User:Richard3120/Hounds of Love

Background
Bush's previous album The Dreaming had been released in September 1982, but despite debuting at number 3 it had quickly dropped out of the UK albums chart after ten weeks. The title track "The Dreaming", released prior to the album as a single, had only reached number 48 of the UK Singles Chart, and the follow-up single "There Goes a Tenner" failed to chart at all. The stress of making the record and the demands of promoting the album had left Bush exhausted: "I was just a complete wreck, physically and mentally. I'd wake up in the morning and find I couldn't move." Tired of living in London, Bush decided to step out of the limelight for a while and in 1983 she and boyfriend Del Palmer moved from their house in Eltham in south-east London to a 17th century farmhouse in the Kent countryside near Sevenoaks. For six months she spent her time visiting friends, learning to drive in the Volkswagen Golf she had bought, and taking dance lessons with a new teacher. "I finished my last album, did the promotion, then found myself in a kind of limbo", she later explained. "It took me four or five months to be able even to write again. It's very difficult when you've been working for years, doing one album after another. You need fresh things to stimulate you. That's why I decided to take a bit of the summer out and spend time with my boyfriend and with my family and friends, just relaxing. Not being Kate Bush the singer; just being myself."

Bush was also coming under pressure from her record company EMI for the amount of expensive recording time spent on The Dreaming at their Abbey Road Studios, which at the time cost £90 per hour. Aware that EMI would be unwilling to finance another lengthy recording experience, in June 1983 she began work on having her own 48-track studio built in the barn behind her family home in East Wickham. Here she reasoned that she would be able to work at her own pace undisturbed by the record company and without the costs incurred by using one of their studios.

Recording
Construction of the new studio was completed in September 1983. While it was being built Bush and Palmer had been composing and creating the album at the farmhouse near Sevenoaks on an eight-track recording machine, using piano, Fairlight and the Linn drum machine. Bush composed the songs using the same process that she had begun on The Dreaming, moving away from writing songs on the piano to composing them on the Fairlight CMI synthesiser and the LinnDrum machine. The songs that were created were not "demos", as the tracks were gradually changed and improved upon over the next two years to create final versions of these songs, rather than re-recording the songs from scratch in the new studio.

Most of the songs for the new album had been written and recorded in basic form by the end of 1983: engineer Paul Hardiman recalled visiting the new studio for the first time on 6 October 1983 and hearing the tracks. Recording started in earnest at the East Wickham studio on 4 November 1983. Over the following months various musicians came to the studio to add instrumentation to the tracks that Bush and Palmer had created. Drummer Stuart Elliott would either add drums on top of the existing Linn drum machine rhythms, or replace the drum machine entirely.

Following the use of traditional Irish instruments on the track "Night of the Swallow" on The Dreaming, Bush wanted to do the same on her new record. Dónal Lunny of Irish band Planxty, who had played on "Night of the Swallow", visited East Wickham to hear Bush's new songs, and arranged for Bush and Palmer to come to Ireland in March 1984 and record at the Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin where Planxty had made several of their records. Many of the album's lyrics were also completed during Bush's stay in Dublin. On their return from Ireland the following month recording resumed at East Wickham. At the end of May 1984 Hardiman had to leave the sessions as he was already booked to work on Rattlesnakes, the debut album from Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, so Haydn Bendall took over the engineer's role for the next six months.

The album was finally completed in June 1985. Bush said in a 1992 radio interview, "I never was so pleased to finish anything in 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."

Writing and composition
The album was produced as two suites - side one being "Hounds of Love" and side two a seven-track concept piece called "The Ninth Wave". Bush described it as being "about someone who is alone in the water for the night. It's about their past, present and future coming to keep them awake, to stop them drowning, to stop them going to sleep until the morning comes." The sleeve notes of the album include four lines of poetry from "The Coming of Arthur", one of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, which reference a "ninth wave". Bush had come across the poem and decided to use the phrase as the title for the second side of the album. Some copies of the album incorrectly attribute the lines to "The Holy Grail", another of the Idylls.

(all quotations transcribed from the interview with Kate Bush in Skinner (1992), except where noted)

Side one: "Hounds of Love"
EMI had wanted to release "Cloudbusting" as the first single from Hounds of Love, but Bush was adamant that it should be "Running Up That Hill". Bush explained that the song was trying to say that a man and a woman would never be able to fully understand each other, and that the only way to do so would be to make a deal with either the devil or, better yet, with God to swap roles for a while in order to get a better understanding of each other. However, EMI insisted that the title of the song had to be changed from its original name of "A Deal with God" to "Running Up That Hill". Bush was not happy with the change, saying, "For me it is still called 'A Deal With God', that was its title. But we were told that if we kept this title that it wouldn't be played in any of the religious countries... and that generally we might get it blacked [i.e. banned] purely because it had 'God' in the title. Now, I couldn't believe this, this seemed completely ridiculous to me and the title was such a part of the song's entity. I just couldn't understand it. But nonetheless, although I was very unhappy about it, I felt unless I compromised that I was going to be cutting my own throat, you know: I'd just spent two, three years making an album and we weren't going to get this record played on the radio if I was stubborn. So I felt I had to be grown up about this, so we changed it to 'Running Up That Hill'. But it's always something I've regretted doing, I must say." As a compromise the original title of "A Deal with God" was retained on the album as the song's subtitle in parentheses.

