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Date: Sun, 8 Sep 85 07:25:21 edt
From: Doug Alan <nessus>
Subject: Pre-Review of "Hounds of Love" by D. Alan
I have acquired a copy of an advance tape of Kate Bush's new album "Hounds of Love", and have had two days to listen to it. This is going to be a relatively short review of it. As soon as I am up to it, I will post a more detailed review.
"Hounds of Love" is basically two separate and very different but coherently related albums. The A side, "Hounds of Love" is (except for one song) a commercial pop album. It is excellent -- just about as good as commercial pop ever gets, but commercial pop only gets so good. When I first heard this side of the album, I was very disapointed. It was neither what I wanted nor expected from Kate, but it is good enough that it's difficult to consider complaining too loudly. "Running Up That Hill" is typical of the quality of the songs on the A side.
The B side, "The Ninth Wave", is a totally different story. It is completely different from, but every bit as good as "The Dreaming"! It is a very diverse and unbelievably strange progressive rock collection of songs that tell the story of a woman who has apparently been shipwrecked and is floating alone in the water at night, and how this traumatic experience changes her outlook on life. The music ranges from a simple folk-like piano ballad to bizarre progressive rock to strange compilations of sounds to Aborigine digeridu to backwards vocals and instruments to dirge-like chants over chilling bass violins to Greek choruses surrounded with Floydian space music and submarine sounds to a cheerful ditty to a traditional Irish fiddle jig mixed with an African drum beat and Burtonesque rap vocals! It's amazing! Just completely indescribably amazing!
One of the songs, "Waking the Witch" even has a part that must have been sung by Helen Fitzgerald:
You will burn
You won't breathe
Confess to me girl
Guilty!
Guilty! Guilty!
Overall, the album is much more happy and positive than anything else Kate has ever done. Some of the the songs on the A side are completely exhuberant. This is strange, in that it comes right after "The Dreaming", which is the most pained and frustrated album she has done. While "The Dreaming" is an album of frustration and pain and fear traced with hope and love, "Hounds of Love" is an album of love and hope traced with frustration and pain and fear.
I'm not so wild, in general, about "happy" music, but on "Hounds of Love" the other elements keep it from becoming too sappy. Also "The Ninth Wave" is about a traumatic experience and is often very scary or very sad or very haunting -- always touching.
Overall, I don't like "Hounds of Love" as much as "The Dreaming", but this is largely due to my personal biases (If both sides of the album were as good as the B side, I wouldn't be writing this article now, though, because I would have suffered from immediate massive coronary failure....) "Hounds of Love" is perhaps, in some ways, a more amazing album than "The Dreaming" due to the sheer diversity of it contents. It has something for everyone. It will almost certainly be a huge international success. It is a work of heart!
"I still dream of all the love"
Doug Alan
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 85 06:05:49 edt
From: Doug Alan <nessus>
Subject: Detailed review of "Hounds of Love"
Here's a copy of something I just posted to net.music:
["Hound me down"]
As previously advertized, what you are now reading is a track by track review of Kate Bush's new album, "Hounds of Love".
Side 1 -- "Hounds of Love"
Kate's foray into commercial music. Four of the five songs on this side have strong commercial potential. It seems likely that they will all be released as singles eventually. In the past, Kate has had the tendency to take one of the most uncommercial songs on an uncommercial album and release it as the first single. This backfired with "The Dreaming", though. Will an uncommercial song be released as a single from this album? Probably not, but we'll see...
(1) "Running Up That Hill"
It doesn't hurt me
Do you want to feel how it feels?
The first single. Kate's only disco song. As good as disco ever gets! Throbbing mechanical drums mixed with erratic subtle drumming form the background texture for a strange mixture of guitar, balalaika, and gentle to firm melodic vocals about the philosophical problem of never knowing what it is like to be anyone else, anyone other than oneself, and how this relates to art and love. The twelve inch single extended version contains vocal echoes whose rhythms clash wonderfully with those of the drums.
Major flaw with song: silly Fairlight sound playing out a four note hook.
A certified hit. Currently number 2 in England. Number 1 on WFNX (the trendy new wave radio staion in Boston). Receiving radio play on AOR and pop stations. Will certainly be Kate's first song ever to make the Top-40 in the U.S. Might make Top-10. Has firmly put Kate back in the limelight in England after five years away from it. Will guarantee that the album sells millions. Profits from this song will pay off mortgage on Kate's new 48 track recording studio.
(2) "Hounds of Love"
I found a fox -- come back ducks
I'm gonna take him in my hands
His little heart, it beats so fast
And I'm ashamed of running away
The third single? Will pay to have new 48 track recording studio converted to digital?
Nice rhythm. About being scared of love (and fans?) and overcoming that fear.
On "The Dreaming", background vocals were haunting and incisive phrases, e.g. "Lock it -- lock it up" and "I want it all". Here background vocals are "Doot doot doot doot doot". Not so inpsiring. Song's still excellent, though.
(3) "The Big Sky"
That cloud
That cloud -- it looks like ivy! [it is "Ireland"
actually, WIE]
The second single? Will pay for disk-based editing system in digital studio?
Very up, positive, jubilant, celebrative song recommending a positive attitude. Overly cute backgrounds vocals (Himinee down, himinee down) evolve into better background vocals. Builds up a very very nice and complex rhythm, but kind of thrashes it to death at the end.
(4) "Mother Stands For Comfort"
And by the cat that takes the bird
To hold the hunted
Beautiful! Amazingly beautifully haunting! Amazing background vocals. Can you listen to this without crying? A love song to mom. Piano ballad with with slow, strange, and erratic drum beat. Breaking plates and other sounds form parts of the rhythmic backbone. Inspirational fretless bass playing -- must be Eberhard Weber! Beautiful! Wonderfully strange and atmospheric Fairlight work. So beautiful! So beautiful! So beautiful! Send a tape of this song to your mother on her birthday. She'll never forget.
