University of Massachusetts Lowell Department of Music Spring 2021 Headphone Lecture Series:
Kate Bush– A Deeper Understanding
By Christopher Lee
For tonight’s session, I knew that I wanted to share some of Kate Bush’s music with you, simply because from the first time I heard her Hounds of Love years ago, it immediately became my favorite album. It’s an embarrassment of musical riches, from Bush’s wonderful melodic sense, to her adventurous use of unusual forms and harmonies within a pop music context, to her hyper-expressive and utterly unique style as a performer, to the intertwining of music with other art forms like dance and literature, and finally to her constantly surprising use of time and spatial effects in her mixes. This album relied largely on the iconic sounds she conjured from of her Fairlight CMI, the first sampler-based music synthesizer/workstation, which came out in 1979. As a child of the 80’s, sounds like these are etched into my musical DNA.
I also realized that presenting anything useful about Kate Bush in the space of an hour, while leaving ample time for listening, was just about impossible. She is so many things to so many people: groundbreaking artist, songwriter, performer, producer, feminist, technologist, choreographer and video artist come immediately to mind. She was one of the first female artists to write and produce her own albums, taking sole production credit since 1982’s The Dreaming. Her first single, “Wuthering Heights”, from 1978, was the first self-written UK no. 1 single by a woman, and she was the first solo female artist to enter the UK album charts in 1980 for her album Never for Ever. Her style is sometimes referred to as “post progressive” due to her bold approach to themes of love and relationships, and other topics usually presented from a male perspective, by earlier British progressive acts like Yes and Genesis.
In addition to being the first musical artist to use a sampling synthesizer on an album, in 1978 she was the first performer to fashion a wireless headset microphone (out of a coat hanger). She weaves multiple musical styles and genres into her songs, including Western classical and a wide range of non-Western and folk musics. Her arrangements for the Bulgarian folk vocal group Trio Bulgarka provide a crucial textural element to several songs on her 1987 album The Sensual World, and the Irish Uilleann pipes are used in her song cycle The Ninth Wave to symbolize, like a leitmotif, the spark of life amid a near-death experience.
Instead of attempting a penetrating analysis of any of her albums, I’ll instead offer an overview, a guided tour to some of her most important songs (or at least, a personal view of the ones that have resonated with me), and a look at some of the musical attributes that make her work so unique. I’ll use Bush’s groundbreaking 1985 album Hounds of Love as a focal point.
Her 1978 breakthrough was the song “Wuthering Heights”, inspired by the Emily Bronte novel and written from the perspective of Catherine, a ghost. It became the first single from her album The Kick Inside, written in the span of a few hours while she sat at her piano late at night, and her vocal on the track was sung in a single take. Harmonically, the song starts in what seems like A major, but all the chords in the verse are unexpectedly major, using modal ambiguity to create an otherworldly atmosphere. No key is established until the chorus, where the song finally seems to settle in C major. Her theatrical vocal delivery, which sees her immerse herself in her ghostly character, was utterly unique at the time. The music video also displays her skills as a trained dancer and choreographer.
Bush’s 1982 album, The Dreaming, was her first entirely self-produced album. It features the Fairlight CMI throughout, allowing her to program sounds and exhaustively experiment with her sonic signature. Bush was, in fact, the first artist to record with the Fairlight CMI, on her 1980 album Never For Ever, and it was subsequently adopted by Peter Gabriel, Jan Hammer, Yes, Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, and Duran Duran, among many others. The Fairlight sound was so ubiquitous in the early 80’s that in the liner notes of his 1985 album No Jacket Required, Phil Collins felt compelled to write “there is no Fairlight on this record.” He wanted people to know that the brass and string sounds on the album were played by real performers.
“Get Out Of My House”, from the Dreaming, demonstrates Bush’s adventurous sonic experiments with the Fairlight, and also her increasingly avant garde vocal performances. Again showing her penchant for drawing inspiration from books, this song was written in response to The Shining by Stephen King.
Kate Bush– Get Out Of My House
In 1983, after The Dreaming was released, Bush decided to build a studio in the barn behind her family’s farmhouse in East Wickham, so she could work at her own pace whenever she liked. Her next album, Hounds of Love, is widely considered her masterpiece. It was released in September 1985 and is the product of almost a year and a half of largely solitary work in her new studio amid the suburbs of southeastern London.
She asked many musicians to perform on the album, but she did the bulk of the production work on her own with the Fairlight. From the first notes of the first track, the creative distance she had traveled from The Dreaming is apparent. On Hounds of Love, there seems to be a rock-solid intent behind every sound, her vocals are perfectly crafted, and every song overflows with big, romantic invention. In short, it’s an intoxicating listening experience. As I mentioned earlier, as a child of the 1980’s, I grew up immersed in the kind of larger-than-life music that decade was known for, music that stretched (or outright ignored) the bounds of acoustic realism. As much as I came to love grunge and alternative rock in the 90’s, there’s nothing romantic about it. If you’re looking for exuberant imagination, this album delivers it many times over.
The first song, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)”, immediately sets a sweeping, cinematic tone for the rest of the album, and introduces her electrifying vocal style. A hypnotic drum pattern and an unmoving pedal bass note anchor the harmony despite the synthesizer’s changing chords above them; this tension between galloping drums, impassioned vocals and immobile bass makes the song feel monumentally grounded and surging at the same time, like it’s about to snap its moorings. Note the entrance of the layered balalaikas in the chorus, filling the previously empty upper midrange. This song, a meditation on gender roles, remains her most well-known.
