Her No 1 album Hounds of Love, with its smash singles including Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God), which she self-produced yet again, was the payoff. In the end, Bush had the last laugh after all that donkeying around. And, once you’ve got through it, the rest of her oeuvre will land on your ears like tufty down. But perhaps she shouldn’t be so surprised: in the decades since, it’s been reappraised as technically pioneering – especially poignant because women in the studio are still not being given due credit compared to their male peers. Every song after comes like a shock: the Artful Dodger oompah-pah of There Goes a Tenner, the guttural howling of “I am aliiiiive!” on the onyx slink of Pull Out the Pin to rival any hair-metaller’s, a title track about aborigines having their homeland stolen that unfortunately has Rolf Harris on didgeridoo, a chorus of donkeys on the closing song …īush has called The Dreaming her “mad” album, amused that many, like Björk, have called it their favourite. Opening track Sat in Your Lap is one of her best ever, foreshadowing Running Up That Hill with its gated drum gallop, as she screeches how people think that a knob equals knowledge, the rhythm pushing and pulling with kinetic energy. The intricacy is overwhelming and thrilling. These are brilliant rackets where her ingenious use of sampling (smashed marbles! Twittering birds!) defies expectation and her voice pole-vaults to new heights. Listening to it now, it sounds like Bush unbound, unleashing her frustration like never before. The Dreaming was the first record that she produced entirely herself, which she would continue to do, using an expensive Fairlight sampler to dazzling effect. This isn’t the album that took her stratospheric (that was its follow-up, Hounds of Love) but it’s her Willy Wonka-sized adventure in sound the self-sufficient cocoon that turned her, some say, from musician into “artiste”. Cool male artists love her, too.Faced with such idiocy, it’s little wonder that Bush secreted herself away and came up with something as deranged as The Dreaming. Kate has since inspired a host of artists including Bjork, Tori Amos, Bat for Lashes and Florence and the Machine. It also performed well in The States where college radio pushed it to number 30 in the American album charts. It went to number one in the British album charts pushing out Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”. “Hounds of Love” was released in 1985 and became Kate Bush’s biggest commercial success. While writing the song, Kate envision the video where she played Peter and Donald Sutherland played the controversial psychoanalyst and physician who discovered orgone energy. “Cloudbusting” was inspired by Peter Reich’s memoir of his father, Wilhelm Reich.
“Hello Earth” was inspired by Warner Herzog’s film version of “Nosferatu” and the title track opens with the line “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” taken from the seance scene from the 1975 British Horror flick “Night of the Demon”. The album has a cinematic quality and was both inspired by films and also spawned short film ideas itself. The album was produced as two suites which suited the vinyl LP format and of which she later stated on French television that she thought of the two sides as two separate albums. The result of all the hard work was a highly structured song cycle where conceptual experimentation was married with pop conciseness balancing a variety of moods and a haunting beauty with incredible melodies. She could take as long as she wanted and she did, as it took 18 months to complete and 12 of those months were for mixing and overdubs alone.
This time there were no time pressures and Kate had full control. She also wanted to ease the time and financial pressures of hiring a studio so she had her own 24 Track studio built in a barn on her parents farm. And everyone was saying, ‘Oh, she’s really gone mad now!’, 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? Do I really care about being famous?’, and I was very please with myself that, no, it didn’t matter as much as making a good album.” * A Room to Call Her Own 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. But she had some convincing to do as she remembered, “For the first time I felt I was actually meeting resistance artistically. When Kate Bush embarked upon recording her fifth album, she wanted to produce it herself as she had her previous album, “The Dreaming”.