(5) Cloudbusting
You're like my yo-yo
That glowed in the dark
What made is
special, made it dangerous
So I buried it
Forget
The forth single? Will pay for life-time operating expenses of studio so that Kate will never have to write a commercial song ever again? The best of the commercial songs on the album. Better than any commercial song can possibly be! How'd she do it? A love song to a fugitive. Nice violins! Rhythm evolves into military marching snares at end. The charts will never before have seen such a great song.
Side 2 -- "The Ninth Wave"
The deeply moving story of a shipwrecked woman alone in the water at night. Supposedly based on the poem "The Holy Grail", by Tennison.
(1) "And Dream of Sheep"
Like poppies, heavy with seeds
They take me deeper and deeper
Gentle and sad piano ballad with acoustic guitar. The struggle is too much. Let it be over. "Let me be weak. Let me sleep. And dream of sheep." So good!
(2) "Under Ice"
Splitting -- splitting sound
Silver hairs spitting -- spitting snow Bass violin dirges. Sonar. Kate chants. Digeridu. Trapped under the ice! Haunting. Scary! Scares me shitless!
(3) "Waking The Witch"
You will burn!
(Red red roses)
You won't breathe!
(Pix and
posies)
Confess to me girl!
(Red red roses go down)
Guiltly!
Guilty! Guilty!
Undescribable! Totally. All of "The Dreaming" crammed into three mintues? Whales sing. Space and echoing piano playing over clips of expressions used to wake people up mutates into a battle between Mother Goose and Satan on the mixing console until they are carried away by the helicopters! Unbelievable! Unbelievable!
(4) "Watching You Without Me"
I'm not here
But I'm not here
Starts off a little slow, but builds eventually into something quite interesting. Nice bass playing. More strange drum rhythms, especially for a slow tempo song. Backward vocals and strange digital effects.
(5) "Jig of Life"
Now is the place where the crystals meet
We will look into the future
The most bizarre Irish jig you will ever hear. The Bothy Band meets the Talking Heads meet Richard Burton meets Run DMC meet Heart in Kate Bush's mind. I burst into tears the first time I heard this. It's that awesome! It's that awesome!
(6) "Hello Earth"
I was there at the birth
Out of the cloudburst
The head of the
tempest
Murderer! Murderer of time!
Why did I go?
Paddy Bush overdubbed into an entire Greek ritual chorus alternates with celestial all-seeing, sadly warning Kate, U-boat space music and German whispers of the deep. Infinitely effective. Infinitely bizarre. Infinitely haunting. Infinitely wonderful.
(7) "The Morning Fog"
Know what? I love you better now
...
I kiss the ground
I
tell my mother
I tell my father
I tell my lover
I tell my
brothers
How much I love them
The happy results of the traumatic experience. Gently celebrative music. Beautiful guitar and bass playing. Very very touching.
The end.
And the beginning.
Doug Alan
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 85 17:54:27 edt
From: Doug Alan <nessus>
Subject: Correction to review of "Hounds of Love"
Oops!
The sixth track of "The Ninth Wave" is "Hello Earth", not "The Morning Fog".
"Hello Earth. Hello Earth.
With just one hand held up high
I can blot you out of sight"
Doug
Date: Sat, 12 Oct 85 06:07:45 edt
From: Henry Chai <chai%utflis%toronto.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA>
Subject: Things that appeared on more than one song: TNW
In The Ninth Wave side, there are little things that appeared on more than one song, thus somehow tying the songs together. Here's what I've found:
"Little light..." (a leap of a perfect fifth) in "And Dream of Sheep" & "Waking the Witch" (beginning part)
surf + seagull "And Dream of Sheep" & "Waching you without Me" (& "Hello Earth" ?? just before the 2nd Greek chorus -- but it sounded more like wind than surf)
submarine sounds "Under Ice" & "Hello Earth"
"Over Here" (Spoken by male voice) "Waking the Witch" & "Jig of Life"
"Listen to me, Talk to me..." (chopped up) "Waking the Witch" & "Watching You Without Me"
Now I'm sure that there are other, more subtle things that are treated in a similar way, but since my equipment is lo-fi, that's all I can come up with. Does anyone else have any similar discoveries?
-- Henry
Date: Mon, 4 Nov 85 11:44:55 est
From: nessus (Doug Alan)
Subject: Re: Things that appeared on more than one song: TNW
> From: Henry Chai <chai%utflis%toronto.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA>
> In The Ninth Wave side, there are little things that appeared on more
than one song, thus somehow tying the songs together. Here's what I've found:
In addition to what you listed, there are a couple others I've found. The first one is very obvious. "Get out of the waves. Get out of the water." occurs in both 'Waking The Witch' and 'Hello Earth'. This one is more difficult to notice: "We are of water and the holy land of water" occurs in both 'Waking The Witch' and 'Jig Of Life'. Can anyone make out what the voices say in 'Waking The Witch' just before "We are of water...."?
Also, some people were mentioning here a little while back musical themes that recur in different songs and musical pieces of some songs that appear on other songs on the album. Could someone point out some of these? I'm really bad at noticing things like this. I never even noticed that I have two different versions of Kate's "Ne T'Enfuis Pas" on record, until someone pointed it out to me several days ago.
"Je viens Comme un chat Par la nuit si noire"
-Doug
IED enters the scene
[Andrew B. Marvick's first regular posting:]
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 86 22:52 PST
From:
IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
Subject: Venturing into the Garden
IA
Hello, Kate fans. The following is the first, I hope, in a series of papers devoted to the relatively new scholarly field usually grouped under the heading Kate Bushology. As always,comments and criticism are encouraged, so long as they contribute to the body of Kate Bushological knowledge.
