Popular and critical reception before Hounds of Love

After the initial shock of ‘Wuthering Heights’, in which her deliberately heightened falsetto and the lurid, romanticised performances of a striking 19-year-old brunette transfixed audiences (Loseff Reference Loseff1999),Footnote ² Kate Bush reinforced the impact of her unique melange of folk music, prog rock and off-kilter pop with the extraordinary debut album, The Kick Inside, which drew widespread popular attention, if mixed critical reviews. It soon became clear, however, that Bush was not happy to settle into a fixed position as a genre musician producing a particular formula of music for a core group of fans. She was rushed by her record company, against her own better judgement, into producing a second album, Lionheart, which suffered from a repetition of theme and a coarsening of tone from the headily perfumed longings of her debut to pastiche and faux-naivety. Drawing herself away financially from EMI and working as her own co- producer, in 1980 she produced an eclectic album of political observation, odd sexual yearnings and an overtone of impending mortality in Never For Ever. She also employed the very first sampling synthesiser technology, in order to create a broader soundscape than hitherto (Callan Reference Callan and Inglis2006, p. 114). This won her a few fans among ‘new wave’ musicians, such as Peter Gabriel and Midge Ure, who recognised her burgeoning talent, but it seemed to leave her stereotyped as an wide-eyed, tuneful eccentric, something that her then-frequent appearances on mainstream television entertainment shows seemed to reinforce. Most of the more serious music journals, such as NME, Sounds and Melody Maker were either condescending in their praise or sneeringly dismissive of her voice, her mannered video performances and her style of music (Baker Reference Baker1979).Footnote ³ The BBC Radio 1 disc jockey, John Peel, at this stage the unassailable arbiter of fashionable music taste, admitted that, try as he might, he could not take her seriously as a musician and never played her music (Peel Reference Peel2008, p. 334).

Bush, increasingly influenced by the avant-garde influenced work of David Bowie, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and Peter Gabriel, chose, in a characteristic display of contrariness, to capitalise on the success of Never For Ever (which was the first album by a solo female performer to reach No. 1 in the UK charts) by producing an album of almost ludicrous complexity for a popular artist. This was not a snub to her record label akin to Lou Reed's legendary Metal Machine Music, as EMI stood by her, despite its doubts about her new project. With recordings from Irish folk musicians, employment of the latest sampling technology, blizzards of over-dubs, boy choristers and Bush imitating a donkey at one point, Reference Bush1982's The Dreaming was an artistic triumph, but a commercial disappointment.Footnote ⁴ The artist's reputation plummeted. Radio stations refused to play the selected singles, which consequently barely charted, disgruntled consumers returned the album and there was even a suggestion that EMI was considering dropping her from their label. Luckily for Bush, her decision to set up her own company, Kate Bush Music Ltd, and thereby to gain control of a larger share of her profits (and some very astute investments by her family on her behalf), meant that she was able to continue on her chosen path with little serious repercussions, apart from the clear lesson that she would not be allowed to make another album like The Dreaming, if she wished to keep EMI as her label.

Bush later acknowledged that she had produced The Dreaming as an act of catharsis, to purge her reputation as an MOR, ballad-singing, BBC Radio 2-friendly songstress, later referring to it as her ‘She's gone mad’ album (Garr Reference Gaar2002, p. 268). She recognised it as a cry of frustration with her position as a young, female musician, which had been rendered darker by its mode of recording, with her locked away with her engineer in rented basement studios, reliant on tea, chocolate and marijuana as they worked into the night to create the complex aural landscapes she needed to bring to life each of the contrasting themes she explored in the songs’ lyrics (Lindsay Reference Lindsay2012). She therefore chose to break away from the claustrophobia of the metropolis for her following project. She had never been part of any artistic set in London, being far more comfortable with her family and her long-term partner, band-member and budding engineer, Del Palmer. She recognised that her initial breakthrough came from the isolation, peace and space in her adolescent years and that being forced to promote her work and to make media appearances continuously was actually inhibiting her muse. She therefore took a break in Ireland (her mother's home country), moved out of London to the Kent countryside to write and built a studio there where she could record at her own pace. This led to a slowdown in production times which has become a legendary feature of her subsequent career (most famously when she took 12 years between The Red Shoes in 1993 and the double-album Aerial in 2005), but which, at the time, was extraordinary in such an ephemeral industry as popular music in which reputations could rise and fall in weeks. As she had not had a top 10 hit for five years by 1985 and conjectures as to her mental state, stimulated by the content of The Dreaming, had led some to believe she had retired from music due to mental exhaustion, NME published a ‘Where are they now?’ feature on Bush, days before she defied her critics with the release of ‘Running Up That Hill’ in August 1985.Footnote ⁵

