*** Great Hounds of Love interview 1 ****

[rhill@netlink.cts.com (Ron Hill)]

CLASSIC ALBUMS INTERVIEW
------------------------
>From BBC Radio 1 
January 25, 1992

        This interview was actually recorded around the middle of 1991, 
making it one of only two known interviews she did that year. 
        Kate sounds very enthusiastic during the interview, and manages to 
convey some very interesting new information about the album she's talked 
the most about.  In fact, this is probably the BEST interview on the album, 
it's one of only three (along with the KBC and HOMEGROUND interviews) where 
she goes track by track over each song. 

[Transcribed by Ron Hill, thanks to Clive Backham for supplying me with the 
tape.]

        A: ... for the start of a new series of Classic Albums, introduced 
by Richard Skinner. 

        A: It's a music business cliche that the second album is the 
difficult one.  The truth is that they all are, especially when the 
singer writes the songs and produces the record as well.  The album we're 
about to hear was the artist's fifth, and it certainly wasn't easy.  The 
year is 1985, and our classic album is the Hounds of Love [sic].

        A:...for the next hour, is Kate Bush.

        K: I think it was probably the most difficult stage I've been at so 
far.  Because The Dreaming, the album before... I'd never produced an album 
before that one.  And because it had a lot of unfavorable attention from 
some people, I think it was felt that me producing Hounds of Love wasn't 
such a good idea.  And for the first time I felt I was actually meeting 
resistance artistically.  I felt the album had done very well to reach 
number three, but I felt under a lot of pressure and I wanted to stay as 
close to my work as possible.  And everyone was saying "Oh, she really's 
gone mad now."  You know, "hey, listen to this, it's a really weird record." 
 But it was very important that it happened to me because it made me think, 
"Right.  Do I really want to produce my own stuff?"  You know, "Do I really 
care about being famous?"  And I was very pleased with myself that, no, it 
didn't matter as much as making a good album. 
        So we started Hounds of Love in our own studio, and I started to 
find out an awful lot of things that I wouldn't have realized otherwise.  I 
relaxed tremendously within my own environment, for a start.  And also, on 
The Dreaming, because I was working in such an experimental way, the studio 
costs were becoming absolutely phenomenal, and I really don't think I could 
have afforded to have made Hounds of Love in a commercial setup.  So, here I 
was in a situation of having as much creative control, really, as I could 
ever ask for. 

["Running Up That Hill" is played in the background]

        K: I had an idea of what I wanted to say in the song and I actually 
asked Del to write me a drum pattern, and he wrote this great pattern in the 
drum machine.  So I just put the Fairlight on top of it and that was the 
basis of the song, with the drone [drum ???], which played quite an 
important part.  

[The song continues]

        K: I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman, can't 
understand each other because we are a man and a woman.  And if we could 
actually swap each others roles, if we could actually be in each others 
place for a while, I think we'd both be very surprised!  [Laughs]  And I 
think it would be lead to a greater understanding.  And really the only way 
I could think it could be done was either... you know, I thought a deal with 
the devil, you know.  And I thought, "well, no, why not a deal with God!"  
You know, because in a way it's so much more powerful the whole idea of 
asking God to make a deal with you.  You see, for me it is still called 
"Deal With God", that was it's title.  But we were told that if we kept this 
title that it wouldn't be played in any of the religious countries, Italy 
wouldn't play it, France wouldn't play it, and Australia wouldn't play it!  
Ireland wouldn't play it, and that generally we might get it blacked purely 
because it had "God" in the title.  Now, I couldn't believe this, this 
seemed completely ridiculous to me and the title was such a part of the 
song's entity.  I just couldn't understand it.  But none the less, although 
I was very unhappy about it, I felt unless I compromised that I was going to 
be cutting my own throat, you know, I'd just spent two, three years making 
an album and we weren't gonna get this record played on the radio, if I was 
stubborn.  So I felt I had to be grown up about this, so we changed it to 
"Running Up That Hill".  But it's always something I've regretted doing, I 
must say.  And normally I always regret any compromises that I make. 
        "Hounds of Love".  Well, again this was written at home, this was an 
early song.  And it was inspired in some ways by this old black and white 
movie that is a real favorite of ours, called Night of the Demon.  It's all 
about this demon that appears in the trees.  And the line at the top of the 
song "It's in the trees, it's coming" is actually taken from the film.  
Morris Demon [??? spelling] is the guy that sang it. 