//IED0DXM JOB
/*JOBPARM ROOM=GSM
// EXEC SCRIPTDC,DEST=IBM6670
Venturing Into the Garden:
A Look at Themes in Hounds of Love, Part I
(Beginning)
Paper contributed in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Kate Bushology by Andrew Marvick K4735r
The following is the first in a series of personal essays which represent one Kate fan's attempts to come to grips with some of the countless messages that lie within the fabric of Kate Bush's new album, waiting to be dug up and decoded. None of my interpretations is meant to be taken as "correct", although for the sake of argument lengthy qualifiers have been omitted. For clarity's sake album titles are underlined, song titles put between quotation marks. To many fans I may seem to have a terrible love of knit-picking; but I am neither the first nor the last fan to whom no detail of Kate's music is insignificant or without interest; and it is to these patient, mildly obsessive fans that I offer the following reflections.
In this essay I will only discuss Hounds of Love proper; that is, Side One of the album.
And I will make no attempt here to unravel the many "secret" or half-secret voices, both lyrical and musical, which seem to multiply with each new listening. I sincerely hope that other fans are searching for and finding these voices and that they will consider sharing them with the rest of us in the near future.
The first and last audible sounds of "Running Up That Hill" are the same: a synthetic drone based on an E-flat and its harmonic root in the B-minor chord around which the song revolves. This drone travels quietly but insistently throughout the recording like a musical parallel to the thematic thread that connects the songs of Hounds of Love.
The sonic textures of both the drone and the lead monophonic motif of the "song" are, at least in their final presentation, artificial. They are, as in purely abstract art, entirely non-referential, like an aural Rorschach image: the listener can associate freely in hearing these sounds in a way which is not possible when hearing, say, the Irish instrumentation of "Jig of Life", because these synthetic sounds were originated and designed exclusively for "Running Up That Hill" -- they are sounds without a history, at once atemporal and eternal within the space of the recording. (One can of course identify them, correctly or incorrectly, with the Fairlight CMI, but such an association is a Catch-22, since the nature of this synthesizer is in the potential for the complete effacement of its own sonic identity in favor of that of the user's imagination and his original sources.)
This internal, autonomous song-time, so to speak, is in keeping with the circular structure of the song itself (listen especially to the twelve-inch remix, which returns, in its final bars, to its point of origin not only instrumentally and musically but vocally and lyrically, as well.)
Whereas "Jig of Life" (or "Cloudbusting", with its marching snare-drum tattoos) is imagistic, or reference-specific, "Running Up That Hill" seems to defy, through its enigmatic lyrics and cyclical structure, the very accessibility of sound which helped to bring it and, somewhat misleadingly, the album, to the public's attention. A good proof of the recording's elusive essence can be obtained by asking a new Kate fan, or a casual admirer of her "hit record", what that solo synth motif "sounds like".
My own ears register a cat's plaintive miaow; but a friend told me recently that it seemed to her more like a cow's low, sped up and "disguised, somehow, by that Fairlight she's always fiddling around with!" Another friend, listening to the same sounds, heard a chorus of successive cries of the question "Why?", one cry dying upon the next. Douglas Allen has denigrated this sound (and the motif for which it was developed), but his reasons for this are unclear.
None of these interpretations is the "true" source. Yet all may be considered legitimate interpretations, because all were personally and honestly felt by their respective listeners. As with so many of the "secrets" buried within the dense and fertile soil of Kate's latest musical crop, the "correct answer" may not be more relevant than the many "incorrect" ones: these interpretations are even encouraged, I think, by Kate's music; and they add to the richness and intricacy of the music's design, in the same way, for example, that the various "mis-interpretations" of the "weirdness" passage of "Leave It Open"-- based on the "false" assumption that the passage could only be understood when played backwards (resulting in the phrase, "They said they were buried here," and its many variants) -- actually contributed to the recording's interest and mystery.
Appropriately, the theme of "Running Up That Hill" is perrenial, endless and insoluble: the contrast between female and male attitudes, or roles. The female shows strength and endurance in adversity, surviving indomitably under great emotional strain: "It doesn't hurt me...Do you want to know/Know that it doesn't hurt me?" How else could she express, with such clear-headed resignation, "But see how deep the bullet lies"; or pose a question with philosophical, almost psycho-analytical implications, "Is there so much hate for the ones we love?"
The male voice is active, aggressive, crudely seductive: "C'mon baby, c'mon darlin'/Let me steal this moment from you now". But to be more accurate about which gender says what, or even to determine whether such an interpretation is any more than vaguely accurate -- this is beyond me. There is in the lyrics, as in the theme itself and the seamless succession of verse upon chorus upon bridge, a constant swapping of places. This deliberate confusion and conflict of roles in "Running Up That Hill" presages the struggle between action and the failure to act which is taken up in the next track, "Hounds of Love".
The difficulty of facing intense love, the exchange of confidences and resulting vulnerability, become not only the central theme of "Hounds of Love", but a recurring theme of the album, too -- see how, in the last lines of The Ninth Wave, that same admission of love is finally, soberly risked ("I'll tell my mother...How much I love them"). It is also the theme of "Under the Ivy", wherein the secret shared with another person is accorded tremendous emotional value -- is made to seem as precious as some holy relic, hidden for centuries by devout acolytes in the depths of a private shrine, exposed for the first time to a public whose adoration may prove fickle. The theme appeared earlier, in "All the Love", except that the conclusion there was more pessimistic -- a resolution to withdraw rather than expose oneself to such emotional risk. This in turn was related thematically to "Leave It Open" ("Keep it shut") -- in that case resolved positively, as in "Hounds of Love", "The Morning Fog" and "Under the Ivy", while having less connection with love, per se, than with emotional relations in general, or with the appreciation of human works, art, etc. So, the final message of "Leave It Open" refers to the least tangible form of emotional magnet: "We let the weirdness in"; and, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see movement from The Dreaming's thematic generalities expressed in reference-specific terms, to the sharp thematic focus and relative sonic abstraction of Hounds of Love.
