Re: The 9th Wave and It's Interpretation

["Forward, Jonathan" <JForward@sitgbsd1.telstra.com.au>]

>  From: Robb McCaffree
>  Date: Saturday, 7 September 1996 2:34PM
>
>  SamiT007@aol.com wrote:
>
>  > If Kate would only sit down with us and say
>  > word-for-word what she meant when she wrote The Ninth Wave, it
>  > would sure save us a lot of problems!
>
>  Egad! Thank God she hasn't!


 She has:
 (copied from Andrew Marvick's "The Garden" - Kate's article for issue
  18 of the Kate Bush Club Newsletter, where she starts writing about
  The Ninth Wave)


'    The side is about someone who is in the water alone for the
night. And Dream of Sheep is about them fighting sleep. They're very
tired and they've been in the water waiting for someone to come and get
them, and it's starting to get dark and it doesn't look like anyone's
coming and they want to go to sleep. They know that if they go to sleep
in the water they could turn over and drown, so they're trying to keep
awake; but they can't help it, they eventually fall asleep--which takes
us into the second song.
     The second song is called Under Ice, and is the dream that the
person has. They're skating on ice; it's a frozen river and it's very
white everywhere and they're all alone, there doesn't appear to be
anyone else there. As they skate along they look down at the ice and
they can see something moving underneath. As they skate along with the
object that's moving under the ice they come to a crack in the ice; and
as it moves under the crack, they see that it's themselves in the water
drowning, and at that moment they wake up into the next song, which is
about friends and memories who come to wake them up to stop them
drowning.
     As they wake up and surface, they are coming out of the whole
feeling of deep subconsciousness. One of the voices tells them there's
someone there to see them, and here in the water is a witchfinder. This
is a sort of nightmare they're having. This monster figure is basically
trying to drown them, trying to see if they're innocent or guilty. If
they drown then they're innocent. If they don't drown they're guilty,
they'll be drowned anyway. It's the trial of this girl who's in the
water; and all she wants to do is survive and keep her head above
water. This song was written through a guitarist--Alan Murphy. The
track would have had the wrong feel with a keyboard instrument. All he
had to work to was the drum track, and I tried to hum and point
patterns out. Everything he came up with sounded great; we spent the
day building up the guitars, then built vocals, Fairlight, sequencers
over the top. Thanks for that, Al.
     The next song is about how she wants to go home. That's really the
thing she wants most, just to be in the cosy atmosphere of her
belongings all around her, and the security of those four walls and the
firm ground, and being with the one that she loves. She finds that
she's there in spirit, and there's her loved one sitting in a chair by
the fire, but she hadn't conceived the idea that she wouldn't actually
be there in real terms. She's not real. And although she can see her
man, he can't see her--she can't communicate with him in any way. It's
more of a nightmare than anything so far, because this is the closest
she's been to any kind of comfort, and yet it's the furthest away.
     The next song is Jig of Life. This is about the future self who
comes to her rescue, basically. She says "Look, I'm the next part of
your life and if I am going to survive and enjoy the things that I've
enjoyed-- having my children, my happy home and my husband--then you've
got to keep it together, you've got to stay alive, you musn't drown or
I will drown with you." It's the future begging her, pleading with her
to let her, the future lady, live.
     The song after that is Hello Earth, and this is the point where
she's so weak that she relives the experience of the storm that took
her in the water, almost from a view: looking down on the earth up in
the heavens, watching the storm start to form--the storm that
eventually took her and that has put her in this situation.
     This track features orchestral arrangements by Michael Kamen. It
was wonderful working with Michael. He's a very receptive person to
work with, and the orchestral arrangements that he did for the tracks I
felt were very atmospheric. It was wonderful for me to watch the layers
of this song go on one by one. It initally had to be written with the
verses symbolizing the storm's gradual buildup, and the choruses having
a great sense of space and atmosphere --and this I always hoped to be a
male choir. When I first wrote Hello Earth I was very much inspired
by a male choir that I'd heard in Herzog's film Nosferatu. And the
verses are a very different piece of music. It was all designed so as
hopefully to link, eventually, with this male voice choir which would
take us to a very different place in the song. They really are meant to
symbolize the great sense of loss, of weakness, at reaching a point
where you can accept, at last, that everything can change.
     This takes us into The Morning Fog. "Morning Fog" is the symbol of
light and hope. It's the end of the side, and if you ever have any
control over endings they should always, I feel, have some kind of
light in there.'


TSB