pipes placed in a large drum of water which, he claimed, when pointed at the sky could form clouds and create rain, thus increasing the flow of Orgone. He bought 160 acres in Maine and named it Orgonon, a place where he could build a laboratory and continue his work. However, his public experiments with the ‘cloudbuster’ and his unorthodox methods drew increasingly hostile attention from the US authorities, particularly the Food & Drug Administration, and he was finally jailed for two years in 1957 for contempt of court. He died of a heart attack a few months into his sentence, aged 60.
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