But if "weirdness" is let in, and if something (simply the mind?) is left open, then what is it that, earlier in that song, had been locked up ("I kept it in a cage")?
In "Mother Stands for Comfort" we may have the answer: "It breaks the cage and fear escapes" -- dangers of, and resulting fear of, letting loose one's emotions. It may be misleading: Kate has not written "Fear breaks the cage"; the pronoun "it" may be interpreted here as a reference to something else besides fear -- madness, perhaps -- so that the natural inference -- that the pronoun signifies the manifest noun -- may be incorrect. If the natural interpretation is the correct one, however, then the danger which arises from the terrible destructive power of fear -- fear of madness itself, perhaps -- brings us full circle, back to "Hounds of Love" and the line, "But I'm still afraid to be there".
The general, surface meaning of this song, already explained by Kate on several occasions, may be summarized as follows: the hounds represent the unknown response to love; by admitting love for and emotional dependence upon another person, one exposes oneself either to tremendous release and joy in finding that love accepted and returned (the friendly Weimeraners so sensitively photographed by John Carder Bush on the LP's sleeves); or to the horror of rejection, humiliation and emotional injury (the dogs that have caught the fox). The human dilemma itself is thus likened to a hound -- which might be gentle and loving, or which might equally prove vicious and deadly. So the vivid scene in which the narrator encounters a trapped fox becomes doubly self-referential, for it deepens the basic analogy of hounds to love (or to death): the dogs have caught the fleeing, desperate, but ultimately helpless fox; in the same way, and with similar desperation, the narrator feels trapped by the possibilities and liabilities of concession to the advance of love; and in the end, he/she, too, falls helpless to that advance.
It is to this implicit meaning of the song that Kate adheres in her film, rather than to the equally vivid and literal imagery of fox and hounds which runs through the lyrics themselves. Could not the hounds, then, correspond, as well, with the driving, almost bestial masculine force which pled, in "Running Up That Hill", "C'mon baby, c'mon darlin'/Let's exchange the experience?"
Rhythmically, "Hounds of Love" seems to begin where the huge climactic drum tattoos at the climax of "Running Up That Hill" left off. That climax, it is interesting to see, occurs simultaneously with the masculine call to love quoted just above. Maintaining what for Kate Bush is a relatively unusual "constancy of "rhythm"", (Interview by Capital Radio's Tony Myatt for the 1985 Kate Bush Convention, November 1985).
"Hounds of Love" nevertheless steps up the pace and increases the volume as the hesitant lover steels her-/himself to take the emotional plunge, so to speak, in such a whirl of sonic activity that with the last, utterly abandoned confession of the song ("I need love love love love love..."), the density of sound seems to tax the very limits of demo-cum-master tape on which it was recorded.
In fact, of course, this is still only a foretaste of what might be called Hounds of Love's "catharsis in decibels", for in the last choruses of "The Big Sky", the celebration of sheer sound does finally saturate, if not the master, certainly the typical vinyl pressings (especially those "marbleized" American ones!), and I would venture to say (at the risk of upsetting more conservative audiophiles) that it is only on compact disc that this overwhelming musical shout of triumph resists distortion completely.
We can now see that "The Big Sky", too, shares a common thread with several other Kate Bush recordings, and that thread is, again (and for want of better words), emotional release, or the liberation of feeling. Kate has herself "explained" (Newsletter #17) how she tried, in the song, to recapture a child's appreciation of the glories of nature, when all sensory experience was new and filled with great emotive power. She has often suggested that adults are still children -- and that, in consequence, many of our adult struggles are simply attempts to regain the wonder once enjoyed in childhood.
There is a great deal more going on in "The Big Sky", however, than immediately meets the ear. Take the lyrics, for example, their syntactical complexity and shifts in tense: in most of the song the narrator sings, "I'm looking," "It's changing," etc. But set against that release in the present action and the promise of freedom to come is a resentment in the remembrance of the past -- "You never understood me/You never really tried." Does this not imply that the narrator is in fact an adult, possibly herself -- and in this song the narrator does appear to be a woman, at least when she calls out, "Tell 'em, sisters!" -- trying to revive childlike feelings which had been suppressed by environment? A third development arises out of this, namely the child's imagination: with a child's easy transference of the imagined onto the real, the narrator -- and her (imagined?) companions -- suddenly are "leaving with the Big Sky"; and, to show the clarity -- the hyper-realism, even --of the child's fantasy, "we pause for the jet". No wonder then that we, too, are made to hear the jet. As always in Kate's music, the sound effect is indispensible, not merely incidental; it serves to reinforce in a very direct and graphic way both the musical and the narrative content.