The album that she released on 16 September was the legendary Hounds of Love, critically regarded as one of the finest popular musical works of the modern era. It is praised for its ability to blend complex experimental musical technique with the conventional modes of mid-1980s mainstream; the ‘New Pop’ which Goodwin describes as ‘danceable, machine-based pop music’ (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1993, p. 34). Kruse emphasises that the first side of the album is presented ‘in an accessible pop style’ in marked contrast to her previous experimentation (Kruse Reference Kruse, Frith and Goodwin1990, p. 391).Footnote ⁶ It featured no fewer than four hit singles (three of which reached the top 20 in UK), yet also contains a side of songs designed as a concept suite (‘my first novella’ as Bush charmingly described it many years later; Doyle Reference Doyle2005, p. 89). The entire album is therefore far too complex to address as a whole in a journal paper. Instead, I shall attempt to use the title track, its alternative recording and the song's visual presentation to the public as a means of analysing the album's immediate success, its long-term popularity and its artistic significance. In conclusion I intend to demonstrate that the song ‘Hounds of Love’ marked the moment that Kate Bush finally succeeded on her self-appointed ‘mission from God’ to escape from the narrow parameters of ‘pop-star’ to the role of cherished (if reluctant) icon of modern British artistic integrity and authenticity.Footnote ⁷

Inspirations

The title of the album and its second track was not addressed by the music press of the period, perhaps surprisingly, given its sheer richness of references and allusions, which is described by some cultural analysts as ‘semiotic thickness’ (Tulloch Reference Tulloch1990; Mowitt Reference Mowitt2002). Bush presented the album with a cover image of herself relaxing in an impossibly glamorous milieu, while clutching two Weimaraner (see Figure 1). As I will examine below, Bush's appearance was as calculated as her music and her vocal performance. This canine image and the use of the ‘doggy chorus’ with its mock-barking in the title track was enough to satisfy the incurious reviewers. A few did attempt to penetrate the song's meaning somewhat further and Bush herself felt obliged to explain the song in one of her annual messages to her patient fan club:

Figure 1.

The cover of Hounds of Love (EMI 24 0384 1) released 16 September 1985

Such a powerful image led those more interested in her work to explore the inspiration for the song. The disc-jockey, Tony Myatt, an early supporter of Bush's career, asked a direct question, to which she gave a typically indirect answer:

Although Bush seemed here to deny that the title and theme of the song were directly inspired by literature, some of the references in the song appear to have undeniable origins. The first and most obvious inspiration for the song, identified by a recent DVD which analysed the album, is to Mary Webb's Reference Webb1917 novel, Gone to Earth. That novel's child-woman narrator, Hazel Woodus, with her passionate love of nature and inability to resist the temptation of physical love, subtly reflects Bush's own public persona. In the lines, ‘I found a fox, caught by dogs … his little heart it beat so fast’ Bush directly acknowledges the relationship between Foxy, a tame vixen, and Hazel. That Hazel is pursued by the hounds of her seducer, Reddin, and driven to her death by a ‘wild-hunt’, a symbol of her own untamed pagan sexuality in an era of nonconformist restraint, was a clear inspiration. Given Bush's propensity for visual stimuli and her acknowledged love of the cinema of the ‘Archers’ (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), it is most likely that she had seen the melodramatic adaptation they had made in 1950.Footnote ⁹ Surprisingly, Bush was not the only experimental artist in this period inspired by Webb's novel. The progressive rock band Barclay James Harvest had released an album entitled Gone to Earth in Reference James Harvest1977 and as Rob Young has established, David Sylvian, formerly of Japan, collaborated with Robert Fripp on an experimental album with the same title, released almost a year after Bush's album (Young Reference Young2010, pp. 575–6).

Although one can find resonances with the themes of Webb's novel, it is also possible to draw a parallel between Bush's personal position as a female singer-songwriter in the male-dominated music industry of the late 1970s and early 1980s and that of Mary Webb, as a female novelist in a patriarchal publishing field in the early 20th century. Bush was well aware of her position and described herself as ‘an artist inside a female body’ and she was determined to carve out a uniquely female (she eschewed the term ‘feminist’) voice through her work and its heightened emotional response to natural phenomena (Cook Reference Cook1982; Anon. 1985). Commentators have noted her adoption of varied female literary guises such as Catherine Earnshaw and Molly Bloom, but she is as keen to address the position of women in folk song (‘The Kick Inside’), historical reality (‘Houdini’) or problematic gender roles (‘Running Up that Hill’ and ‘This Woman's Work’) (Whiteley Reference Whiteley2005, p. 83). She once described her work as ‘pure emotion’ (The Russell Harty Show, 1980).Footnote ¹⁰ This is a telling issue – for many, often male, commentators have struggled with what is sometimes described as her ‘affected’ tone. Contemporary rock critics accused her of over-dramatised, sixth form theatrics (Robertson Reference Robertson1979; Shaar Murray Reference Shaar Murray1979). Mary Webb's work has been described similarly as ‘contrived’, with characters who are merely ‘mouthpieces’ suffering from ‘a high strung, blunt didacticism’ (Sanders Reference Sanders1966, p. 115). While Webb's work was defended by literary contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy and Rebecca West, musicians have come forward to defend Bush's authenticity. Rufus Wainwright stated that ‘this possession she is under, is real, it rings true’, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry claimed that ‘the music industry is full of devils. But Kate Bush is the only angel left’ and even Big Boi of Outkast characteristically said of her that her music is ‘raw emotion … She seems to be in love like a motherfucker. Really, really, really in love’ (Doyle Reference Doyle2005, p. 83; Thomson Reference Thomson2010b, p. 48; Shafrir Reference Shafrir2011).Footnote ¹¹

In the introduction to the Virago edition of Gone to Earth, Erika Duncan describes Webb's literary aim throughout her work:

