The brilliant, Bush-directed video – her first, and another example of her ravenous artistic reach in this period – pays homage to the Scottish Highland set Hitchcock thriller The 39 Steps. That undertone of horror is amped up in the title track where love is personified as a pack of dogs hunting unsuspecting foxes “ It’s coming for me through the trees,” she sings. It is easy to forget that the song is kind of a body-swap narrative, with the singer asking the deity to swap places with her partner so that they can better understand one another. “Running Up That Hill” remains as overwhelming and epic on the 100th listen as it does on the first because of the small details lurking beneath the surface elements: the wailing vocalizations in the background of the final chorus, the way the guitar makes a counterpoint rhythm with the toms. In an interview promoting the album, Bush described the A-side as five distinct pieces connected by the theme of love. A cathedral of sound with Kate Bush as architect and master builder. It is dead serious without being self-serious Gothic music, not goth music. Because of the recording technology now at her fingertips, Bush was able to move directly from the demo stage that commenced in January 1984 and begin building the tracks on top of these first recordings in the middle of that year.Īs a result, the songs on Hounds of Love have an intricate architecture – the Gothicism that might have been taken as playfully tongue-in-cheek on “Wuthering Heights” is here blown out to album scale. Three years would pass between the release of The Dreaming and the unleashing of the swelling synth and primordial beat that form the opening seconds of “Running Up That Hill.” The Fairlight sampler – which had been so integral to that previous record – became the backbone of Hounds. To call The Dreaming a commercial and critical failure wouldn’t be quite right – but given that the record label probably raised an eyebrow at the muted response, it’s all the more remarkable that Bush doubled down on the impulses that produced that album in making Hounds.Īfter four records in as many years, Bush decamped to Wickham Farm and built her own studio, something like the final brick in her kingdom of sound. The results stand the test of time, but it has taken time.
Hounds of Love is the delirious pinnacle – the culmination – of this first period, but you already know this.īy The Dreaming, Kate Bush was not just singer/songwriter/performer – she was the sole occupant of the producer’s chair, conceiving the most experimental work of her career thus far from start to finish. It is a process, too, of Bush taking control of her own art. The early years of Kate Bush’s career document one of the most forward-thinking artists of the 20th century as she wended her way through the pop industry, alternately experimenting and striking gold – challenging the expectations of her audience by furiously marching toward her own aesthetic horizon.
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