Kate Bush

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 escape route is to flee from pain, "simply" burning through life with every passing second. A positivity that resurfaces in the album's tail end. "The Morning Fog" is precisely the morning mist that hides landscapes while at the same time revealing new ones. The atmosphere is luminous, between a sweet acoustic phrasing and promises to be sung with no more psychodramas on the horizon. It is the desire for a genuinely fulfilling future that takes over in the words of the British musician. That same future which would be romantic in the subsequent "The Sensual World" and thrilled in "The Red Shoes", before a hiatus lasting a full twelve years. 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.

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03/05/2020