Kate Bush– Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)
The second track on the album, “Hounds of Love”, is written from the perspective of someone who is afraid to fall in love, which seems like a well-worn topic, but here, Bush illustrates it with the metaphor of being chased by a pack of wild dogs. The song opens with a dialogue sample from the 1957 British horror film Night of the Demon– “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” What fascinates me about this song is the instrumentation– thundering drums, vocals, and strings. Notice how the violins in the middle of the soundstage are Fairlight patches, but the cello parts that ping-pong to the left and right of the soundstage are played live.
The second single from this album was “Cloudbusting,” another example of Bush drawing inspiration from books, in this case A Book of Dreams by Peter Reich. The song tells the story of Reich’s relationship with his father, the eccentric psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, whose controversial work dealt with Freudian analysis and sexuality. His ideas were not well received in the United States, where he moved his family before World War II. He was arrested for fraud by the FBI and died in prison in 1957. The song tells the story of how young Peter and his father often went “cloudbusting” on their farm in Maine, called Organon, using a machine Reich invented for seeding rainclouds.
The song ends with the father being taken away by the authorities, and we hear the pain and helplessness his son felt at not being able to protect him. Writing for Allmusic, journalist Amy Hanson said that "Safety and danger are threaded through the song, via both a thoughtful lyric and a compulsive cello-driven melody. Even more startling, but hardly surprising, is the ease with which Bush was able to capture the moment when a child first realizes that adults are fallible."
The second side of Hounds of Love is comprised of a song cycle titled The Ninth Wave, a phrase taken from one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s epic Arthurian poems. Reflecting Tennyson’s influence, Bush uses the songs to describe a so-called “vision quest”, where a protagonist journeys through death and rebirth. In this case, she tells the story of a woman floating alone at night in the ocean in a lifejacket, probably after a shipwreck. She experiences hallucinations, a spiritual trial and judgment, and finally emerges through a supreme affirmation of life. The songs themselves offer a kaleidoscope of musical imagery and sonic invention.
The third track in the cycle is called “Waking the Witch.” In it, the protagonist’s friends and family appear as in a dream, trying to wake her up and keep her from drowning. Bush enlisted her family and band members to record the voices at the beginning of the song. From there, she imagines she’s on trial for witchcraft. Bush has said this about the song:
I think it's very interesting, the whole concept of witch-hunting and the fear of women's power. And in this song, this woman is being persecuted by the witch-hunter and the whole jury, although she's committed no crime, and they're trying to push her under the water to see if she'll sink or float.
The combination of instruments with pitch-shifted vocals, atonal and multi-metric chant and church bells, and a percussive, delayed guitar pattern makes for an intense and disorienting sound collage. If the helicopter sample sounds familiar, it’s the same one that was used on Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
The last song in the cycle, “The Morning Fog,” sees the rescue of the protagonist, and the first rays of light in the morning sky. Bush wrote that
it's very much a song of seeing perspective, of really, you know, of being so grateful for everything that you have, that you're never grateful of in ordinary life.
It features Del Palmer on fretless bass, an instrument Bush favors in many of her songs for its elastic, expressive lyricism. To me, “The Morning Fog” sounds like joy and gratitude distilled to its essence.
Bush’s next album, The Sensual World, from 1987, again took its inspiration from literature. In the title track, Bush writes from the perspective of James Joyce’s Molly Bloom in Ulysses, when she steps out of the page to experience the real (or “sensual”) world. The album again features Irish folk instruments such as the fiddle, Uilleann pipes and whistle, which were part of her sonic palette in Hounds of Love, and this time also features the Bulgarian folk vocal ensemble Trio Bulgarka. This group appears on three tracks. The album again puts a spotlight on the sound of the fretless bass, played in several songs by Del Palmer, John Giblin and Mick Karn. One track that features both the fretless bass and Trio Bulgarka is “Deeper Understanding.” It’s a beautiful song that shows just how much foresight Bush had, writing in 1987 about a lonely person forming an emotional bond with her computer. The swirl of drums, piano, fretless bass, and voices creates a sonically rich and intoxicating stage for the story.
Kate Bush– Deeper Understanding
The last song I’d like to share is another of Bush’s most popular works, a song she wrote for the John Hughes film She’s Having a Baby. It’s called “This Woman’s Work,” and the scene she wrote it for involves a man learning that the lives of his wife and unborn child are in danger. The song, written from his perspective, takes him through flashbacks and self-recrimination, before finally resolving in a happy ending. For all the production wizardry we’ve heard so far, this song powerfully shows Bush’s elegant melodic sense, relying on not much more than her voice and piano to weave its heartbreaking spell.
Kate Bush went on to release just four more albums in the next 25 years– The Red Shoes in 1993, Aerial in 2005, Director’s Cut in 2011, which was a rerecording of several hits, and 50 Words for Snow at the end of 2011. In 2014 she performed a sold-out 22-night residency at London’s Hammersmith Apollo Theater, which was only the second time she has ever performed a run of shows. The first was a tour in 1978 after the release of her very first album, The Kick Inside. We can only hope that someday we’ll hear new work from her brilliantly uncompromising, distinctive voice again.
– Christopher Lee, 2021