Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  The genius of ‘Cloudbusting’ is that it doesn’t even attempt to distil Reich’s bizarre, brilliant, esoteric and in some respects highly dubious life into a five-minute song. Instead, it focuses on the profoundly touching relationship between a child and his father. Peter Reich witnessed the ransacking of his father’s labs, watched the FDA take him away, and visited him in prison many times. He was 13 when Reich died, and A Book Of Dreams is written from the universally accessible perspective of a son celebrating the magic of a mysterious and powerful man, a man who can make rain, and his feelings of pride, helplessness, loss and confusion (Reich Jr. never can make up his mind about the legitimacy of Orgone and the ‘cloudbuster’) following his death.

  Bush was haunted by A Book Of Dreams. She had contacted Peter Reich to explain her motives in writing ‘Cloudbusting’ and to express the wish that she hoped that he approved of the song; in a neat, serendipitous touch, she received his reply while they were working on the track at the farm. “When we were doing the vocal, she got a letter from Peter Reich saying he loved the idea of what she was doing,” says Haydn Bendall. “Doing the vocal on that was just fabulous, the power and the passion is stunning. When Kate stands in front of the microphone and sings, it’s fantastic, it takes your breath away. That’s a huge privilege. We’re used to effects in the studio and computer graphics in films, but when you’re faced with raw talent it’s still stunning. She’s quite softly spoken and laughs a lot and is very joyous, but she takes on these different personae when she is singing – she’s an actress as well as a singer.”

  It’s a wonderfully balanced song, both sad and strangely ecstatic, and filled with a real understanding of a child’s love for a parent; for don’t we all, as children, want to believe that our parents can perform miracles and cosmic sleights of hand? It’s almost impossible not to to hear ‘Cloudbusting’ as a hymn of love and gratitude for Bush’s own inspiring, kind and somewhat eccentric father, a man who always sought to open her eyes to the power of beauty and magic.

  That her family remained her strength and joy was a truth communicated time and time again on Hounds Of Love. In ‘And Dream Of Sheep’ she slipped in one of her mother’s favourite expressions, the oddly touching – and very Irish – “Come here with me now,” while ‘Mother Stands For Comfort’ was a more complex, disturbing account of the all-encompassing nature of a maternal love that extends far beyond the bounds of moral and legal right and wrong. Elsewhere, Jay slipped into his best Irish accent to declaim poetically over the end of ‘Jig Of Life’, while the entire brood popped up in ‘Waking The Witch’, Paddy switching effortlessly from Geordie to a Yorkshire accent to implore the girl to wake up.

  Perhaps mindful of the warning contained within ‘All The Love’ on The Dreaming, in which she contemplates the sorrow that comes from deep feelings left unexpressed, Hounds Of Love ended with ‘The Morning Fog’, a song pricked with glorious points of light, expressing the joy and gratitude felt by someone who has returned from far away – “I kiss the ground” – and is now determined to celebrate the things that truly matter: life, love and nature, and music. It can be read as a note to self: hold on to your happiness, sing it out, celebrate it. And indeed she does, ending the album with a promise to tell her mother, her father, her lover and her brothers “how much I love them.” Simple and heartfelt, it’s an extraordinary gift of a song.

  Listen closely and you can hear that sentiment running through every note of the album. Joy is a fiendishly difficult emotion to capture in any art form. With Hounds Of Love Bush gathered up the positive forces of her childhood home, surrounded by her friends and family and her treasured collaborators, and returned to something fundamental in her music, an elemental vigour. The words are some of her best, containing her most inclusive, dramatic and beautiful thoughts; the music is a force of nature, all wind, weather, light and love; her voice is sublime, the potency she discovered on The Dreaming harnessed and perfectly rendered.

  Familiar, less jubilant themes are also present: the difficultly of connecting, the impossibility of really knowing and loving another, the fear of surrender, the fear of not surrendering, the constant yearning. Several tracks are honest and imaginative examinations of human struggle, but nothing is insurmountable. Hounds Of Love is ultimately about maintaining hope and happiness against all the odds. ‘Running Up That Hill’, though not her choice of title, was a perfect analogy – life is hard, but we’re getting somewhere. Though bleak and often nightmarish, similarly ‘The Ninth Wave’ is a story about not dying, not going under, but instead riding the waves and, somehow, keeping going. Every moment of darkness and doubt is balanced and leavened by a ringing affirmation, an unfakeable joie de vivre – she had fun making this record. “It was one of the most content, happy periods of my life for quite a while, in that I actually had time to breathe and work creatively,” she said.27 Hounds Of Love is a thrilling portrait of the artist as a truly alive, fully connected human being.