{TO BE CONTINUED}
[Editorial Note: Oh, my. It looks like Mr. Marvick is trying to outdo me! -- Doug]
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 86 12:57 PST
From:
IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
Subject: Venturing...conclusion
Venturing Into the Garden:
A Look at Themes in Hounds of Love, Part 1
(Conclusion)
Paper contributed in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Kate Bushology
by Andrew Marvick K4735r
Similarly subtle but equally significant shifts in meaning through the alterations in tense or mode appear both in "Hounds of Love" and "Running Up That Hill". In "Hounds of Love" the shift occurs in the second verse, which begins the narrative as a past event: "I found a fox caught by dogs/He let me take him in my hands". But as the narrator continues we suddenly move into the present: "His little heart beats so fast/and I'm ashamed of running away/ From nothing real/I just can't deal with this..." At first we merely listen to a story, set safely in the past -- factual, perhaps, but part of another time, another world, even; memories of the huge, magical and dangerous world of childhood. Suddenly we must confront this world -- we have become children again, ourselves; and the scene of the hunt, the trauma to a child's consciousness in beholding a helpless, dangerous, yet mysteriously gentle fox, is presented to us as it happens.
In defiance of the safety of a historical event, we see the terrified but passive fox as it rests in the narrator's hands; the heart beats now. And in fact, this crucial, transitional moment is stressed -- almost underlined, in fact -- musically by a single, long, vigorously bowed {treble} F-natural in the cello part, dubbed over the by-now familiar ryhthmic cello obligato (in octaves of the same note, on the opposite "side" of the recording) that enters the song at the beginning of that crucial second verse. The leap into the present (we are confronted with the moment, much as is the heroine of ..us The Ninth Wave at the climax of "Jig of Life": violently, with the harshness of grim reality) from the safety of the past, effectively connects the past event --the fact safely remembered -- with the figuratively dangerous, present moment of truth in an adult romantic relationship (which the fox's beating heart perfectly represents). So, with the first chorus, facing childhood fears in a forest, the narrator sings: "Help me someone", but with the second chorus, experiencing the new dangers of romantic love, he/she cries, "Help me ..us darling".
With a similar use of language, the narrator of "Running Up That Hill" asks, in the first verse of that song, "Do you want to hear about the deal that I'm making?" only to add, a moment later, "And if I only could/ I'd make a deal with God". Presumably this deal refers to the swapping of gender roles -- perhaps of gender itself -- between the man and the woman. A transition has been made from the present participle (fact) to the conditional (fantasy); and with that transition is expressed a realization of the impossibility of such fundamental change in human relations. No deals are made with God, the words imply. This relationship begins -- and may end (witness the tragic second verse) -- in the human sphere, on the earthly level.
In fact, if we see this all too human relationship as struggling on the earthly plane, then perhaps we can see related meaning, at last, in the title and its surrounding textual lines, "Be running up that road/Be running up that building." Again we are presented with an eternal struggle to reach some new level of awareness -- in this case a fuller understanding of interpersonal relationships; just as in "Sat In Your Lap", the struggle lay in reaching a fuller and deeper understanding of space, the universe and everything; and just as in, in "Suspended in Gaffa" (and here I'm really treading on cat's ice), the struggle lay in attaining a new spiritual understanding and self-confidence, despite the constrictions of personal or mundane limitations represented by the titular pun on the words "gaffer tape". Yet, in keeping with the general subject of "love" which Kate has declared to be the main focus of Hounds of Love, the struggles in "Running Up That Hill", "Hounds of Love" and even (if we consider long enough the connotations of the lines "You never understood me/You never really tried") "The Big Sky", revolve around people's feelings for and against each other, rather than the more intangible subjects addressed in "Sat In Your Lap" and "Suspended in Gaffa".
With this in mind both "Mother Stands for Comfort" and "Cloudbusting" seem wholly relevant, in complete thematic harmony with the three tracks which precede them. Both deal with interpersonal love -- in fact, familial love of a very specific kind. "Mother Stands for Comfort" treats the subject of a woman's love for her child, however misguided or ill-fated that love might be. The converse of the same subject, "Cloudbusting", investigates the mutual love of a father and his son. It is quite appropriate that one should follow directly upon the other. And in fact the two subjects have more in common. Both refer to the protective instinct among family members, and both carry intimations of failure and eventual separation: in "Mother Stands for Comfort" there are the lines "Mother will hide the murder/Mother hides the madman"; in "Cloudbusting" we see not only the explicit reference to Wilhelm Reich's actual separation from Peter ("You looked too small/ In their big black car/To be a threat to the men in power" -- a reference to the United States' Food and Drug Administration, which brought suit against Reich in the 1950s), but also signs of an almost paternal concern on the part of the boy for his father's safety: "I can't hide you from the government".
No-one as far as I know has yet identified any specific source for the subject of "Mother Stands for Comfort", although I suspect that there is one, whether consciously drawn on by Kate or not. (Knowing Kate's admiration for The Shining, I might suggest as a possible source a memorable scene from Stephen King's The Dead Zone, in which the mother of a psychopathic murderer is found to have been protecting her son despite the knowledge that he was continuing to kill; but there are no doubt many other possible sources.) In the case of "Cloudbusting", however, because the source is known to us, there arises a great temptation to draw comparison not only with the book (Peter Reich's A Book of Dreams) --especially as Kate has herself admitted feeling an obligation to "do justice to the book" (Capital Radio interview, November 1985.) -- but also with the facts surrounding the elder Reich's sorry treatment at the hands of the FDA. Certainly there are many specific references to the subject in the song.
The phrase "...something good is going to happen...", for example, stems from a recurrent foreboding, in Peter Reich's memoir, that "something bad was going to happen." And, in fact, the military, march-like rhythms in the recording may have arisen directly from the author's descriptions of the Cosmic Engineers, in which, as a child, he had filled the rank of Lieutenant. (It is with powerful irony, therefore, that the footsteps of the government agents in Kate's film for "Cloudbusting" are shown keeping time with the music.)
