Cloudbusting -- Kate Bush In Her Own Words

All The Love

: Although we are often surrounded by people and friends, we are all ultimately alone, and I feel sure everyone feels lonely at some time in their life. I wanted to write about feeling alone, and how having to hide emotions away or being too scared to show love can lead to being lonely as well.

: There are just some times when you can't cope and you just don't feel you can talk to anyone. I go and find a bathroom, a toilet or an empty room just to sit and let it out and try to put it all together in my mind. Then I go back and face it all again.

: I think it's sad how we forget to tell people we love that we do love them. Often we think about these things when it's too late or when an extreme situation forces us to show those little things we're normally too shy or too lazy to reveal.

: One of the ideas for the song sparked when I came home from the studio late one night. I was using an answering machine to take the day's messages and it had been going wrong a lot, gradually growing worse with time. It would speed people's voices up beyond recognition, and I just used to hope they would ring back again one day at normal speed.

: This particular night, I started to play back the tape, and the machine had neatly edited half a dozen messages together to leave ``Goodbye", ``See you!", ``Cheers", ``See you soon'' .. It was a strange thing to sit and listen to your friends ringing up apparently just to say goodbye. I had several cassettes of peoples' messages all ending with authentic farewells, and by copying them onto 1/4'' tape and re-arranging the order, we managed to synchronize the ``callers'' with the last verse of the song.

: There are still quite a few of my friends who have not heard the album or who have not recognised themselves and are still wondering how they managed to appear in the album credits when they didn't even set foot into the studio. (1982, KBC 12)

: We've also been using an awful lot of compression on the new album - with nearly everything, in fact. It's interesting, the kind of dynamics you can actually create, which is what I really never understood before. Especially with voices: as you start compressing them more and more, so many different levels start coming through on it - the breath particularly. And for me, that's as important as the words: it's the space in between.

In ``all the love'' the ``sighs'' seem to be important in this way.

: Yes, it's the idea of using the breath as a voice. There was another backing vocal sung by our engineer, and it's fantastic, because in the gaps there are these huge passages of him going ``haahuuh!'' where you can feel the breath moving past. (1982, Electronics Music Maker)