  She had been gone a long time. In her absence, Marvin Gaye had died and Madonna had arrived, ushering in an age of brash, blatant sexuality that made Bush’s purring eroticism seem positively demure; MTV was the new kingmaker, the compact disc had undergone its ‘Big Bang’ moment, and that ‘gated’ drum sound could be heard on records by everyone from David Bowie to Bruce Springsteen. The world had moved on apace. In their August 3, 1985 issue NME ran a feature placing Bush firmly in the ‘Where Are They Now?’ file. Yes, she had been gone a long time.

  The response was swift. Two days after NME hit the shops Bush released ‘Running Up That Hill’ as a single and appeared on Wogan to sing it, her first public performance in the UK for almost three years, and in the final third of 1985 and for much of the following year she was everywhere, exposed to more interviews, television appearances and awards shows than at any time since the late Seventies.

  ‘Running Up That Hill’ had been called ‘A Deal With God’ until EMI expressed concerns that the title would damage its chances of success in staunchly Catholic territories, and probably also hinder its prospects in America, where Bush had been steadily building a profile. “We were told that if we kept this title that it wouldn’t be played in any of the religious countries,” she recalled. “We might get it blacked purely because it had ‘God’ in the title. This seemed completely ridiculous to me … but nonetheless, although I was very unhappy about it, I felt unless I compromised I was going to be cutting my own throat.”28

  Bush hadn’t had a hit record since 1981, or a Top 10 single since 1980, a lifetime in pop’s accelerated chronology. She had already insisted that ‘Running Up That Hill’ be the first single rather than ‘Cloudbusting’, the company’s choice, so she reluctantly consented to the title change, reasoning that “after The Dreaming, I couldn’t be bloody minded.”29 She had learned when to pick her fights. Whereas the dust-up over ‘Wuthering Heights’ at the launch of her career was a defining battle she felt she simply had to win, the compromise on ‘Running Up That Hill’ was made from a position of strength. She could see the bigger picture, the wider victory. She even deigned to appear on Top Of The Pops, her first performance on the show since the ‘Wuthering Heights’ debacle over seven years earlier. This time she called the shots and her band came with her.

  ‘Running Up That Hill’ was greeted with almost universal acclaim. Even Melody Maker, whose reviewer Helen Fitzgerald initially gave it a desperately ill-considered brush-off, re-considered and printed a glowing write-up in a future issue. It quickly peaked at number three, her biggest hit since her first single, and proved a resounding success worldwide. It remains – alongside ‘Wuthering Heights’ – her most widely recognised song. Its accessibility wasn’t hurt by the fact that the insistent rhythmic pulse that drove the song was so effortlessly in synch with the times.

  The B-side was ‘Under The Ivy’, a hushed, two-minute retreat into an internalised world of childhood that she had succeeded in carrying with her, recorded in an afternoon early in the alb
um sessions. Here, she brings her past and present selves together in a lament for lost innocence, set in the farm’s rose garden, where “someone is recalling a moment when … they were children, something they used to do … that they won’t be able to do again.”30 It is a testament of the strength – not just of songwriting, but also of unity and form – of Hounds Of Love that such a magnificent song was left on the sidelines. ‘The Ninth Wave’ concept bustled some fine tracks into touch, but she seemed to retain a soft spot for ‘Under The Ivy’, performing the song live from Abbey Road in March 1986 for a special anniversary edition of the Channel 4 music show The Tube.

