STACK #182 Dec 2019

MUSIC

FEATURE

it’d affect her work, and she looked at me for a second and said she hadn’t been straight for nine years, and I loved her.” Utah Saints sampled one line from Cloudbusting (“I just know that something good is going to happen”) for their ravetastic chart hit Something Good (1992), which reminds me of another Bush-sampled dancefloor-filler that Australia’s-own Infusion released in 2003 as Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush Vs Infusion (of which only about ten copies were originally pressed) – still sounds fresh AF! Running Up That Hill , also from Bush’s career-defining fifth album Hounds Of Love , boasts insistent, galloping, ‘80s-style drums; something which sounds like tuneful sea lions mating; and that sexual, persuasive bridge: “Oh come on, baby/ Oh come on, darling/ Let me steal this moment from you now...” Bush explains the meaning behind Running Up That Hill : “I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman can’t understand each other because we are a man and a woman. And if we could actually swap each other’s roles, if we could actually be in each other’s place for a while, I think we’d both be very surprised!” At the age of 11, Bush taught herself to play piano. While expressing concern over her debut album The Kick Inside ’s cover shot, which features a bra-less Kate sporting a pale pink leotard, she said, “People weren’t even generally aware that I wrote my own songs or played the piano. The media just promoted me as a female body. It’s like I’ve had to prove that I’m an artist in a female body.” When she was just 16, David Gilmour helped Bush produce the three-track demo tape that attracted the attention of EMI Records. In Queens Of British Pop , Bob Mercer shockingly

Bush photographed by her elder brother, the esteemed writer John Carder Bush; John’s narrated poetry and backing vocals can be heard on several of Kate’s albums

admits, “There was literally a mantra at EMI: ‘Birds don’t sell’,” around the time when he personally signed her to the label. Mercer also says he pushed for the more rock-oriented James And The Cold Gun to be released as her debut single, but Bush – aged 19 – insisted on Wuthering Heights , which topped the UK

Singles Chart for four weeks in 1978, making her the first female artist to achieve a UK #1 with a self-written song. Wuthering Heights also topped the ARIA Singles Chart. Bush has produced all of her studio albums since 1982’s The Dreaming . For this album’s title track, she drew inspiration from Indigenous Australians being driven from their sacred land as colonisers moved in to dig for ore. Revisiting Hounds Of Love now, the production is pristine. Sounds crash and fizz through alternate earbuds – an ideal headphones-listen released back when boom boxes were all the rage. (Meanwhile, how cool were those dual cassette decks for recording bootleg copies?) Bush wrote all of the tracks on Hounds Of Love (except the Georgian traditional choral in Hello Earth ), and built a 24-track studio in the barn behind her family home so that she could record at her own pace. The record was composed specifically for vinyl and cassette formats with two separate sides: 1) Hounds Of Love , containing five ‘accessible’ pop songs (including the album’s four singles) and 2) The Ninth Wave , a conceptual suite of seven interconnecting songs documenting the internal monologue of a person who somehow winds up in a body of water overnight (yep, also filed under ‘weird’). “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,” Bush clarifies. Album closer The Morning Fog is the rescue: “The light/ Begin to bleed/ Begin to breathe/ Begin to speak...” For the Hounds Of Love album release party, guests were invited to watch a laser show inside the London Planetarium while listening to a playback of the album in its entirety. How much do you wish you were there right now!? BC

Bush (and her wig) in the clip for Cloudbusting

Bush in the clip for Running UpThat Hill

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