In an amusing acknowledgement of Bush’s continued stage absence, the release was supported by a 32-date college ‘tour’ undertaken by the Live At Hammersmith Odeon video, followed by the belated but highly promoted release of Lionheart and Never For Ever in January 1984. The net effect was as desired. By the time ‘Running Up That Hill’ was released in the US in August 1985, snazzy 12-inch and all, followed by Hounds Of Love a month later, Bush’s profile Stateside had grown appreciably. It didn’t hurt that the US reviews for the album were superb. “Bush compellingly stakes her claim as a major voice in pop music,” said Pam Lambert in the Wall Street Journal. The Los Angeles Times deemed the album a “dark and dreamy masterpiece” while Spin called her a “genius [who] creates music that observes no boundaries of musical structure or inner expression.” The Boston Globe declared the album “an upbeat affirmation of life and love; Bush has come a long way from her early days as a soft-rocking singer-songwriter.”
For the first time, she agreed to undertake serious promotion in North America, following up a handful of preliminary phone interviews with a visit (Concorde, naturally) to New York in November, where she taped several TV and press interviews and visited the MTV studios. She also hit the streets, signing copies of Hounds Of Love at Tower Records in Greenwich Village, where the queue snaked hundreds of metres around the block, and she stayed – happily, amazed by her popularity – many hours longer than arranged. There is no question that her promotional input made a palpable difference. ‘Running Up That Hill’, supported in the US by the film clip of her performance on the Wogan show (the video she made with David Garfath, with its ballet moves, low-key colouring and lack of lip-synching, was deemed by MTV to be too esoteric for US audiences; surely a backhanded compliment), climbed to number 30 on the Billboard chart in late November. Had she also released one of the album’s outtakes, ‘Not This Time’, as a single rather than relegated it to the B-side of ‘The Big Sky’ she might even have scored a genuinely huge US hit. One of her most conventional songs, built along the lines of a standard rock ballad with a well-worn chord pattern and big, reverbed drums, ‘Not This Time’ seemed absolutely tailor-made for Stateside success. The thought, no doubt, didn’t even occur to her.
Hounds Of Love had legs, stamina. In the US the album peaked just before Christmas at 30 on the Billboard album chart, but in Britain the record’s initial success triggered a series of aftershocks that lasted long into the following year. She won three BPI nominations – Best Album, Best Single, Best Female Vocalist – and lip-synched to ‘Hounds Of Love’ at the ceremony in February 1986, looking suitably vampiric, her hair jet black, her eyes lined with deep purple, her lips a vicious dark red. She also performed the song on Top Of The Pops and, from certain angles, came almost to resemble a conventional pop star, popping up in the unlikeliest places. She sang backing vocals for Big Country and Go West (her guitarist, Alan Murphy, also played with them) and was bitten by the charity bug which, post-Live Aid, had infiltrated much of popular culture. Over three nights in April 1986 she performed ‘Breathing’ solo at the piano for a Comic Relief benefit at the Shaftesbury Theatre and, effortlessly flitting from the truly sublime to the patently ridiculous, duetted with comedian Rowan Atkinson – looking like a cross between Lou Reed and a prototype Jarvis Cocker, and clearly channelling his inner Neil Diamond – on a fine slice of comic capery called ‘Do Bears …?’, in which she played the fragrant if slatternly love interest to Atkinson’s smarmy loser: “He was rich and I was down on my luck,” she purred. “So I charged him a fortune for a flying fu-” at which point Atkinson hastily interjects with “for crying out loud.” Later in the year she turned up with other Comic Relief stars at the Claude Gill book shop in Oxford Street to launch the charity’s Christmas book and she also did her bit for Sport Aid, running on Blackheath to raise funds for famine relief in Africa.
