*** Great Hounds of Love interview 2 *****

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

        A: The continuous flow of music on a compact disk masks the fact 
that Hounds of Love and The Ninth Wave were conceived as two quite separate 
sides to the album.

        K: Yes they were.  I started off writing, I think, "Running Up That 
Hill", "Hounds of Love", and then I think probably "Dream of Sheep." And 
once I wrote that, that was it, that was the beginning of what then became 
the concept.  And really, for me, from the beginning, The Ninth Wave was a 
film, that's how I thought of it.  It's the idea of this person being in the 
water, how they've got there, we don't know.  But the idea is that they've 
been on a ship and they've been washed over the side so they're alone in 
this water.  And I find that horrific imagery, the thought of being 
completely alone in all this water.  And they've got a life jacket with a 
little light so that if anyone should be traveling at night they'll see the 
light and know they're there.  And they're absolutely terrified, and they're 
completely alone at the mercy of their imagination, which again I personally 
find such a terrifying thing, the power of ones own imagination being let 
loose on something like that.  And the idea that they've got it in their 
head that they mustn't fall asleep, because if you fall asleep when you're 
in the water, I've heard that you roll over and so you drown, so they're 
trying to keep themselves awake. 

[The song is played]

        K: Well at this point, although they didn't want to go to sleep, of 
course they do.  [Laughs]  And this is the dream, and it's really meant to 
be quite nightmarish.  And this was all kinda coming together by itself, I 
didn't have much to do with this, I just sat down and wrote this little tune 
on the Fairlight with the cello sound.  And it sounded very operatic and I 
thought "well, great" because it, you know, it conjured up the image of ice 
and was really simple to record.  I mean we did the whole thing in a day, I 
guess.

[The song is played] 

        K: Again it's very lonely, it's terribly lonely, they're all alone 
on like this frozen lake.  And at the end of it, it's the idea of seeing 
themselves under the ice in the river, so I mean we're talking real 
nightmare stuff here.  And at this point, when they say, you know, "my god, 
it's me," you know, "it's me under the ice.  Ahhhh"  [laughs]  These sort of 
visitors come to wake them up, to bring them out of this dream so that they 
don't drown.
        My mother's in there, my father, my brothers Paddy and John, Brian 
Tench - the guy that mixed the album with us - is in the there, Del is in 
there, Robbie Coltrane does one of the voices.  It was just trying to get 
lots of different characters and all the ways that people wake you up, like 
you know, you sorta fall asleep at your desk at school and the teacher says 
[song cut's in at "Wake up child, pay attention!" line]

[Song plays through to helicopter sound]

        K: Couldn't get a helicopter anywhere and in the end I asked 
permission to use the helicopter from The Wall from The Floyd, it was the 
best helicopter I'd heard for years for years [laughs].
        I think it's very interesting the whole concept of witch-hunting and 
the fear of women's power.  In a way it's very sexist behavior, and I feel 
that female intuition and instincts are very strong, and are still put down, 
really.  And in this song, this women 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.  
Uooo, ah.  [Laughs]

        A: And the next track on "Hounds of Love" is "Watching You Without 
Me".  

        K: Now, this poor sod [laughs], has been in the water for hours and 
been witch-hunted and everything.  Suddenly, they're kind of at home, in 
spirit, seeing their loved one sitting there waiting for them to come home.  
And, you know, watching the clock, and obviously very worried about where 
they are, maybe making phone calls and things.  But there's no way that you 
can actually communicate, because they can't see you, they can't you.  And I 
find this really horrific, [laughs] these are all like my own personal worst 
nightmares, I guess, put into song.  
        And when we started putting the track together, I had the idea for 
these backing vocals, you know, [sings] "you can't hear me".  And I thought 
that maybe to disguise them so that, you know, you couldn't actually hear 
what the backing vocals were saying.

[The song continues]

        A: "Watching You Without Me".  Next is "The Jig of Life".