Similarly, Bush has said:

The theme of the song, which presents love, in particular sexual love, as a predatory force, returned Bush to a constant theme, the impact of sexuality on the individual. Bush famously addressed the awakening of sexual love throughout her first album, The Kick Inside, in songs such as ‘L'Amour Looks Something Like You’, ‘Feel It’, ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’ and, most notoriously, in the title song. In these songs, as in Mary Webb's work, young women, who have found a sense of peace and personal fulfilment in their relationships with the natural world, are suddenly confronted with the threat of male sexuality. Webb saw this as a loss of an innocent instinctive animism and a realisation of human mortality. Sexual love brought with it the concepts of ageing, parenthood and imminent replacement by a younger generation. Bush likewise has been perhaps unique in sharing this sadness in the loss of childhood and its safety and expectation. She wrote a song celebrating the eternal child Peter Pan for her second album Lionheart and imagined ‘the little girl inside me, retreating to her favourite place’ when confronted with a lover in ‘Under the Ivy’. For Bush, as for Webb, sexuality brings fear of death, ‘my terrible fear of dying’ in ‘Symphony in Blue’, ‘the first time I died’ in ‘All the Love’ and the prospect of suicide for the heroine of ‘The Kick Inside’. Even as Bush matured and came to terms with her adulthood, the association of melancholy with ecstatic love continues through later songs such as ‘And So is Love’, ‘You're the One’ and ‘This Woman's Work’.

Ironically, it was only with the birth of her son, Albert, in the late 1990s that Bush appeared to have overcome the issues which prompted her retreat from music and she expressed a more positive tone in her work, celebrating the perfection of a summer's day in A Sky of Honey, the extraordinary nine-track suite of songs which made up the second disc of her comeback double album, Aerial, in 2005. This statement of new intention was followed by an uncharacteristic return to her back catalogue in 2011, when she released an album of her old songs as a Director's Cut. As well as showcasing her new style of stripped back production and deeper, mature voice, the entire enterprise appeared to have been arranged (at least in part) so that Bush could now sing ‘and now we see that life is sweet’ on her re-interpretation of ‘And So is Love’. That is not to say that her acute awareness of the human condition has faded as she has most recently demonstrated in her latest album, 50 Words For Snow, seeing her son's innocence as a ‘Snowflake’, with his soprano voice as the epitome of the transience of his youth, and depicting the plight of a snowman, ‘Misty’, awakened by a young girl's love, but doomed to melt from her passionate embrace.Footnote ¹²

Webb saw the whole of nature as a mysterious harbinger of human destiny with the seasons, the shapes of mountains and the songs of birds as reminder of our own insignificance and fragility. In A Sky of Honey, Bush infused the tracks with birdsongs, translating the cooing of wood pigeons and performing a duet with a blackbird on ‘Aerial Tal’. Although never acknowledged, there is a synchronicity between Webb's and Bush's artistic visions and their early careers – both autodidacts, both uncomfortable with self-promotion and both wedded to an almost pagan, yet decorously English, nature-worship, a type of ‘animism so unabashed as to exceed naivety’ (Macfarlane Reference Macfarlane2012, p. 245). Bush has commented later on how Hounds of Love is suffused with weather and natural images, partly as a result of her sojourn in Ireland while she was writing the album and partly because of her new rural home. For example, when the central character of The Ninth Wave, lost at sea, longs to disengage from his/her predicament, s/he imagines sheep that ‘smell like sleep’. In ‘Hounds of Love’, the abandonment to love that the narrator fears takes the form of stripping one's shoes from one's feet and throwing them into a lake and then the character walks onto (not into) the water. Asked about this sensual metaphor, Bush's intention was clear and she, uncharacteristically, gave a direct answer to a question about her lyrical meaning:

The title of the song itself,’ Hounds of Love’, reveals alternative meanings to that identified by most commentators. The obsessive pursuit from which the singer runs and the driving, almost tribal rhythm of drums and the singer's self-confessed love of Victorian literature leads any critic to Francis Thompson's mystical 1893 poem, The Hound of Heaven, famously quoted in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (Reference Du Maurier1938), another tale of obsessive, damaging love. (35) Seven years after the album's release, Bush commented that ‘I sort of started coming across this line about hounds’ and it is telling that she speaks of finding a ‘line’, which would suggest that a poem or lyric may have inspired her initially, before the subject matter led her to Mary Webb's work (Interview with Richard Skinner: Radio 1 Classic Albums: Hounds of Love, 1992). The opening lines of Thompson's poem:

are evoked by Bush in the opening of her song:

The driving lyric of Thompson's poem, as he attempts to flee (divine) love, fearing its effects on his intellectual and personal freedom is entirely consistent with Bush's statement that her song addresses ‘the fear of being trapped’ by love (Myatt Reference Myatt1985). Furthermore, Bush's final surrender, ecstatic in delivery:

echoes the final line of Thompson's poem, when the pursuer reveals himself as Jesus, the Prince of Love:

Although there is no directly denominational element in Bush's work at this point in her career, critics had already wondered as to the spiritual yearning that is suggested by such songs as ‘Them Heavy People’, ‘Symphony in Blue’, ‘All We Ever Look For’, ‘Sat in Your Lap’ and ‘Suspended in Gaffa’. The suffering and redemption of the protagonist of The Ninth Wave has been repeatedly read in terms of a religious journey (Moy Reference Moy2006). Throughout 1993's The Red Shoes, Bush's lyrics addressed the symbolism of her Catholic schooling, and most strikingly, in ‘Why Should I Love You’, she pondered the sensuality of elements of the Mass and whether Jesus's smile could ‘heal’.

