Kate Bush
40 Years of "Hounds Of Love", a miracle of total art-pop
The anniversary
Forty years ago, on September 16, 1985, breaking a three-year silence, Kate Bush conceived her definitive album, one able to marry her experimental daring to an inspired pop instinct. Fresh off the formidable (and misunderstood) "The Dreaming", an eccentric concept album steeped in art-pop, folk, prog and ethnic music, the English singer-songwriter wanted to follow up such a bold work with something different. She needed something less complex but just as sophisticated to win back her loyal English audience, who had already embraced her evolution from the enfant prodige of "Wuthering Heights" (launched with a helping hand from David Gilmour) into a refined experimenter, on outstanding works such as, above all, "Never For Ever", Bush's first album to top the British chart. Hence those years of seclusion, away from the public eye, spent honing her production skills and her command of the Fairlight synthesizer even further. The final flash of insight from the fearless Catherine would anticipate by a year the new direction that her kindred spirit Peter Gabriel would pursue starting with "So": pushing experimentation forward without giving up on contemporary relevance and a more pronounced pop accessibility.
The release was preceded by the sweeping single "Running Up That Hill", which married synth-pop with emotional tension. An instant classic that secured a permanent spot in heavy rotation (on radio and TV, with its accompanying video) and climbed to number 3 on the UK singles chart.
The mid-1980s saw major pop stars moving millions of people on the dancefloor and flirting with audiences on MTV through increasingly aggressive rhythms. With her new album "Hounds Of Love", the first recorded entirely in her home studio, the "new" Kate — provocative even on the glossy cover art — feared no comparison. Of course, her intellectual ambitions hadn't been set aside, starting with "Cloudbusting", made famous by a video featuring Donald Sutherland, dedicated to the story of Sigmund Freud's disciple Wilhelm Reich, the mid-20th-century psychoanalyst who theorized the existence of orgone energy linked to sexuality and orgasm. And it's especially in the second half of the album that the Kent-born artist unleashes her full experimental potential, effectively crafting a "record within the record" (take, for example, the seven-part suite titled "The Ninth Wave", which told the inner journey of a woman adrift at sea), where her boundless vocal range finds full expression, conjuring gothic fairy tales and Celtic folk, medieval mysticism and witches' spells, tribal rites and the most ethereal pop.
But the manifesto of the entire work was precisely that first, unforgettable single. The martial, galloping beat of "Running Up That Hill" underpins a dreamlike landscape over which Bush's voice settles restlessly, at times dramatically, yet never losing that funky phrasing which makes it, in practice, a track with undeniable radio appeal. A song that stands as a symbol of pop sophistication that remains eternally vivid over time. A sensual, unreachable light.
Recorded partly at her private studio in the countryside and partly at famed rooms like Abbey Road, "Hounds Of Love" marked Kate Bush's establishment as a complete artist: songwriter, musician and producer in full control of her own work.
The beating heart of the recordings was the Fairlight CMI, the revolutionary synthesizer-sampler that Bush used as a creative laboratory, blending electronics, simulated orchestration and cinematic textures.
It was also the album that managed to win over the last holdouts of a critical establishment not always able to grasp the genius underlying Bush's earlier work. Avant-garde and melody, technology and pathos intertwined in a compact, complete, irresistible work.
Success was immediate: it knocked Madonna and her "Like A Virgin" off the top of the British charts, staying in the top ten for seven consecutive weeks, three of them at number one, despite a complete absence of promotional shows.