Three more singles were released from Hounds Of Love, each accompanied by expensive, hi-spec videos which – again, in keeping with current trends, but also reflecting Bush’s move away from dance as a medium of visual expression towards film – were less pieces of performance art and more like mini-movies. The ‘Cloudbusting’ film, in particular, was a hugely ambitious undertaking, incorporating a Hollywood star (Donald Sutherland), a member of Monty Python’s creative team (Julian Doyle) and Bush acting the part of a young Peter Reich. Filmed over three intense days in September on White Horse Hill in Uffington on the Berkshire Downs, it fuelled her desire to become even more involved in film-making. Even on such a huge project, however, she always kept her eye on details elsewhere.
Her instinct was to lead from the front and, where possible, to oversee personally every last detail. She rushed from the set of ‘Cloudbusting’ to attend the pressing of the single to ensure that the correct message [‘For Peeps’, the nickname of Peter Reich] was cut into the run-out grooves. Bush does not have a natural flair for delegation. She favours the kind of obsessive attention to detail which has led to charges of control freakery, but which also ensures the results of her endeavours are frequently flawless.
‘Cloudbusting’ reached number 20 in October 1985, followed by ‘Hounds Of Love’, which peaked at number 18 in March 1986, and ‘The Big Sky’, which scraped into the Top 40 in the summer, almost a full year after the album was released.*
Even when the Hounds Of Love singles dried up, Bush was still a fixture in the charts; in the autumn of 1986 she had two further hit singles. The first – and biggest – was ‘Don’t Give Up’, a duet with Peter Gabriel, another art-rock individualist undergoing a commercial gold rush with his ‘Sledgehammer’ single and So album. Bush had recorded her part of the song back in February at Gabriel’s home studio at Ashcombe House, where she would have felt fully at home amongst the rural informality. “The cattle barn was Peter’s PA room, and then we had a side room for the control room, with cows peering in through the window,” recalls Daniel Lanois, the Canadian who co-produced So. “Pretty makeshift, very West Country!”
A beautiful, burbling ballad with gospel overtones, ‘Don’t Give Up’ is a song of battered pride, sung by a man who has lost his job and, in the process, has also lost his faith and sense of identity. Yet it also reinforces the essentially comforting idea that a bond between two people can overcome the most grievous setback. “Peter wanted it to be a conversation between a man and a woman,” says Lanois. “This completely came from Peter and was there early on, so Kate was volunteered to play the role.” The pair did not sing together in the studio; Gabriel had already recorded his vocals, and Bush followed his lead on her parts. The first time she reacted spontaneously to the song, feeling her way into it. Ashcombe House was a tiny space, and she sang from the control room wearing headphones, squeezed in beside Gabriel, Lanois and the engineers. Not her ideal creative environment.
There was a raw intimacy in her vocal that matched the lyric, but she felt she had “messed it up”31 and, having been sent a cassette copy of the song with her vocals dubbed on, she returned later to sing it again. In the end, some of the doubt and fragility of her initial vocal was retained in the final version. “She was a sweetheart to work with,” says Lanois. “It’s a bit of a funny song to sing, because the time signature is really odd, and until you wrap your head around it it’s quite complex, but she managed to pull it off nicely. If I can be blunt about it, she is just a great emotional singer, and that really came across in that performance.”
‘Don’t Give Up’ rose to number nine in the UK and entered the Billboard 100, an unlikely hit single for a song of its length, subject matter and unusual time signature. It has become a beloved and much-covered standard – Lady Gaga and Midway State being the most recent – and for many listeners, particularly in the US, it remains their first point of reference for Bush. The simple, highly effective video featured Bush and Gabriel in a long, loving clinch – both emotional and erotic, this was an embrace full of pain, comfort and reassurance – which fuelled further speculation that the two
were, in time-honoured tabloid parlance, ‘more than friends’. The same suggestion had often been made about Bush and Gilmour. Gabriel had a deserved reputation as something of a swordsman, but “there was certainly [nothing between her] and Peter at that time,” says Lanois. Sinead O’Connor, one of his past romantic partners and never one for playing the diplomatic card, later said, “I’ve got to admire Kate Bush because Peter Gabriel tried to shag her and she wasn’t having any. She’s the only woman on earth who ever resisted him, including me.”32
As ‘Don’t Give Up’ was sliding down the charts it waved hello to Bush’s new single, ‘Experiment IV’, which peaked at 23. It was a curiously flat song, B-grade Bush, and another tale of weird science and shadowy figures from the government. This time the plot concerned a military plan to create music that can secretly kill people, a further twist on a familiar Bush concept, the notion of a hidden evil lurking within beauty: it could be love, music, or the lure of water lulling her to fall and then ripping her to shreds. The video, featuring an array of alternative comics such as Hugh Laurie and Dawn French, was another cinematic showpiece; her performance of the song on Wogan, the band decked out in lab coats as Bush sang from behind a large desk, proved more compelling.