In Electric Eden, Rob Young has suggested the evolution of such distinctly ‘English’ 1980s pop as the work of David Sylvian, Talk Talk and Kate Bush owes more to the work of Vaughan Williams, Cecil Sharp and Ewan MacColl than it does to American rock and the British guitar bands of the 1960s (Young Reference Young2010).Footnote ¹³ Young re-positions her as a ‘wide-eyed maid of Albion’ who ‘harnesses modern electronics and studio techniques to traditional instrumental textures and a lyrical sensibility that often evokes myth, fairy tale and magical transformations, and obliquely draws on the ballad canon’ (Young Reference Young2010, pp. 569–570).

Certainly, throughout Hounds of Love, Bush was, perhaps instinctively, referencing the folk tradition which so inspired the vocal style of her early work, and much of the subject matter of her songs. In 1964, Anne Briggs, who had already inspired Ewan MacColl and Christy Moore, released her first solo recording, a quartet of traditional songs under the title, The Hazards of Love.Footnote ¹⁴ Anne Briggs’ career, as a reluctant performer and a very private person around whom legends soon sprang up, was surely of great relevance to Bush, and the title of her album is perhaps an oblique reference to such an uncompromising pioneer (Boyd Reference Boyd2007, pp. 82–3). This suggestion might seem to be little more than suspicion based on hindsight, were it not for the choice of B-side to the single release of ‘Hounds of Love’ in January 1986. Although completely ignored by music scholars, Bush chose to record a bowdlerised version of a traditional sea shanty, ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’. She told her fans that the single had been rushed over Christmas (Reference Christie1985) and so ‘we plumped for a totally unaccompanied traditional song’ (Kate Bush Club Newsletter 19, 1986). This track, which no doubt appealed to Bush due to its storyline of gender confusion and unwanted pregnancy, was made famous by MacColl and A.L. Lloyd on their album of sailors’ songs, Blow Boys Blow in Reference McColl and Lloyd1960.

Graeme Thomson vividly describes the influence of this type of music on Bush in his biography (Thomson Reference Thomson2010a, pp. 18–21).Footnote ¹⁵ Having recorded an album using the latest technologies and employing avant-garde forms of music, Bush was clearly determined not to lose touch with the traditions on which her music was built. The folk influence, also heard on a track from The Ninth Wave, ‘Jig of Life’, would return in an unexpected fashion in 1989 when Bush wrote three songs on her next album, The Sensual World, to incorporate the extraordinary melodies of the Trio Bulgarka, in an idiosyncratic reflection of the fashionable interest in world music in the late 1980s (Ashley Reference Ashley and Ramet1994, p. 155).

Voice and delivery

It is important to position Bush as more than a mere creative ability, such as a singer-songwriter. With her partner, Del Palmer, as engineer, and her home studio in her rural house in Sevenoaks, Bush effectively anticipated the modern, internet-facilitated phenomenon of the musical ‘cottage industry’. She was (and is) her own producer, believing that only with full artistic control could she attempt to stay true to the intentions of her art, and not be excessively distracted by the pressures of music-industry marketing and the demands of transient fashion (Mayhew Reference Mayhew, Whiteley, Bennet and Hawkins2004, pp. 155–6). She had managed to extract an unusual contract from EMI in the early 1980s that gave her a large share of her earnings, as well as the ability to work relatively unhindered by company schedules and she left the veteran distributor with little real choice but as to whether to reject an album or not. As has been mentioned, they had almost rejected The Dreaming but, as Bush's loyal fanbase had propelled even that most uncommercial album to number three in the charts, she had retained her label's support (largely, one suspects, due to the benevolent support of Bob Mercer, who initially signed her). Clearly, in order to retain EMI's unrivalled distribution network, it was advisable that her next album should contain more commercial, radio-friendly material (hence the more conventional rhythm patterns of three of the four singles released from Hounds of Love), but Bush was clearly intent on continuing to experiment, with unusual instrumentation, complex lyrical themes and her distinctive vocal experimentation.

It is possible to analyse the music of ‘Hounds of Love’ in many ways, but I will focus on the structure of the song and Bush's use of voice. The song begins with a dramatic line of dialogue from the 1958 horror film, Night of the Demon, famous for its sequences of victims fleeing through night-time forests while pursued by an unseen horror. As Bush put it,