        K: At this point in the story, it's the future self of this person 
coming to visit them to give them a bit of help here.  I mean, it's about 
time they have a bit of help.  So it's there future self saying, "look," you 
know, "don't give up, you've got to stay alive, 'cause if you don't stay 
alive, that means I don't."  You know, "and I'm alive, I've had kids 
[laughs].  I've been through years and years of life, so you have to 
survive, you mustn't give up."

[The song is played]

        K: This was written in Ireland.  At one point I did quite a lot of 
writing, you know, I mean lyrically, particularly.  And again it was a 
tremendous sort of elemental dose I was getting, you know, all this 
beautiful countryside.  Spending a lot of time outside and walking, so it 
had this tremendous sort of stimulus from the outside.  And this was one of 
the tracks that the Irish musicians that we worked with was featured on.
        There was a tune that my brother Paddy found which... he said 
"you've got to hear this, you'll love it."  And he was right [laughs], he 
played it to me and I just thought, you know, "this would be fantastic 
somehow to incorporate here."
        Was just sort of, pull this person up out of despair.

        "Hello Earth" was a very difficult track to write, as well, because 
it was... in some ways it was too big for me.  [Laughs] And I ended up with 
this song that had two huge great holes in the choruses, where the drums 
stopped, and everything stopped, and people would say to me, "what's going 
to happen in these choruses," and I hadn't got a clue.

[The song is played]

        We had the whole song, it was all there, but these huge, great holes 
in the choruses.  And I knew I wanted to put something in there, and I'd had 
this idea to put a vocal piece in there, that was like this traditional tune 
I'd heard used in the film Nosferatu.  And really everything I came up with, 
it with was rubbish really compared to what this piece was saying.  So we 
did some research to find out if it was possible to use it.  And it was, so 
that's what we did, we re-recorded the piece and I kind of made up words 
that sounded like what I could hear was happening on the original.  And 
suddenly there was these beautiful voices in these chorus that had just been 
like two black holes.

[The song is continued]

        In some ways I thought of it as a lullaby for the Earth.  And it was 
the idea of turning the whole thing upside down and looking at it from 
completely above.  You know, that image of if you were lying in water at 
night and you were looking up at the sky all the time, I wonder if you 
wouldn't get the sense of as the stars were reflected in the water, you 
know, a sense of like, you could be looking up at water that's reflecting 
the stars from the sky that you're in.  And the idea of them looking down at 
the earth and seeing these storms forming over America and moving around the 
globe, and they have this like huge fantasticly overseeing view of 
everything, everything is in total perspective.  And way, way down there 
somewhere there's this little dot in the ocean that is them. 

        A: The Ninth Wave song sequence concludes with "The Morning Fog"

        K: Well, that's really meant to be the rescue of the whole 
situation, where now suddenly out of all this darkness and weight comes 
light.  You know, the weightiness is gone and here's the morning, and it's 
meant to feel very positive and bright and uplifting from the rest of dense, 
darkness of the previous track.  And although it doesn't say so, in my mind 
this was the song where they were rescued, where they get pulled out of the 
water.  And 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 because you just abuse it totally.  And it was 
also meant to be one of those kind of "thank you and goodnight" songs.  You 
know, the little finale where everyone does a little dance and then the bow 
and then they leave the stage.  [laughs]

[The song is played]

        K: I never was so pleased to finish anything if my life.  There were 
times I never thought it would be finished.  It was just such a lot of work, 
all of it was so much work, you know, the lyrics, trying to piece the thing 
together.  But I did love it, I did enjoy it and everyone that worked on the 
album was wonderful.  And it was really, in some ways, I think, the happiest 
I've been when I'd been writing and making an album.  And I know there's a 
big theory that goes 'round that you must suffer for your art, you know, 
"it's not real art unless you suffer."  And I don't believe this, because I 
think in some ways this is the most complete work that I've done, in some 
ways it is the best and I was the happiest that I'd been compared to making 
other albums.


/l

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