[The song is played]

        When I was writing the song I sorta started coming across this line 
about hounds and I thought "hounds of love" and the whole idea of being 
chasing by this love that actually gonna... when it get you it just going to 
rip you to pieces, [raises voice] you know, and have your guts all over the 
floor!  So this very sort of... being hunted by love, I liked the imagery, I 
thought it was really good. 
        "Big Sky" was very difficult to write.  I knew what I wanted to 
finish up with, but I didn't seem to be able to get there!  We had three 
different versions and eventually it just kind of turned into what it did, 
thank goodness.

[The song is played]

        That was really about... you know the thing of when - I used to do 
it a lot when I was a kid, we'd go out somewhere and sit up and look at the 
sky.  And if you watch the clouds long enough, they take on different 
shapes, you can see dinosaurs in them, or castles.  And at the time I was 
writing this album, we were living in the country and my keyboards and stuff 
were in this room overlooking a valley and I'd sit and watch the clouds 
rolling up the hill towards me.  And there is a lot of weather on this 
album.  The countryside was a big inspiration at this time, and it's always 
changing, it's a very different perspective from living in the city, 
sometimes you hardly see the sky above the buildings at all. 

        A: "The Big Sky."  Kate had first used a Fairlight on her third 
album Never For Ever and by the time she made Hounds of Love it had become a 
key element in the creative process.

        K: I'd say with this album, that most of the songs were written on 
Fairlight and synths and not piano, which was moving away really from the 
earlier albums, where all my material was written on piano.  And there is 
something about the character of a sound - you hear a sound and it has a 
whole quality of it's own, that it can be sad or happy or... And that 
immediately conjures up images, which can of course help you to think of 
ideas that lead you on to a song.  So everything is crucial for trying to 
find some direction with inspiration, and really sounds, now, I think are 
pieces of gold for people, you know.  A good sound is worth a lot, 
artistically.  [Laughs]
        Quite often I find synthetic sounds create a coldness, that if the 
track is lonely or sad or dark, sometimes you want that kind of coldness, 
that machine-like coldness, which is very specific.  And with acoustic 
instruments you get a real - normally - a very warm, human presence and 
something that's intimate and really there, something that breathes, you 
know, it's not this kind of dead, cold, machine.  And I feel that both are 
very usable, depending on what you want to say.

        A: How about, "Mother Stands For Comfort" for instance? 
        
        K: Well, the personality that sings this track is very unfeeling in 
a way.  And the cold qualities of synths and machines were appropriate here. 
 There are many different kinds of love and the track's really talking about 
the love of a mother, and in this case she's the mother of a murderer, in 
that she's basically prepared to protect her son against anything.  'Cause 
in a way it's also suggesting that the son is using the mother, as much as 
the mother is protecting him.  It's a bit of a strange matter, isn't it 
really?  [laughs]

[The song is played]

        A: "Mother Stand For Comfort"  Our classic album is the Hounds of 
Love [sic] by Kate Bush, and the next track is "Cloudbusting". 

        K: This was very special to me because it was all inspired by a book 
that I found years ago.  And I went into a bookshop I used to go into 
regularly and just saw this... I liked the title, it said A Book of Dreams,  
and took the book off the shelf, I never done it before, an unknown book.  
And it was this beautiful story by this guy called Peter Reich.  And it's 
all about his view of his father, but through the eyes of a child, so it was 
all about his childhood and how he saw his father as this incredibly magical 
figure.  And his father was Wilhelm Reich and he was a very respected 
Psychoanalyst, I believe, but his work became very controversial and he 
eventually arrested and died in prison.  But one of the things that features 
in the book is how he used to go with his father cloudbusting.  And his 
father had this machine that when you pointed it up to the sky you could 
make the clouds disperse or you could gather them together, and if you 
gathered them together it would rain.  And the machine is all based on 
Orgone energy, which is one of the bases of Reich's teachings.  And the book 
is just extraordinary.  It's so said, but it's also got this beautiful kind 
of happy innocence that goes with childhood.  And as the guy grows up in the 
book, in does get sadder and sadder as you can feel him hanging onto his 
childhood.  And the book really touched me, and the song is really trying to 
tell that story. 

[The song is played]

        K: That did all fall apart over a period of about ten bars.  And 
everything just started falling apart, 'cause it didn't end properly, and, 
you know, the drummer would stop and then the strings would just sorta start 
wiggling around and talking.  And I felt it needed an ending, and I didn't 
really know what to do.  And then I thought maybe decoy tactics were the 
way, and we covered the whole thing over with the sound of a steam engine 
slowing down so that you had the sense of the journey coming to an end.  And 
it worked, it covered up all the falling apart and actually made it sound 
very complete in a way.  And we had terrible trouble getting a sound effect 
of steam train so we actually made up the sound effect out of various 
sounds, and Del was the steam.  [Laughs] And we got a whistle on the 
Fairlight for the "poo poop." 

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