The line is accompanied by one of the most unusual effects that Bush employs, a super-compressed, fore-fronted drum sound. After this unexpected opening, the synthesiser is employed to create a drone over which Bush sings and at 0:40 a double-tracked cello enters to create a steady melodic flow and further enhance the atmosphere of a pursuit. As Moy points out, there is almost no traditional bass element, which ‘removes the frequencies’ in contemporary music which are ‘comforting and familiar’ (Moy Reference Moy2007, p. 45). In this way, the singer is forced to provide almost all the harmony while the synthesised drone shifts across three chords: C minor, A-flat and B-flat. As Chris Ingham notes, these chords ‘crop up again and again on the whole album’ and provide a ‘slightly melancholy’ underpinning to the track. The drums are even more insistent and thunderous than on ‘Running Up That Hill’, and Charlie Morgan, Bush's drummer on the track, describes how Bush banned cymbals and built up the drums to create a ‘ridiculous blanket of percussion’ (Kate Bush: Hounds of Love – Under Review, 2009). It is interesting that so much of the subsequent analysis of the songs has been on the drums rather than on the unexpected choice of the cello (Whiteley Reference Whiteley2005, p. 79). In both her lip-synched performances of the track in 1986 at the BPI awards dinner and on BBC's Top of the Pops, Bush had two ‘cellists’ (one of whom was her brother Paddy) placed front stage to flank her. She also took the unusual step (for her) of writing out the cello part for Jonathan Williams prior to the track's recording, rather than improvising and offering less formal guidance to guest musicians as is her normal working practice (Swales Reference Swales1986).Footnote ¹⁶

The use of melodic motifs and the heightened impact of the fore-fronted drums explained the success of all the four tracks from the first side of the album that were released as singles. In ‘Hounds of Love’ there are elements of what Loseff calls ‘chart-pop context’ especially in the refrain and the anthropomorphic ‘doggy-chorus’, which were the main focus of The Futureheads’ indie-pop cover version in 2005 which surpassed Bush's single release in reaching number eight in the UK singles charts (Loseff Reference Loseff1999, p. 239). But the track's unsettling and powerful lyrical imagery is mirrored by the unconventional use of drone and rhythm instruments and the complete absence of conventional harmonic support. The track is nothing but rhythm and drone without Bush's vocal performance. And so, as so frequently with her work, attention must shift to Bush's vocal performance in the mood created and the delivery of the lyric.

Roland Barthes first called attention to the ‘grain of the voice’ and this, perhaps, has been the key motif to Bush's recording career (Barthes Reference Barthes and Heath1977, pp. 179–80; see also Moore Reference Moore2012, p. 183). Bush has always deliberately experimented with styles, perhaps most dramatically on her re-imaginings of her past songs in 2011 on Director's Cut. Many critics were puzzled by her vocal approach on this album, but she was attempting to vary her style, from the languid sensuality of ‘Flower of the Mountain’ to the torch-singer precision of ‘Moments of Pleasure’ and finally the unexpected attempt to mimic the vocal style of Exile on Main Street-era Rolling Stones on ‘Rubberband Girl’. This is an artist who has sung in a disused swimming pool (‘Lord of the Reedy River’), stimulated mucus in her throat by eating chocolate and drinking milk (‘Night of the Swallow’) and written tracks in a key she had hitherto been unable to reach (Steward and Garratt Reference Steward and Garratt1984, p. 104). Notoriously, all Bush's lyrics are recorded in a single take with no vocal overdubs allowed, so that the emotional engagement of the singer's commitment can best be conveyed to the audience. Even when the singing is not technically perfect, it is used if it conveys a powerful experience (as in the last verse of ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’ when Bush's voice cracks at the memory of the absent husband). So concerned was Bush not to be distracted that when the recording studio was installed at her country home in Kent, it did not have a window between the mixing desk and the recording booth, in order to minimise distractions.

What was perhaps most distinctive to contemporary listeners of ‘Hounds of Love’ was the voice that sang the song's first line. Having made her name with her distinctive high soprano on her first two albums, Bush was now deliberately lowering her voice. As Paul Hardiman, engineer on Hounds of Love remembers, there were numerous takes, until a tone of what Graeme Thomson describes as ‘primal power and awesome control’ was perfected (Thomson Reference Thomson2010b, p. 53) Bush commented that when Jonathan Williams lowered the cello part by an octave, this forced her to engage with a far lower register than she had used hitherto (Swales Reference Swales1986).Footnote ¹⁷ There is the same romantic abandonment in her delivery as was present on such diverse tracks as ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘The Infant Kiss’, but now it is performed in a more mature tone that conveys a deep sense of foreboding. Nicky Loseff noted that, contrary to immediate impressions, the notes hit on ‘Wuthering Heights’ were not as high as critics believed and that the impact of Bush's voice had ‘little to do with pitch and much to do with timbre’ (Loseff Reference Loseff1999, p. 229). Lucy O'Brien implicitly agrees, describing Bush's voice on this track as ‘deeper and more dynamic’ (Kate Bush: Hounds of Love – Under Review, 2009). It was in an interview with a French journal that Bush acknowledged the significance of her performance:

The delivery of early lines such as ‘hiding in the dark, hiding in the street’ achieve a strange, other-worldly, duality, being both resonant on the word ‘dark’ yet rising to an strange soprano wail on ‘street’. There is also a narrative friction, as in so much of the singer's work. There is an exact, almost refined enunciation of lyrics, as in ‘the hounds of love are hunting’ yet the subject matter and the delivery is highly erotic and disturbing. Rather than singing in the conventional mid-Atlantic drawl that most modern British artists adopt, Bush employs diction which Ron Moy describes as ‘precise and wonderfully home counties’ as she stretches her vowels and lisps the word ‘throw’ (Moy Reference Moy2007, p. 45). This is a deliberate vocal identity that Bush has adopted. In all her recordings, apart from those where she adopts an accent in order to highlight the identity of the song's protagonist, Bush has almost always sung in an English accent and has pronounced a word's ending, no matter how great the falsetto leap that her delivery contained (most distinctively in her live performances of ‘Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake’ when the last vowel of the title is considerably extended, yet the consonant at the end is deliberately pronounced) (see Moy Reference Moy2006). In the numerous interviews on radio and television which she recorded during her initial period of fame, it was noticeable that Bush's conversation was peppered with Americanisms (‘I'm not into that’, ‘t'rrific’ and ‘amazin’, especially), and that she spoke with a distinct South London accent, yet her diction on her recordings was extremely clear, even demure.Footnote ¹⁸ This tension between vocal identities remains on ‘Hounds of Love’, even though, by this time, her public accent began to elide with her singing voice. As will be seen below, Bush began to cultivate an increasingly aloof, slightly more formal manner in dress and for public appearance after 1985, which helped to sustain the mystery of her personality which her music had emphatically established.Footnote ¹⁹ She learnt to take a much more cautious approach in her dealings with the media, repeating well-rehearsed lines to all her interviewers, only becoming enthusiastic and outspoken if she felt the interviewer took more than a casual interest in her work.Footnote ²⁰ After poor experiences with the media in the early 1990s as a less respectful and more provocative approach was taken by the mass media (Bush even assaulted a photographer who yelled abuse at her), Bush retreated from engagement with the media altogether, granting only one interview in an entire decade (between 1994 and Reference Bush2005), in much in the same way that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of her beloved Steely Dan did from the mid-1970s. She conducted most of her media interviews for her two releases in 2011 via telephone or Skype.

As had become habitual in the music industry in the mid-1980s, following the success of Frankie Goes to Hollywood in retaining sales through the sales of innumerable remixes of their 1984 hit ‘Two Tribes’, 12” versions of all four of the singles from Hounds of Love were released (Warner Reference Warner2003, pp. 81–2). While the remixes of ‘Running Up That Hill’ and ‘Cloudbusting’ added little new to the tracks, containing no new performances, merely repeats of the soundscapes and instrumental passages, and the ‘Meteorological Mix’ for ‘The Big Sky’ only illustrated Bush's eccentric sense of humour, for ‘Hounds of Love’ an ‘alternative’ version of the song was released. Although it is wrongly described by Thompson as an early version of the track, Bush did record the album version first, describing this remix as ‘the most demanding so far’.

That the ‘alternative’ is not a demo is also suggested by the fact that, unlike so many artists exploiting the heritage value of their back catalogue, Bush has never released any of the draft versions of her work (or, in fact, any of the hundreds of songs that she wrote and recorded in her teens). In fact, on the only occasion she permitted an unreleased song to be played in public in 1979, she criticised her own performance (Personal Call with Ed Stewart and Sue Cook, 1979). The performance on ‘Alternative Hounds of Love’ and its arrangement are far more polished and complete than any demo track and are, in many ways, the ultimate demonstration of Bush's talents in that she can create a parallel mood to that of the original release. Gone is the flamboyant quote from Night of the Demon, the reference to Hazel Woodus's ‘Foxy’ and the lyrical metaphor of throwing her shoes into the lake. Instead, the mood is darker, with the fear of pursuit even more visceral. The scything cello sets the pace from the very start, with the drums entering later. Although the song begins again with the reference to childhood, the chorus is unsettlingly frantic in its repetition of ‘run’:

There is an attempt to build verses, but this is constantly thwarted by the panic in which phrases are constantly repeated, such as the contrasting ‘I know what I really need’ and ‘I don't know what's good for me’, while a descending vocal backing hits out a further rhythm to add to the orchestration and the incessant drums. Bush's vocal performance is even more abandoned than that of the original track. She can be heard to gasp, to gulp air between lines and to exhale as she embodies the plight of her protagonist as thoroughly as she previously did that of Catherine Earnshaw in ‘Wuthering Heights’ (Ellis Reference Ellis1978; cf. Cowley Reference Cowley and Young2002, p. 199). The result is a thoroughly authentic performance in which the emotional turmoil of the protagonist, attracted to yet scared of the commitment of an all-consuming love, is portrayed through a vocal grain that is both ecstatic and terrified. In the first chorus, the strain of the fast repeated lines seems to drive Bush to drop an octave in the third chant of ‘run run run run run run honey, run from the hounds of love’ and one anticipates that she will repeat this again in the second chorus. Here, however, one of the most powerful combinations of subject and performance interact as Bush chooses instead to unleash the unharnessed depth of her voice. She hits as high a pitch and as strong a tone as she has ever managed and sings the final ‘hounds of love’ in a powerful mezzo-soprano delivered from her diaphragm that is a potent reminder of her qualities as a performer as well as an artist.

