The mind of Kate Bush ca. 1981 must have been a very very interesting place. Kate’s previous album Never Forever had been her first number one and achieved this hit status despite having some pretty strange concepts woven into the eleven tracks. I remember playing Never Forever to some friends back in the day. None of them got it and it was easier to swap it out for a Meatloaf album (RIP) rather than put up with their constant moaning about the weird music!
Kate’s follow up album The Dreaming makes Never Forever sound like an Abba release. The songs on this album seem to focus on personal fears and it’s a record that takes you further inside a composer’s mind than anything I’ve ever listened to. The Dreaming is undeniably a marmite album and if you just play it in the background while you’re busy doing something else, there’s a fair chance you’ll never give it a second spin. But, if you open your mind and devote forty three and a half minutes to nothing other than listening to these incredible compositions, you’ll be taken on a rich, wild ride that you'll want to repeat again and again.
What follows is a personal ‘review’ of the album…this is what I take from it. With such a complex recording, my interpretation will almost certainly differ from what Kate Bush intended. Whether it’s a record you play regularly, whether you’ve thought it wasn’t worthy of a second play or if it’s never crossed your radar, here are my tips for the best possible experience with this masterpiece:
1. As the sleeve notes say, this record was made to be played loud.
2. Using speakers? Place them wide apart and facing each other and sit in the middle.
3. Play it when it’s dark – turn the lights off so all your sensory inputs are through your ears.
4. Relax, take a deep breath and listen with all your might………..
We open with the thumping beat, piano and synthesised horns of the album’s first single Sat In Your Lap. The rhythm races – in your mind you’ll be running uncontrollably downhill as Kate searches for knowledge and wisdom: for her the most important things in the universe. For me, this is one of the weakest tracks off the album but despite being completely at odds with what was going on in the British charts at the time, it reached a respectable number 11.
The official video is here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4csr6pLZLg
Sung in a mock cockney accent, the next track There Goes a Tenner tells the story of an attempted robbery. With the getaway car in place, the song builds tension as their accomplice prepares to blow the safe. While they wait, our protagonists’ mind drifts…….he (she?) sees the gang members as the heroes of 1930s and 1940s cinema: Bogart, George Raft, Cagney….but these heroic qualities quickly disappear when the robbery goes wrong. Banged up in Strangeways, the last few lines of the song seem to drift between whimsical reminiscence and incomplete memories of the moments after the safe blew, with paper money floating down all around them – “There Goes a Tenner, Hey look, there’s a fiver….” A very odd song but totally at home on this album.
Sonically, the third track is a tour de force. It blew me away the first time I heard it and it still does every time I play it. Pull out the Pin is sung from the imagined perspective of a Vietnamese soldier who is tracking an American soldier through the jungle. The musical arrangement manages to be both sparse and rich – it transports you to the dense steaming jungle but there are foreign sounds – sounds of traffic and helicopters overhead – which emphasise the gulf between these two warring cultures. As he stalks his prey, the Vietnamese soldier is wrestling with his inner demons. He’s a peaceful man – his most prized possessions is his silver Buddha – is he really ready to kill? When eventually, their eyes meet, those concerns vanish. In those stranger’s eyes he sees another world, an alien world and with a final cry of “I love life”, he pulls out the pin.
The narrative buried in the next track is not so easy to define. I don’t think anyone knows for sure what Suspended in Gaffa is about! Some argue it’s about being unable to achieve the things you really want….the term Gaffa being a mis-spelling of Gaffer – the ubiquitous tape used to fix everything in its place. I’ve listened so many times and still can’t get my head round it! The music drifts along with a waltz-like quality that’s enhanced beautifully if you’ve been indulging in a few glasses of wine as you’ve been listening. Kate wants it all – and wants it now - and when she realises life doesn’t work like that, everything goes into slow-mo .