  The album had been completed in June, Bush having added all the necessary atmospheric flourishes, which included whirring helicopter noises borrowed from Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Palmer simulating a steam train to help disguise the slo-mo collapse at the conclusion of ‘Cloudbusting’, and her old friend Morris Pert dropping in for some percussive fun on ‘The Big Sky’: “Ah yes, we do get going, don’t we!” he fondly recalls. No donkeys this time, no emus. The mix, overseen by Brian Tench, was once again suitably complex, and even mastering the record was something of a trauma. Ian Cooper, who cut all Bush’s records from The Dreaming to The Red Shoes, recalls, “Hounds Of Love took the longest. I won’t say it was a nightmare, but I remember the list of what I had to do rolling onto the floor, it was jumping around all over the place. I have a funny feeling we were still doing it when it was released. I remember asking her when it was coming out, and she said, ‘It’s out!’ I said, ‘Then why are we doing it?’ and she said, ‘I think we could this and that right.’” It’s tempting to surmise that nothing is ever quite finished to her satisfaction.

  Hounds Of Love was yet another autumn baby, launched at the London Planetarium on September 9, 1985 and released a week later. Bush and Palmer attended the launch together, arriving hand in hand amid an eruption of flashbulbs as the papers finally got the shot they’d been waiting for. Inside, the entire album was played to the accompaniment of a light show in the Laserium, but the event was rather overshadowed by some of the subsequent press coverage in which Bush was bitchily portrayed – still – as some air-headed ingénue, while the gossip sheets took great delight in the fact that a well refreshed Youth had called Del a “wally”.

  “I got drunk at the launch of Hounds and made some serious indiscretions,” says the bass man. “All I can say is that I was extremely jealous. I wanted to be Del! But I don’t want to talk about that, really.” It can certainly prove hazardous for the heartstrings recording with Bush. One musician deliberately stopped working with her for many years because he “was absolutely desperately and totally in love, just besotted with her. She and Del were together and I wasn’t going to do anything to change that, and in the end I kind of absented myself. It was very tricky. I was getting emotionally involved and I lost all objectivity, so I bowed out.”

  Nick Launay admits that while working with Bush on The Dreaming he became “very confused by the whole thing. She bought me towards the end this big box of chocolates with this wonderful note in it, and wrote lovely cards saying ‘Thank you for making my music come alive’ and all this. It was all very lovely. I was, like, ‘Wow, what does she mean by this?’ But she had a boyfriend, Del Palmer, and he was there all the time, and that was obviously ongoing. She’s just a very, very loving person and I think she puts this feeling of love and appreciation out there when you work with her, and you tend to get a little confused about what it all means! Some people put out an incredible energy of love, and I think she was just like that. I was really young. I was 20 but more like a 12-year-old, so it was pretty amazing just being in the room with this amazing looking person. To me it was like being with a cartoon character, almost, like a Japanese anime character. And the way she talked! This incredibly high voice, quite bizarre and very seductive. None of it was put on at all, she was just like that.”

  Daniel Lanois describes her as down to earth, “apart from the fact that every man in the room falls in love with her! If you call that down to earth….” On the set of The Line, The Cross And The Curve, the entire crew scrambled over each other to do her bidding. It’s a widespread affliction, and one not merely confined to men. “Her gentleness, you just can’t help but fall in love with her,” says Borimira Nedeva, who worked with Bush during her sessions with the Trio Bulgarka. “The trio adored Kate as everyone else did.”

  Scores of interviews with Bush over the years have ended as fawning paeans to her ‘sensuality’, every male journalist fancying himself as a potential suitor, eulogising everything from her dimples to her toes. Among her closest friends and collaborators, however, she inspires a deeper loyalty and sense of protectiveness, not only in deference to her artistry, but also her privacy. Bush’s natural warmth, genuineness, lack of prudishness, tactility, sincerity and artistic integrity, combined with her obvious beauty and great gifts, is a large part of the reason people love working with her to the point where they become almost devotional. She surrounds herself with musicians and technicians and creative people of all ages, stripes and experience who will go the extra mile for her because not only does she treat them with respect, but they understand more than anyone that what she does is extraordinary. “No disrespect to anyone I’ve worked with since, but I’ve not met anyone else who is in the same league,” says Jon Kelly, echoing an oft-repeated mantra. “She was so different, and just the sweetest lady.”