There are, however, significant discrepancies between these sources and Kate's work, as well. A single look at the marvellous Donald Sutherland in the film suffices to demonstrate that fidelity to the picture in her own mind's eye bears far greater weight with Kate than any responsibility to the facts. (In reality Sutherland, moustached and grey-haired as he appears in the film, looks, I dare to suggest, a bit more like Kate's own rather than Wilhelm Reich, who was bald, clean-shaven, and quite stocky!) Furthermore, the gorgeously verdant but unmistakably English countryside; the fascinating but factitious gizmos in the laboratory; the utterly intriguing -- because alliteratively and phonetically suggestive -- reference to Oregon rather than to Maine or Arizona, where Orgonon and Little Orgonon were located, respectively; the new implications that arise from the surely deliberate re-spelling of the name Orgonon, itself-- the substitute, organon, referring not only by pun to Reich's once-controversial sexual theories, but also directly to the term "organon," an alternative form for "organum," which plays a major role in the philosophical writings of Francis Bacon; Ken Hill's quite breath-taking Cloudbuster, far more beautiful and impressive than the originals ever were; and even the boy's disclosure --with conspiratorial smile -- of a paperback edition of A Book of Dreams in his father's jacket pocket (an element of the surreal or fantastic quite in keeping with the gathering rainclouds attracted by positive orgonotic energy); all of these details combine to show that the ultimate source for the recording, as for the film, was the imaginative authority of Kate Bush herself.
One final group of comments before this rumination on Hounds of Love is suspended, these in relation to one of the many aspects linking Sides One and Two, heretofore de-emphasized by Kate herself in an understandable wish to make clear to her public the basic autonomy of The Ninth Wave from Hounds of Love. Apart from the many images which define the atmosphere of both sides -- images of sky, clouds, water, darkness, storms and animals -- everywhere animals, from the cat ("Mother Stands for Comfort") to the sheep ("And Dream of Sheep") to the blackbird ("Waking the Witch") to the gulls and whales which are audible at various points in The Ninth Wave, and back to the fox and hounds, to name creatures from this album alone -- apart from these, there is one specific transitional motif which I cannot help but see as an implied invitation to move from the setting of "Cloudbusting" to the structure of the whole of The Ninth Wave: namely, the dream. (Not without communicative purpose did Kate recently name Salvador Dali as a favourite artist.* (Newsletter Number 19, p.)
As "Cloudbusting" begins ("I still dream of Organon {sic}"), so does The Ninth Wave ("Let me be weak, let me sleep/and dream of sheep"). In fact, Kate has shown a longstanding fascination with dreams and dreamlike states (I've been told that she once described having dreamt of a long vigil in the sea in an interview dating as far back as 1978), and with the thin line between waking and dreaming -- her interest in the experience of sensory deprivation being one recent example. It seems to me no mere co-incidence, therefore, that Peter Reich's A Book of Dreams unfolds in a fashion almost eerily like that of The Ninth Wave; both develop around a temporarily helpless and incapacitated person drifting between conscious understanding of real danger and pain, and unconscious dream experiences. In fact, if there is one thing that Hounds of Love and The Ninth Wave do not include, amid their huge variety of subjects, images, symbols and partly or wholy hidden references, it is --mere co-incidence.
(C) Copyright Andrew Marvick, 1986
The replies:
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 86 19:18:30 EST
From: nessus (Doug Alan)
Subject: Re: Venturing...conclusion
> [A. Marvick:]
> ... the new implications that arise from the
surely deliberate re-spelling of the name Orgonon, itself-- the substitute, ...
I asked Kate if there was any reason why she spelled "Orgonon" differently than Wilhelm Reich did, and she said with an amused smile on her face "It wasn't intentional."
I believe her.
Doug
Date: 19 Apr 86 20:59:00 PST
From: "ROSSI J.A." <rossi@nusc.ARPA>
Subject: DOA / Francis Bacon
The first Marvick posting was interesting, the second was long winded. I would seriously like to ask the question, Doesn't Kate ever write music devoid of 'deep-meaning'. Granted, we all get the message concerning Cloudbursting, and we are aparently informed of its meaning. How the essay ever got from Kate's musical tragedy to mention of Francis Bacon and his tragedy to mention of Francis Bacon (bravo on getting the correct Bacon, here) and his prophetic masterpiece <Novum Organum, The New Atlantis>, eludes me. Am I missing satire, here. Or as the nuns of good ole St. Josephs High kept on telling me, I don't understand artistic symbolism. To think that I actually believed that the Scarlet Letter was a story about an innocent who got knocked up by some preacher, and that the Merchant of Venice was about a typical loan shark in the 18th century. Maybe we should ask the most important question, if we were to reverse the context of RuTH would we then have a song about somebody traversing a ski slope afraid to fall?
"We have harmonies, which you have not, of Quarter sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Diverse instruments of Musick, likewise to you unknown, Some sweeter than any you have, together with Bells and Rings that are dainty and Sweet ..."
Francis Bacon, 1627 (no shit!)
Roger Bacon was also a cunning linguist,
John
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 86 18:07:22 -0800
From: J. Peter Alfke <alfke@csvax.caltech.edu>
Subject: Kate Bushopathy
Y'know, I'm a pretty thoughtful guy, and it takes a lot to turn me into a slavering anti-intellectual popster, but I fear that Our Lord of the TROFF Macros, Andrew Marvick, has just done exactly that.
IT'S ONLY ROCK & ROLL!! IT'S ONLY ROCK & ROLL!!
Hasn't this person read the amazing Kate Bush/Doug Alan interview? That wonderful conversation illustrates far more clearly than I ever could the perils of overwrought analysis.
Now, Doug, you're a nice guy and I do like you, but that interview had me and all my friends rolling on the floor. This is the hazard of being a trufan. Andrew Marvick, however, is fast threatening to eclipse you, both in hysteria and volume. ..