Bush's desire to offer alternative versions of her songs, reinterpreted by her changing artistic sensibility, later manifested itself in an attempt to reduce the ubiquity and novelty value of ‘Wuthering Heights’ by recording a far less ethereal vocal for her best-selling compilation album The Whole Story in 1986. Far more worthwhile was her Reference Bush2011 stripping away of the blizzard of over-production from the two follow-up albums to Hounds of Love – The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. Although the tracks from the former were not especially improved, the seven tracks from her 1993 album, widely regarded as her weakest mature work (Gill Reference Gill1993; Moy Reference Moy2007, pp. 121–2; Thomson Reference Thomson2010a, pp. 258–9) were significantly enhanced by a less compressed sound, greater energy and, in the best track, ‘Lily’, the deployment of Mica Paris as backing vocalist.Footnote ²¹

Visual presentation and performance

In addition to producing, Bush has also taken a direct hand in the public presentation of her work. After her experience working with Gered Mankowitz at the cusp of her career, in which she was provocatively photographed after a vigorous workout in a thin pink leotard, she attempted to bring her visual presentation under her ambit. For this she relied on chosen artists, such as her poet-photographer brother Jay (John Carder Bush). His image on the Hounds of Love album back cover, for example, shows a languid Bush rising from flower-strewn water, in a homage to Millais's Ophelia, but wearing a modern life-jacket, dramatising the narrative of The Ninth Wave (Showalter Reference Showalter, Parker and Hartman1985).

This control extended to the single releases. Whereas ‘Running Up That Hill’, ‘Cloudbusting’ and ‘The Big Sky’ all featured images from the promotional videos, for the single release of ‘Hounds of Love’ in January 1986 Bush is photographed in a conventional fashion for an art-rock release of the period. The pouting, sideways-glancing Bush is only half shown, but with an expression of mournful languor. In the background a quite exquisite photograph of sunlight on an English lake references the line from the song:

The cover, with its implied longing for escape to an idealised rural utopia, again references the character of both Mary Webb and her literary protagonists. Some have criticised Bush for pretentiousness, for posturing and melodrama, but this image is potent and far more striking for its restraint and ambition (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

The cover of the 12” single of ‘Hounds of Love’ (EMI 12KB3) released 24 February 1986

Bush's ongoing desire for full artistic control (she once described herself as ‘the shyest megalomaniac you're ever likely to meet’; Sutcliffe Reference Sutcliffe1989, p. 84), now extended to directing her video for the track. In order to analyse the ‘Hounds of Love’ promotional video, one must, as Goodwin urges, ‘show how the conditions of production of music television are written into the text’ (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1993, p. 20). Although a pioneer in the field of film promotion in the late 1970s, by the time of her re-emergence in 1985, the importance of the music video in the pop industry had significantly developed with the popularity of MTV. The global success of John Landis’ film of Michael Jackson's ‘Thriller’ now meant that every major new release was awarded a fully costumed, loosely narrative promotional video (Shuker Reference Shuker2005, pp. 169–70).

Bush had taken great interest in the work of previous directors, especially Julian Doyle, who directed the best of all her videos, the heartbreaking ‘Cloudbusting’.Footnote ²² When and why she chose to promote herself from enthusiastic collaborator to full-blown director is not particularly clear, but it is possible that her previous experience in story-boarding ideas for early videos and her close friendship with Terry Gilliam encouraged her to take control of this aspect of her work. She was determined to maintain the cinematic quality to her videos that ‘Cloudbusting’ had premiered. In contrast to her earlier video performances, as with the videos for ‘Cloudbusting’ and ‘Running Up That Hill’, Bush does not mime the words of the song, nor does she look directly into the camera. Instead she is the heroine, abducted by the hero as he flees from a nameless threatening authority. As she revealed in her fan club newsletter, her brother, ‘Paddy, inspired me into a 39 Steps theme’ and the video's narrative recalls the plight of Pamela, played by Madeline Carroll, who is unwillingly handcuffed to the hero of the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock adaptation, played by Robert Donat (Kate Bush Club Newsletter 19, 1986).

Why a song, already laden with strong visual metaphors and the inspiration of two celebrated films, needed a completely different intertextual reference is surely a reflection of Bush’ directorial naivety as well as her well-attested impetuousness. As a result, although the character played by Bush is pursued in the video, she is not actually the object of the hunt and thus the story of the song is confused by the narrative of the video. This mismatch between lyrics and image is analysed by Goodwin s ‘disjuncture’ (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1993, p. 89–90). Bush was known to be a fan of Hitchcock, but the needless muddying of the song's theme, the rather slow pace of the action compared to the driving beat of the music, together with the conventional music video clichés that Bush's directors had hitherto largely eschewed, are not especially successful.

The video frequently emphasises Bush's physical appearance (as do most of her videos up to this point) in a discourse of stardom that the artist became increasingly uncomfortable with, and uses the cliché of Bush's luxuriant hair being let loose – an image that, however powerful, does not match the power of the song's climactic conclusion. Bush herself, interviewed four years later, was described as grimacing ‘a little self-consciously at the mention of the video’ and rather unconvincingly ascribing the disappointment with the video to ‘working with a song that is not particularly visually oriented’ which is perhaps not the most accurate of excuses (Sarnoff Reference Sarnoff1990).Footnote ²³ Despite this, Bush went on to direct many of her later videos with very mixed results and even a short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, in 1994 based on six of her songs from The Red Shoes, which she later disowned in vigorous terms, describing it as ‘a load of old bollocks’ (Doyle Reference Doyle2005, p. 81).Footnote ²⁴ Perhaps wisely, she hired the Japanese animation director, Jimmy Murakami, to take control of her comeback video in 2005, ‘The King of the Mountain’, and has chosen to employ a variety of animation techniques such as stop-motion and shadow-puppetry to illustrate portions of her songs on her latest album, 50 Words For Snow.