  Building on the success of ‘Running Up That Hill’, Hounds Of Love went straight to number one in the UK charts, knocking Madonna’s Like A Virgin off the top perch. Not only was the album a superb artistic statement but it was cleverly constructed, front-loaded with the most accessible songs before introducing the more demanding material that comprised ‘The Ninth Wave’. The Dreaming had been somewhat uneasily ahead of its time and portrayed Bush in a light so far removed from how she had appeared previously that great chunks of her audience couldn’t, or wouldn’t, connect with it. On Hounds Of Love, conversely, she succeeded in looking and sounding utterly true to herself and yet also conveniently in tune with the mood music of the mid-Eighties: big hair, shoulder pads, great melodic hooks. Technology, too, had caught up with her. During her studio hibernation the Fairlight had become ubiquitous, and any number of songs were flying around the ether featuring its bright, synthetic string sound rubbing against bubbling Linn rhythms; The Blue Nile’s 1984 single ‘Tinseltown In The Rain’, for instance, bears a striking resemblance to ‘Running Up That Hill’. And let us not forget that 1985 was the year the charts succumbed to the power of love: Huey Lewis, Jennifer Rush, the afterglow of Frankie Goes To Hollywood. What better time for a cry of, ‘It’s in the trees, it’s coming!’

  The colossal success of Hounds Of Love had a certain inevitability about it. EMI were excited and pushed the album hard. It sold over 600,000 copies in the first nine months, ten times more than The Dreaming, and became the fourth best selling compact disc released in Britain, lining up behind the coffee table classics, Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms and Love Over Gold and Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required.

  The critics were also impressed. Sounds gave it the full five stars, declaring simply that “Hounds Of Love is fucking brilliant. All human life [is] contained herein. Dramatic, moving and wildly, unashamedly, beautifully romantic.” NME, the volatile weather front charged with shaping the nation’s musical temperature on a weekly basis, pronounced that Bush was, at last, cool. “Kate’s a genius, the rarest solo artist this country’s ever produced,” wrote Jane Solanas. “She makes sceptics dance to her tune. The company’s daughter has truly screwed the system and produced the best album of the year doing it.” Smash Hits gave it a nine out of 10 rating and made it pick of the month; No 1 called it “a haunting collection of musical images” and then spoiled it all by declaring it “one for Marillion fans everywhere.” Melody Maker liked it but had an unpleasant Pavlovian reaction to ‘The Ninth Wave’; anything with a ‘concept’ was deemed pro
foundly suspicious.

  The last months of 1985 were almost entirely given over to dedicated promotion, not only throughout Europe but also further afield. In mid-November she visited the United States for the first time since 1978. Her stock had steadily been growing across the Atlantic since The Dreaming, the first of her albums since The Kick Inside to get a release in the US. Its oddness and originality had earned some highly favourable reviews and also considerable exposure on college radio, her designated home on the airwaves; in the States, Bush has always been considered unequivocally ‘alternative’. Michael Davis characterised her in his 1982 Creem review as “a cross between Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchell, Nina Hagen and [The Motels’ lead singer] Martha Davis.” In latter years she has often been bunched in with other ‘sensitive’ female musicians like Jane Siberry and Sarah McLachlan, the Lilith Fair set. In a musical landscape obsessed with categories, she was always going to have a problem finding her niche.

  Nick Burton in Record called The Dreaming a “masterpiece … she’s the only female rocker out there doing anything original (or experimental) in contemporary pop. What’s pending? Stardom, one hopes.” Building on these positive reactions and a subsequent foothold in the nursery slopes of the Billboard 200, EMI-America had finally mobilised behind Bush’s career, organising the release of a five track mini-LP in June 1983 featuring ‘Sat In Your Lap’, ‘James And The Cold Gun’, ‘Babooshka’, ‘Suspended In Gaffa’ and a French vocal version of ‘The Infant Kiss’ called ‘Un Baiser D’Enfant’. In Canada, the mini-LP included an extra track, ‘Ne T’Enfuis Pas’, specially aimed at the French-speaking Canadian market and recorded and mixed – alongside the new vocal for ‘Un Baiser D’Enfant’ – by Bush, Palmer and Paul Hardiman in a single day at the house in Eltham on October 16, 1982. A personal promotional tour was planned to coincide with the release of the mini-album, but last minute engine failure on the QE2 – one of the least hackneyed of all rock star excuses, but Bush was still not a happy flyer – put paid to her trip, and in the end she publicised it via telephone interviews.