She had recorded ‘Experiment IV’ to accompany The Whole Story, a selective compilation of 12 of her singles released in November 1986 and, to date, her first and only greatest hits collection.* She re-recorded a new vocal and added a very Eighties beefed up drum sound to ‘Wuthering Heights’, suggesting both a lack of love for the original and a reluctance to be side-swiped by the fatal embrace of nostalgia. “It sounded dated,” she said. “I think if we’d had more time I probably would have done the same with a couple of songs.”33
Even if she thought it was “a crap idea”34, releasing a compilation of old material was an atypically regressive and obviously commercially motivated move, followed by a video collection of similar songs, issued despite her own misgivings about the quality (she felt she was only really beginning to get to grips with the form) of much of the material
She felt she owed EMI – in particular, David Munns – some payback, and thus allowed them to cash in on her catalogue at a time when her commercial profile was at its highest. There would never be a better time, and she may have realised that if she did it now she wouldn’t ever have to do it again. The Whole Story was released on the back of a promotional drive of almost military precision, heavily advertised in the press and on radio and television, and proved by far her most successful record. It has sold over six million copies to date, and has taken her music into households she might never have otherwise reached.
She undoubtedly worked hard for the extraordinary successes of 1985 and 1986, and in many ways allowing the release of The Whole Story was her final concession to playing the industry game, while pushing Hounds Of Love would be the last time she promoted an album with such a wide ranging, conventional campaign. The clash between the banal flippancy of a TV studio and the style and substance of her music had become increasingly pronounced, just as the disparity between the isolation of her working methods – much of the time now it was just her, Del and an engineer, squirreled away in the studio for months – and the fanfare with which she was expected to announce and promote her work made for increasingly discordant mood music. “I do get a bit scared of the exposure,” she said. “Coming out of work and saying, ‘Here’s the new album!’ It’s a big frightening how exposed you are suddenly everywhere, being on the side of a bus when it goes past. I hate that!35 I think sometimes the work speaks much better than the person does. I certainly feel mine does. I think sometimes it can go against the work; the personality can almost taint it.”36
Promoting in America may have sealed the deal. The interview she taped in November 1985 with cable show Night Flight was too ghastly to be entirely typical, but it summed up the hard sell, say-this, say-that, say-it-again conveyor belt of US media promotion. Faced with an under-briefed female interviewer who insists on calling The Dreaming ‘Dreaming’ and a technical crew who keep interrupting her, Bush keeps her cool – just – but you can tell the entire charade is sapping her soul. It was clearly an excruciating experience.
Back home, she still often felt misunderstood and misrepresented. In critical terms, the progress Bush had made on The Dreaming was largely cemented by Hounds Of Love. Bush certainly had her supporters within the music press prior to 1985, but they were swimming against the tide; she was just as likely to be dismissed as irredeemably naff, someone guaranteed to add a weird and titillating novelty factor to achingly uncool pillars of the ‘entertainment’ establishment such as Pebble Mill and BBC Radio One. After Hounds Of Love she was generally viewed as hip, sexy and in control, but even the glowing testimonies came with a degree of age-old baggage. Her art might be dismissed or grudgingly praised, but rarely without an obligatory remark about her breasts and a derogatory dig about her dancing thrown in for good measure. Even eight years after the Mankowitz portrait, in a positive review of Hounds Of Love, NME, then a bastion of left-leaning political correctness, was still fixated with her “famous tits,” while there was a condescending tone lurking in several other reviews, a kind of apologetic undertow, as though liking Bush remained a guilty pleasure.