Forty years on, the album feels even fresher and more relevant than it already was. Yes, because this time it's the charts that have been turned Upside Down. Such is the power of TV series — one in particular, "Stranger Things", which after all makes ample use of magic and supernatural powers. It turns out that a few spins on the walkman of one of the story's central characters — Maxine "Max" Mayfield (Sadie Sink) — were enough to send Kate Bush and her "Running Up That Hill" racing back up that hill — the chart hill, that is — which 37 years earlier she had only seen from a distance. Of course, times have changed: back then, that thirtieth spot on the Billboard 100 certainly counted for more than today's ethereal number one on iTunes (not to mention #29 on Spotify in the UK, with 161,100 streams), but the fact that a song from 1985 can resurface from the attic of memory and race past songs by contemporary pop stars like Lady Gaga, Lizzo and Harry Styles remains unusual — proof of how TV series have become a formidable vehicle for music promotion, far more effective than other channels still stubbornly pursued by our prehistoric record labels and PR agencies. For anyone wanting to dig deeper into the topic, we recommend our podcast on the subject, titled "Sound and Television".
A curious fate, then, for the key track of that new sonic direction which the singer-songwriter behind “Babooshka” had crowned in the mid-Eighties. Also fantastic, and as ever extremely seductive, is the video, with Kate dancing like a dizzy Goddess alongside dancer Michael Hervieu.
Now, after years of unrepentant cult devotion from her disciples, Kate is dancing back into our ears, with her irresistible energy and her sumptuous vocal performance. A Deal with God that, in the end, turns out not so different from the deal with the Devil of Faustian memory - except Goethe's Mephistopheles allowed for 24 years, not 40. (Claudio Fabretti)
The Review
November 1982: it's time for a new record, unfortunately a negative one, for Kate Bush: "There Goes A Tenner", the third single taken from the recent "The Dreaming", is her first not to make a dent in the British charts. A result that wasn't entirely unexpected – a few months earlier, both the album and the title-track single had underperformed expectations. That blend of art-pop, folk, prog and world music fuelled a sensational work (rightly reappraised over time), but one that was perhaps too demanding to take in, even for the loyal British audience that had followed her growth from the enfant prodige of "Wuthering Heights" into a refined experimenter.
Three years would pass before Kate Bush attempted to follow up such a daring work — years of seclusion away from the public eye, spent honing her production skills and her mastery of the Fairlight synthesizer even further. It was during this period that she made a decision that would anticipate, by a year, the very same choice her kindred spirit Peter Gabriel would make with "So": to push forward with experimentation without giving up on contemporaneity and a more pronounced accessibility. The mid-80s saw major pop stars moving millions of people on the dancefloor and flirting with audiences on MTV through ever more aggressive rhythms, but with "Hounds Of Love" the new Kate Bush — even provocative on her glossy album cover — would fear no comparison.
An unprecedented dynamism sweeps over the listener as soon as the album opens with its first and most memorable single. The martial, galloping pulse of "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" underpins a dreamlike landscape over which Bush's voice settles, restless and at times dramatic, yet never losing that funky phrasing that makes it, in practice, a track with undeniable radio appeal. A song that stands as a symbol of pop sophistication forever vivid through time. A sensual, unreachable light. The track would indeed be claimed by wildly different bands, as shown by its most celebrated covers from the 2000s onward (Within Temptation, Placebo, Chromatics, First Aid Kit). Fantastic, and as ever extremely seductive, is the video with Bush dancing like a dazed Goddess alongside dancer Michael Hervieu.
The same dynamism can be found in the title track, a crackling, slightly more populist ride built on swirling strings and vocal extravagances (the baying of hounds turned into backing vocals), and in the sweeping crescendo of "The Big Sky", where Bush's singing starts out gentle before giving itself over to an ecstatic sabbath, amid tribal rhythms, hysteria and cutting guitars.
Soothing such a propulsive opening is the spectral tableau of "Mother Stands For Comfort": a deeply murky bassline, sparse piano notes and Bush's Fairlight taking centre stage amid elastic vibrations and shattering glass. A far from reassuring scenario for pondering maternal overprotectiveness. The father figure, instead, is at the heart of the superb "Cloudbusting" (the second single, accompanied by an equally memorable video), in which the fascinating figure of the cloudbuster — inspired by Peter Reich's book "A Book Of Dreams" — is staged as a driving bolero torn between Eastern and Celtic allure.