--Peter Alfke
PS: Andrew, does your installation have \TeX? It would make your stuff \it{much} more readable if you used it$\ldots$
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1986 02:23 EST
From: Mark Woodruff <WOODRUFF%UCF1VM.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU>
Subject: shit
>From: IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
> Venturing Into
the Garden:
> A Look at Themes in Hounds of Love
You're full of it, and this essay reeks of it.
Take me off the mailing list, Doug, I can't stand the smell any more.
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 86 02:43:15 EST
From: nessus (Doug Alan)
Subject: Re: Kate Bushopathy
Mr. Alfke, I wouldn't expect someone who thinks that Madonna has merit to agree with the statement that pop music can be *real* literature. But I see no reason for you to spoil the fun of those who were forced to write lots of unenjoyable papers in high school on symbolism in *Hamlet* and *The Great Gatsby* and the collected works of Keats, and who have finally found something that they can apply all of this previously wasted education on and *enjoy*.
You might also speculate on the the fact that Kate refuses to talk about how she does her two-way messages or the contents of them, even though she *does* admit reluctantly that they are there, and how this strange attitude of hers might bear on her unwillingness to talk about symbolism in her words.
You might also speculate on the fact that when I asked John Carder Bush similar questions about his lyrics to those I asked Kate, he said that I was right. Consider that Kate has said on several occasions that John is one of her biggest influences.
Your parody of my interview is I feel not very appropriate. This would be much more accurate:
DOUG: In the song "The Dreaming" you sing "The Pull of the Bush" to mention the attraction of the Aborigine in Australia to the unspoiled land. But you are also making a pun on your own name. Did you have any special intention in doing this, other than in being a bit humorous?
KATE: Pun on my name? I'm not sure what you mean.
DOUG: "Bush" occurs in "Pull of the Bush".
KATE: So?
DOUG: That's your name.
KATE: I had nothing of the sort in mind when I wrote the song.
DOUG: But why is "Bush" capitalized on the lyric sheet?
KATE: It wasn't intentional.
DOUG: And in the video, the two male dancers pull on you from either side when you sing that line.
KATE: How people interpret your art really has nothing to do with you anyway. But it's great if people get as much out of it as they can.
DOUG: But surely...
KATE: Excuse me for a moment -- I have to use the bathroom.
In any case, I just got a letter from John Carder Bush (and a pile of his poetry) that some might find somewhat interesting:
Dear Doug,
Thanks for your interesting letter; it's nice to meet someone these days who gets excited about words.
[Two pages of stuff...]
Entendres are, indeed, interesting things. Over the years I have evolved a sort of personal understanding of this planet/God/life in terms of rhyme. If you can see the Supreme Being as merely a harmonizing force, then coincidence, synchronicity are easily explained; as the poet makes his rhymes, the pattern of life makes its rhymes. And in double, tripple, or whatever, entendres, the poet exercises a god-like technique.
Keeping this in mind, I feel that for someone working in an artistic medium, and thence becoming "godlike", by imitation, there must come a series of levels of progress, each level preceded by intense periods of obsession and worry with the creation -- late nights, wrong food, ill health, etc. -- and at each level something crystallises, and an energy vortex with a consciousness of its own starts going.
Once it is able to generate its own creative direction, it needs to be fed and looked after like any machine, but it can be relied on to offer up an image, a line, in which the levels are all there, up and down, and can be understood depending on the level of the receiver. Sufi stories, Zen stories, Greek myths all have this spiralling mult-interpretation power, as do all the great written works of religion. You can keep coming back to them and finding the next level confirmed as you grow.
So I am sure you are right when you find these meanings in Kate's music, but whether it was conscious or unconscious is not important if you accept that she is a vehicle for the Great Rhymer. Kate's subject matter for her lyrics has always been extraordinary, which I think comes from an ability to empathise with life forms that is unusually sensitive.
So, I hope you enjoy these poems and watch out for Big Sky, soon to be released over here and the video is the best so far.
All that's good,
John
-Doug
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 88 11:16:26 EST
From: Justin Bur <justin@iro.umontreal.ca>
Subject: the HoL typeface
The typeface used on the cover of Hounds of Love is called Zapf Chancery Medium Italic. It is available on most modern PostScript devices.
Zapf Chancery was designed in 1979 by Hermann Zapf, one of the most important 20th-century type designers. He has also produced Palatino (also on PostScript devices) and Optima. Both the "roman" (slightly slanted) and the italic (moreso) of Zapf Chancery are based on 16th-century chancery cursive script.
For more information and a review of the type, see the article by Kris Holmes (herself a noted type designer, co-author (with Charles Bigelow) of Lucida) in Fine Print 6:1 (1980).
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 91 23:42:22 EST
From: the element of laughter <woiccare@pebbles.sct.clarkson.edu>
Subject: loTs o'sTuff
hello all...just got back from germany and am slowly readjusting to the grind again. i've got a few tidbits to share first though:
- in munich, i met the guy who owns the #00 hounds of love jersey (the jersey of which 100 were made numbered from 00-99). the guy is not a KaTefan at all. he's just saving it for a day when he needs the cash.
Date: Sat, 17 Aug 1991 10:23:00 -0700
From:
gatech!chinet.chi.il.us!katefans@eddie (Chris'n'Vickie)
Subject: Madame
Maria Nanky
Jorn asks:
> 5) That mysterious Madame Maria Nanky, whose cover
version of "Poor Old Flea" Kate favors, gets a thank-you in the HoL
acknowledgements.
Pretty Good Authority (PGA) tells us that Madame Maria Nanky, Enrico Baratta, Reverand Normal and others are fictional characters invented quite a while ago by Kate and her brother Paddy. Sharp-eyed viewers might be able to spot Mr. Baratta in the Experiment IV video as the silhouette visible through the window of the Major's (?) office as Kate/Monster brings in the tea.
