Kate Bush -- Raw Cards

• Kate Bush (b. 1958)
• HOUNDS OF LOVE

  Hounds of Love – No.5 Cloudbusting

  The Ninth Wave – No.1 And Dream Of Sheep; No.2 Under Ice
• 1985 – date of release. (Her birth date backwards – 58 becomes 85!)
• Hounds of Love got to Number One as an album (her fifth) – knocked Madonna’s Like a Virgin off the top spot. Opening track – Running Up That Hill – was one of four singles (reaching Number Three).
• KATE BUSH wrote and recorded the album in her own studio – studio costs on previous album The Dreaming had been very expensive.
• KATE BUSH is both lyricist and composer and performer (a triple threat!).
• Each of these three songs has a different structure.

  ·      HOUNDS OF LOVE – vbrch / vbrch / Inst+Ch / instcoda

  ·      AND DREAM OF SHEEP – V link1 / V / link2 / Coda

  ·      UNDER ICE – through composed
• Textural blend of synthesised sounds and ‘traditional’ instrumentation (often folk with Irish influences on account of family connections – whistles, uilleann pipes, balalaika, bouzouki, didgeridoo). This is typical of Progressive Rock – more poetic lyrically and using ‘art music’ techniques (and jazz and folk traditions). This movement emerged out of the psychedelia of late 60s in UK and US – concerned more with listening than dancing. Essentially eclectic!
• KATE BUSH spotted by Dave Gilmour (Pink Floyd) and signed by EMI while still at school (aged 16)! KATE BUSH was only 19 when Wuthering Heights was released – this debut single was Number One for four weeks – she was the first female artist in UK to achieve a Number One with a self-written song! WH was also an international hit. Some of the songs on this debut album had been written when KATE BUSH was only 13…
• Hounds of Love was her third as producer and her most independent project to date.
•  The two parts of the album were either side of the original vinyl LP. The Ninth Wave, on side 2, was a miniature concept album, based on Tennyson’s poem about King Arthur called Idylls of the King.
• Use of Fairlight CMI was a signature of her studio technique. (She had first used it on her third album Never for Ever.) This was the first commercially available synthesiser that could process a cache of sounds, use looping and sequencing techniques and could also be used as a sampler.
• CLOUDBUSTING was inspired by Peter Reich’s A Book of Dreams about his father Wilhelm Reich who was arrested in US for professional misconduct and then died in prison when PR was only 13. His Austrian father was a psychoanalyst and Freudian sex therapist (vegetotherapy and the Orgonon – a treatment booth in which Charakterpanzer (character armour) could be broken down to release more natural instincts and freedoms); he was interested in ufos and also invented a system of cloud seeding which changed the weather and made it rain…
• The Ninth Wave is a mini concept album inspired by Alfred Tennyson’s poem about King Arthur –Idylls of the King.
• ‘Wave after wave, each mightier than the last / ‘Til last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep /

  And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged / Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame.’

   

  KATE BUSH: ‘…about a person 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.’
• Sampling (Sound Découpage) is a technique used in a lot of Prog Rock. Steam Engine SFX at end of CLOUDBUSTING; Shipping Forecast in first instrumental of AND DREAM OF SHEEP; less abstractly 2 bars of balalaika into the first bridge of CLOUDBUSTING – played by KATE BUSH’s brother Paddy as a ‘one-off’ moment of colour.
• CLOUDBUSTING. C sharp Aeolian (natural minor); harmony all pivots around a minor second interval of B and C sharp; strong rhythmic drive from strings and mostly syllabic setting – limited chord palette; melodic 4 bar riff starts at bar 18 (bars 2 and 4 are identical, 1 and 3 are inversions). Remorseless insistence of the state over the individual?
• AND DREAM OF SHEEP: in E major but starts in relative minor C sharp (settles onto a tonic pedal of E at bar 8 for 5 bars; melismatic word painting in final bars on ‘deeper’; unresolved final chord B/E (dominant over tonic bass); unstructured rhythmic devices give an improvisatory feel – rit. / fermata / occasional bars in 2/4, 3/4 or 5/4;
• UNDER ICE: Transparent textures using quartal and quintal harmonies over spare octaves in the bass; extensive use of sus 2 chords with total avoidance of the dominant – harmonic tensions never resolved in a conventional diatonic sense; low tessitura for the voice; unstable rhythmic profile starting at 65 bpm with a gradual accel. Up to 108 bpm with rit. At the end; folk-style melisma with examples of ‘Scotch snap’; improvisatory feel to the melismatic portamento in final phrase. Sul ponticello effect in string textures.
• Use of Medici Sextet (recognised classical chamber ensemble) typical of Prog Rock’s collaborative use of ‘legitimate’ techniques; eg use of Michael Berkeley to arrange the vocal parts on Hello Earth and John Williams on guitar for The Morning Fog; also Irish folk musicians in AND DREAM OF SHEEP – Donal Lunny on bouzouki and John Sheahan on whistles;
• John Lennon: ‘I enjoyed Reich’s dreams very much.’ Peter Reich’s book was part of the zeitgeist.
• KATE BUSH on A Book of Dreams: ‘written by this man through the eyes of himself when he was a child, looking at his father, and the relationship between them.’
• Video for CLOUDBUSTING was conceived by Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam. Features Donald Sutherland as Wilhelm Reich and KATE BUSH as his son Peter. The machine makes it rain as her arrested father is driven away in a big black car… Video of AND DREAM OF SHEEP features KATE BUSH floating in the open sea – the ‘little light’ is the flashing red light on her life jacket.