Bush described the title track as the feeling of being chased by love, being both fearful and thrilled at the same time. The sample "It's in the trees! It's coming!" at the beginning of the track is taken from a séance scene from the 1957 British horror film Night of the Demon, spoken by actor Reginald Beckwith, which inspired the song. She recalled that "'The Big Sky' was very difficult to write. I knew what I wanted to finish up with, but I didn't seem to be able to get there. We had three different versions and eventually it just kind of turned into what it did, thank goodness. [The song] was really about... when I was a kid, we'd go out somewhere and sit up and look at the sky. And if you watch the clouds long enough, they take on different shapes, you can see dinosaurs in them, or castles. And at the time I was writing this album, we were living in the country and my keyboards and stuff were in this room overlooking a valley and I'd sit and watch the clouds rolling up the hill towards me." Engineer Haydn Bendall also recalled that the song's gestation was one of the most protracted on the album, with three very different versions being made before settling on the final one. "Mother Stands for Comfort" the track's really talking about the love of a mother, and in this case she's the mother of a murderer, in that she's basically prepared to protect her son against anything. The final line of the lyrics, "Mother will stay mum", is a play on words: "mum" being a colloquial term for "mother" in Britain, but "stay mum" means to keep silent.

"Cloudbusting" was inspired by Peter Reich's memoir A Book of Dreams, which Bush had found in a bookshop in 1976 and bought because she liked the book's title. Reich was the son of Austrian sexual psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who believed that a cosmic energy, which he termed orgone, existed and that he could harness this energy and change weather patterns using his invention the Orgone Accumulator. He also believed that an opposting negative force, deadly orgone, caused desertification and built a machine which he called a "cloudbuster" which would form rainclouds to increase the flow of positive orgone. Orgonon, mentioned in the song's opening line "I still dream of Orgonon", was the name of the house in Maine that Wilhelm Reich bought in 1942 and where his son Peter grew up. The single's video, directed by Julian Doyle, told the Reichs' story and starred actor Donald Sutherland as Wilhelm and Bush herself as Peter, with cropped hair and wearing boy’s clothing. The video depicts the pair using the Orgone Accumulator, before Wilhelm is arrested and taken away by US government agents.

The song ends with the sound effect of a steam train, whistle created by Bush on the Fairlight and Palmer making steam hissing sound, to cover up the fact that the song had no proper ending as the various instruments on the track came to a stop.

Side two: "The Ninth Wave"
"The Ninth Wave" starts with the piano ballad "And Dream of Sheep", which Bush believed was probably the third track that she wrote for the album after "Running Up That Hill" and "Hounds of Love". Bush said of the song, "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 travelling at night they'll see the light and know they're there... 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." "Personal worst nightmares put into song" Despite their best intentions, the song's protagonist does eventually fall asleep and has a dream where she is skating over the ice of a frozen pond. She becomes aware that something is moving underneath the ice beneath her, only to realise that it is herself, trapped under the ice. "Waking the Witch" starts with a variety of voices pleading with the protagonist to wake up. Among the people lending their voices are Bush's father Robert and mother Hannah, her two brothers Paddy and John, boyfriend Del Palmer, album engineer Brian Tench, and actor and comedian Robbie Coltrane. The song explores another nightmare scenario where the protagonist is being tried as a witch - Bush felt that misogynist ideas still existed.

Towards the end of the track the sound of a helicopter is heard. Bush said, "We 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". In "Watching You Without Me" the protagonist now imagines herself at home in spirit form, seeing her loved one waiting for her return and wanting to speak to him, but being unable to. The backing vocals play a trick by singing "You can't hear me" with enough disguise to make it difficult to hear them properly.

The protagonist is paid a visit by her future self, who urges her not to give up and tells her that she must live so that her future self can live and can experience many years of happiness in the future. "Jig of Life" was written while Bush and Palmer were in Dublin and features Irish musicians. It incorporates a traditional tune discovered by Bush’s brother Paddy who played it to her and Bush decided to include it within the song. Her other brother John Carder Bush provides the spoken word poem that features in the track.

The character in the story is now floating in the ocean and looking up at the stars. With the endless expanse of both sky and water it is easy for her to imagine that the sky and the ocean are reversed, so that the stars are actually reflections on the water, and the protagonist is floating in space, looking down on the Earth and being able to view everything that is happening around the planet.

The chorale in "Hello Earth" is based on the traditional Georgian song "Tsintskaro", performed by the Richard Hickox Singers. Bush had heard the song in the film Nosferatu, performed by the vocal ensemble Gordela. She said, "'Hello Earth' was a very difficult track to write... 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. 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 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 were these beautiful voices in these choruses that had just been like two black holes." With no written score available composer Michael Berkeley was asked to help recreate "Tsintskaro"'s arrangement with Bush's new "lyrics".

The final track "The Morning Fog" describes the arrival of the morning and daylight, and implies that the protagonist is finally rescued from her ordeal. Bush stated, "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."

Artwork
The photographs on the front cover and inner artwork were taken by Kate brother John Carder Bush. The front cover features Kate with the family's pet bloodhounds, Bonnie and Clyde. To avoid distressing the dogs by taking them out of the family environment, the photographs were shot in the Victorian washhouse situated in the garden at East Wickham. The back cover photograph displays similarities to John Everett Millais' painting Ophelia – John Carder Bush obtained an Australian garden pool and filled it with water and pond plants for his sister to lie in.