Bush also carefully controlled her performance in her two public performances of the single, using what Inglis refers to as the ‘metamusical components’ of her appearance to heighten the drama of the song (Inglis Reference Inglis and Inglis2006, p. xv). Her first mime-performance was given at the annual British Phonographic Industry (BPI) awards ceremony (later rebranded as the ‘BRITs’) on 10 February 1986.Footnote ²⁵ Here the build-up to the song is taken from the ‘alternative’ track as back-lights illuminate the stage. Bush swings her hips in time to the drum beat before the spotlight hits her. She throws back her head and smiles as she mouths the first line, ‘when I was a child’. The message is clear; she is a child no more. She is dressed conservatively, with a long black skirt, court shoes, tailored black jacket and a lace ruff. Her face is startling, however. She wears extravagant make-up – deep red lipstick, thick black eyeliner and purple eyeshadow that reaches to her eyebrows. The effect is almost vampiric and deeply unsettling. She looks older than her 27 years with a deliberate hint of the 1950s film star in general and Jennifer Jones from the Archers’ Gone to Earth in particular; it is very different from her media appearances promoting her earlier music (see Figure 3). Then her attire had (mainly) been as glamorous as possible, from the see-through white dress of ‘Wuthering Heights’, through the low-cut vamp costume of ‘Hammer Horror’, the tight bodysuits of ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’ and ‘Breathing’ to the Valkyrie of ‘Babooshka’.

Figure 3.

Kate Bush performing ‘Hounds of Love’ at BPI awards, 10 February 1986

Her movement had been similarly provocative, with the use of dramatic dance and movement that she had learnt from Lindsey Kemp and other instructors and which had probably earned her even more ridicule than her extraordinary vocal style.Footnote ²⁶ She remains static for most of the performance, but her delight in delivering the music to an audience of her industry peers is evident in her facial expressions and her stance, standing with her legs apart, dominating the stage (a remarkable achievement for a woman only 5'3” tall) as all the other musicians are seated. At times she sings with a posture of physical restraint, conveying the struggle within herself. For the crucial line ‘I found a fox caught by dogs’ she stands with her back arched, her free hand clasped behind her back and her eyes closed. The moment of release is achieved at the climax of the song as, unexpectedly, Gow Hunter, the chiselled ‘hero’ from the official video, suddenly appears and recreates the final tango, swinging Bush as she successfully mimes the song's final lines (Dodds Reference Dodds and Austern2002). This final resolution acts as a much more satisfying visual signifier of the song's final release than the rather muddled party scene in the official music video. As Marion Leonard observes, many female performers of the late 1970s and 1980s, such as Siouxsie Sioux and Annie Lennox, sought to use their appearance as a means of challenging the ‘conventions of female stage performance’ whereas Bush's approach was less confrontational and less overtly sexual (Leonard Reference Leonard2007, p. 91). However, by invoking once again a visual metaphor of a historic female stereotype, as she did in her video performances as the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw in ‘Wuthering Heights’, Bush's subversion of the romantic 1950s heroine was less sensational and more profound than the performances of her musical peers. For such a debased setting as a mimed performance at an industry awards dinner, Bush managed to create a moment of unforgettable romantic drama by her appreciation of the power of pose, presentation and choreography.

In the second performance, on the 6 March 1986 broadcast of the long-running BBC television music chart show, Top of the Pops, which Warner describes as ‘central to any discussion of British pop music’, Bush mimes the song, dressed in a version of female power-dressing that was fashionable at the time (Warner Reference Warner2003, p. 12). The contrast between her conservative dress and stance (this time she never moves from the spot) and her ecstatic singing and expressions of rapture tells a powerful sub-narrative of a repressed sexuality bursting to the surface, almost against the narrator's wishes. It is perhaps the strongest performance she gave on the legendary show and one that firmly marked her transition from singer ‘wide of eye and high of voice’ to a respected and cherished musical pioneer.

In some ways, however, Bush's performance here was consistent with her earlier visual interpretations of her work. While she was disarmingly unguarded in her initial interviews, Bush's performances retained an enigmatic quality, even in her first few years of exposure. Although rightly lauded for her groundbreaking ‘Tour of Life’ of 1979, with its carefully choreographed dance, elaborate set-design and employment of a stage magician, even this show revealed very little of the musician who was at the centre of the unique spectacle. At no point throughout the two-and-a-half-hour performance did Bush speak to the audience, until the typically theatrical ‘curtain call’, when Bush came on stage last after her band and dancers and spoke a few parting words in her best estuary English.Footnote ²⁷ Bush claimed that she needed to keep her performance, both on stage and in the studio, separate from her own personality, so that she could fully immerse herself in each song and thus communicate with her audience through the emotional intensity of her work, rather than speaking to them directly and thus breaking the illusion (Thomson Reference Thomson2010c). At the end of her mimed performance on Top of the Pops, Bush bows extravagantly from the waist, a restrained theatrical gesture undermined by the mane of her hair which is thrown forwards and then back in an amplification of the song's final emotional declaration.