Today there is a climate within popular culture of instant assimilation and mass consensus, and it’s easy to forget how fiercely delineated the battlelines were two decades ago. It was a time of rigid side-taking, heightened class awareness, ruthless scrutiny of motives and methods. For some commentators there was still something not-quite-right about Bush, the ‘girl’ who had swanned her way to the top, twirling and caterwauling and getting the middle-aged TV execs all steamed up with her ‘artistic’ dancing. She was regarded by many as part of the Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, Annie Lennox and Pink Floyd axis of orthodoxy, the Prince’s Trust and BPI set: comfortable, privileged, somewhere ‘over there’, a bit of odd pop for mums and dads and girls in Laura Ashley dresses, but nothing more. “Most of her records smell of tarot cards, kitchen curtains, and lavender pillows,” wrote the Stud Brothers in Melody Maker which, as a fundamental misreading of her art, is hard to improve upon. Yet this perception of her work as something twee and prettified served with a side order of entrance-level kookiness still lingered.
When Bush appeared on Whistle Test in 1985 host Richard Skinner erected an immortal monument of condescension in her honour, beginning the interview by smiling, “Now, you’re a very determined girl….” She greeted his idiotic gambit and others like it with the smirking, silent contempt it deserved, but it was little wonder she resolved to subject herself to this process with increasing infrequency, and that when she did there was a palpable change of tack. She had become a very different interviewee from the unguarded, gushing, enthusiastic young woman who emerged in 1978. Having long since recognised that the press pursued their own agenda no matter what, she duly adopted a more formal demeanour, backing away from any discussions of a more outré, hippy-dippy nature. This was business, not therapy. Any questions concerning Gurdjieff or ‘communing with nature’, for instance, were met with firm stonewalling. You could almost see her running through her answers in her head before she spoke. She was prepared to be there, at least, and to talk politely about her music, but no more.
“I find it very difficult to express myself in interviews,” she said. “Often people have so many preconceptions that I spend most of the interview trying to defend myself from the image that was created by the media eight years ago. That is understandable to a certain extent – that’s when I did most of my interviews, and I think the image was created by what the press felt the public wanted, how they interpreted me as I was then, and how I projected myself at that time. I was very young, idealistic and enthusiastic about so much then, but I felt they exaggerated these qualities. And I was – and am even more so now – a private person.”37
Hounds Of Love was enormously significant in determining the path of Bush’s future
career and her subsequent media profile. It was both her best-selling blockbuster and her escape route, amassing the kind of sales and critical hosannas that allow an artist to do whatever they want, whenever they want. “They [EMI] left me alone from that point,” she said. “It shut them up.”38 Had she so desired, she could have grasped the nettle of global stardom by quickly recording a follow-up album, going on tour, writing an autobiography, acting in a dubious film, and generally teaching Madonna a trick or two about how to be an emotionally and intellectually engaged female pop phenomenon. Instead, she gratefully recognised its success as an opportunity to bolt in the opposite direction. “Absolutely good luck to her because – talk about being on the front line!” she later said, gazing in Ms Ciccone’s direction. “She’s such an exposed person. I would find that so difficult to live with.”39
The success of the record, combined with the fact that she now had her own private studio, was her one-way ticket out of rat race. She has never really come back.
Making and recording Hounds Of Love was not just a creative peak, but the first practical application of Bush’s working ethos: her career hereafter has become a self-sufficient cottage industry conducted in real time, at home, alone or among her friends, keeping the industry and most other observers at several arms’ lengths. It meant, after the ripples surrounding the album’s extraordinary triumphs subsided in late 1986, that we would see much less of her. “When I come out into the world, it’s only to say, ‘Here’s the album’, so I can get on with the next one,” she said.40
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