Chris Williams
Date: Tue, 16 May 1995 21:52:10 GMT
From: zpj@huskbeat.demon.co.uk
(Steve ZPJ)
Subject: Re: HOL cover
On the back cover of HOL, Kate is supposed to be Ophelia in a lifejacket.
Ophelia was in love with Hamlet who pretended to be mad to get rid of her. She then went mad herself. She drowned in a river that she used to put flowers into as a message to people (the flowers not the drowning). The picture itself is inspired by a painting by John Everett Millais. -- Steve ZPJ
From: IEDSRI@aol.com
Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 18:37:27 -0400
Subject: "Ophelia" and "The Ninth Wave"
> On the back cover of HOL, Kate is supposed to be Ophelia in a lifejacket.
This is not strictly accurate. All that we can say for sure about this photograph is that it represents the protagonist of "The Ninth Wave". All else is supposition, however reasonable.
Kate has not actually acknowledged the close visual link between the Ninth Wave photo(s) and Millais's 1851-52 painting, "Ophelia". An interviewer once suggested an indirect connection, in noticing the likeness of the Ninth Wave shots to a picture which Kate owns, painted by an unidentified artist, entitled "The Hogsmill Ophelia". Kate once mentioned that she bought this picture at a time when she hadn't anything like the money to afford it. It depicts an infant (or a doll) floating on its back in a dirty gutterlike area.
Kate has, however, acknowledged and expressed a deep love for Millais's early Pre-Raphaelite work, and specifically praised his "A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew's Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge" (1851-52).
Kate's brother, John Carder Bush, has said that Kate and he attended the great "Pre-Raphaelites" exhibition mounted at the Tate Gallery in 1984, so there is good reason to assume that she is at least somewhat familiar with the imagery in question. Of course, some of it, including "Ophelia", is famous, and part of the English people's collective subliminal self-image, so to speak; reasonable assumptions of familiarity can be made on that basis, too.
There are several other veiled references to Pre-Raphaelite sources in Kate's work, including two likely allusions to J. W. Waterhouse's 1888 version of "The Lady of Shalott" (or possibly to other related images, including the many "Elaine" scenes in the British canon). Knowing that Kate is aware of this pictorial legacy, then, we may even see the photograph of ivy on the back of "The Dreaming" as a Pre-Raphaelitesque (sorry!) reference; but no evidence proves it.
-- Andrew Marvick (IED)
S R I
From: Garrick Twinney <G.Twinney@plymouth.ac.uk>
Date: 1 Sep 95
13:02:36 GMT
Subject: October 1995 'Q' Magazine.
Greets.
A couple of 'Kate spots' in this month's 'Q' magazine. Details follow.
Firstly the free tape on the cover features R.U.T.H., amoungst some other rather good tracks. The tape is entitled "Drive! An hour of cruisin' classics". Inside the cover a small photo of Her Kateness and a few words :
3 KATE BUSH Running Up That Hill
Aside from her breakthrough effort, Wuthering Heights, this intoxicatingly rhythmic beauty from August 1985 was Bush's most successful single, as well as her most significant, signalling a new complexity and maturity for the already prodigious talent. According to the astonishing lyric, she wished to swap places with no less than God. Pushing things a tad, even for Kate. A wizardette, a true star.
3(UK) 30(US)
No comment ;)
From: IEDSRI@aol.com
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 1995 14:22:23 -0400
Subject: Tennyson + de la Tour
The "ninth wave" reference is not found in Tennyson's "Holy Grail". Although it is from the "Idylls", it is part of "The Coming of Arthur". The false reference was a mistake which Kate did discover before the release of the first edition of the album, but which she could not prevail upon the printers to correct. Later pressings incorporate the correction. According to one interviewer, she was very distressed by the error.
-- Andrew Marvick (IED)
From: Robb McCaffree <nsrjm@nursepo.medctr.ucla.edu>
Subject:
Re: Kate on Q Tape
Date: 21 Oct 1995 06:01:15 GMT
MCQUARRF@ucfv.bc.ca wrote:
> The October issue of Q says:
>
"....According to the astonishing lyric, she wished to swap places with no
less than God. Pushing things a tad, even for Kate."
> Surely the author has misunderstood the lyric?
> "If I only could
> I'd make a deal with God
>
and get him to swap [?] places".
> Is it "swap OUR places" or "swap places"? And in any case, isn't she talking about swapping places with the significant other person, and God is the person facilitating (so to speak) the swap?
Well, it is indeed OUR places, and I too had always thought that Kate was wanting God to swap her place with that of a lover. But grammatically, it still works the other way:
'I'd get him (God) to swap our (God's and my) places"
But the following lyric, "I'd be running up that road" hardly seems to be an act worthy of a God(dess).
Robb
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 22:47:00
From: Peter Fitzgerald-Morris <pfm@glass.jecsystems.com>
Subject: The Coming of Arthur
Hello All,
You might be interested in the full story of the miscredit on the back of "Hounds of Love"
At HOMEGROUND we got hold of an advance copy of the album sleeve in late August 1985. Being already aware of the Arthurian connection from something Kate had said to us some time earlier, I was keen to look up the poem and get the full context. My first discovery was indeed that Kate had credited the wrong poem, "The Holy Grail" rather than "The Comming of Arthur"
We let EMI know, who told Kate, by phone in the middle of some promotional interviews if memory serves.
There was time to change the UK vinyl lp covers, but not the CD inserts.
When Kate was speaking to Dave Cross on the phone in early September 1985 she was extremely grateful.
written by Love-Hounds
compiled and edited
by
Wieland
Willker
Sept 1995 June 1996