Family dynamics, the search for unconditional love beyond the roles of a couple, the harmony of nature as a yearning for the divine. With five exquisitely crafted pop songs, Kate Bush seems intent on gathering fixed points ahead of even more demanding and sinister narratives. Because "Hounds Of Love", the album destined to finally win her the charts, even overseas, ends here — and what follows is another story entirely, practically a record within the record, in which the progressive soul of the Kent-born artist, held in check until now, returns to the territory of "The Dreaming" and overwhelms us forcefully with one of her most ambitious works, the seven-part suite titled "The Ninth Wave".
A crystalline voice echoing into the void — that of a castaway adrift at sea, torn between staying alert while waiting for rescue and giving in to a comforting yet fatal sleep. In just under three minutes, the bittersweet piano ballad "And Dream Of Sheep" rivals the stormy heights of the past and leads us into the psychological depths of someone risking the loss of everything most dear to them. This marks the beginning of the aforementioned second half of the album, made up of floating movements, halfway between chart-friendly delicacies and a longed-for pursuit of a conceptually higher artistic elevation. An escape from one's own ghosts, with water serving as the pivotal element in which to surrender or "drown". In the opening "Under Ice", the second of these two possibilities takes hold. The mood is dark. The swan has turned "black".
"Waking The Witch" signals further perdition, anguish, dismay. Bush is in the grip of negative waves. She seeks shelter between one piano note and the next, a prayer and an invocation, before an android rhythm takes over in support of an alienated dance, as if to mark, always tiptoeing, "other" territories. One might even be tempted to invoke certain instrumental intuitions of Eno and Fripp on the disorienting "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts", doled out here and there with feminine "hysteria".
By contrast, "Watching You Without Me" defuses the neurosis with its Eastern-tinged gait, arriving at more conciliatory destinations. As Bush herself explained, the song imagines "a shipwrecked woman's return home". A longed-for dwelling, in this case an actual pagoda. "Watching You Without Me" is indeed the most exotic track of the bunch. A warm stopover before reactivating various hallucinations, as clearly shown by "Jig Of Life", between festive violins and future visions clashing with memories of the past. Thoughts to be shed, that is, in order to live again. Sensational, too, is the "continental leap" cushioned by the musician, flown in one fell swoop from the East to her beloved Northern Europe, complete with folk dance set against the obsessive beat. The sampled dialogue of American astronaut Daniel Brandenstein with NASA mission control, in turn, opens the doors to the album's other ballad: "Hello Earth". The work's concept, built around a woman metaphorically drowning in her own troubles, defines itself through the pleas of a choir arriving to rescue a wounded soul.
All your sailors
Get out of the waves, get out of the water!
All life-savers
Get out of the waves, get out of the water!
All you cruisers
Get out of the waves, get out of the water!
All you fishermen head for home
Go to sleep, little Earth
The planet, with all its wonders, thus becomes a mirage, a lifeline. The escamotage is to flee from pain, "banally" burning through life with every passing second. A positivity that resurfaces in the album's closing stretch. "The Morning Fog" is precisely that: the morning mist that conceals landscapes while revealing new ones at the same time. The mood is luminous, caught between the sweetest acoustic phrasing and promises to be sung with no more psychodramas on the horizon. It's the desire for a truly fulfilling future that takes over in the British musician's words. That same future which will turn romantic on the following "The Sensual World" and excited on "The Red Shoes", before a twelve-year hiatus. In the meantime, "Hounds Of Love" would cement its status as an intimate watershed, confirming itself in many ways as Kate Bush's most brilliant and influential achievement. (Giuliano Delli Paoli)
Ride the wave of great music
Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.
This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Claudio Fabretti, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
Kate Bush on OndaRock
Go to artist page
Reviews
Kate Bush
Aerial
Kate Bush
Director's Cut
Kate Bush
50 Words For Snow
Kate Bush
The Kick Inside
Kate Bush
Hounds Of Love
Miscellaneous
Latest features
original design & development by
Edoardo M. Cappuccio
Edoardo M. Cappuccio
redesign by
Gabriele Brombin
Anna Quaranta
Gabriele Brombin
Anna Quaranta