Leave it Open is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever heard. By this stage in the album, we seem to be exploring Kate’s deepest fears and concerns. At first, she feels her mind needs to be closed to others - to contain the potential for harm that she fears lies deep inside her. But evil forces are at work, trying to loosen her defences. If she drops her guard even for a second, what unspeakable malevolence will she let out….or let in? Towards the end of this track there’s a strange vocal - a sort of muffled otherworldly high pitched chant that’s repeated to the end of the song “We let the weirdness in”. This minor detail on a single track, shows the almost obsessive detail that Kate Bush went to when recording this album. This weird vocal effect was achieved by singing the words to tape and then playing the tape backwards. Kate then taught herself to vocalise the backwards-running sounds and recorded that. She then played the reversed vocalisation backwards to deliver the weird almost supernatural chant that closes the track.
If you’re listening to this on vinyl – we’ve reached the end of side one. Time to get up, turn on the light, refill your glass and start side two.
The album’s title track The Dreaming was the second UK single off the album (by now record buyers were wary – this only reached No 48). Again, Kate adopts an alter ego to explore the problems facing Australia’s aboriginal people and this time she sings in an Australian accent. Like the rest of the album the production is rich and complex, built from layers with sound effects including screeching brakes, roaring crowds and birds taking flight buried deep within those layers….but again for me this is one of the weakest tracks on the album. I suspect there was a battle going on to try to find the least weird tracks to release as singles ….. but embrace it people….the strength of this album lies in its weirdness.
The official video is here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2Wa0LdCsvM
As this, the opening track of side two ends, didgeridoos fade into a refrain of Celtic fiddles …. and it’s at this point that I think the album really comes alive. As I understand it, the next three tracks weren’t written as a suite but taken together, they are one of the most sublime things in all of recorded music.
First, we have Night of the Swallow which was released as a single in Ireland. In contrast to the multi-layered production we’ve been treated to so far, the introduction is sparse - three chords on the piano is all it takes to herald the opening line “The night doesn’t like it” sung in a haunting wail that contrasts so dramatically with the tenderly-sung words that follow “Looks just like you face on the moon to me….”. After the initial calm, the pace of the fretless bass and drums usher in an urgency that increases as the song unfolds “I won’t let you go through with this”. Again Kate seems to be exploring crime – as the pace rises and the uillean pipes, penny whistle and fiddles kick in, the gang are plotting to escape by air. The vastness of the night sky will mask their escape, they’ll never be caught. But their hubris brings the tempo to a crashing halt and once more we hear the desperate wail of Kate’s banshee voice – so enticing and yet so alarming. And as the drums roll from right to left through your skull, the fiddles and pipes resume and we’re dancing, reeling, hectically through the air, through the moonlight. You’re deeply involved by this stage, feet tapping to the Celtic reel …. only for it to fade with a strange wail to nothing … absolute silence. Wow.
The next track All the Love emerges from that palpable silence between the tracks, with just a single chord on the piano and a sniff before the bass twists and turns out the rhythm of the song. This is about family but also the longing and the need that comes with family bonds. “Only tragedy allows the release of love and grief never normally seen”. A crystal clear choirboy voice adds the refrain as if from the grave “I needed you to love me too, I wait for your move”. Part of the inspiration for this song was a broken telephone answering machine that Kate owned and odd snippets of messages left by her loved ones were used in the music. “All the love you should have given, All the love we could have given”. After you’ve finished this record, go and give all your nearest and dearest a hug.
Houdini is one of the highlights of this album - vying very closely with Night of the Swallow. The opening verse describes a séance attended by Harry Houdini’s wife, who is trying to reach her dead husband. But despite all his tricks (listen for the tambourine as it weaves around your head before dropping to the table) she realises the medium is a fraud. In her despair, she reflects on the role she played in her husband’s world-famous escapology. “With a kiss I’d pass the key” is apparently one of the tricks Houdini used in his act and it’s this concept that was the focus for the album’s cover art (spot the small golden key in the image above). But very quicky the tenderness of a wife’s kiss gives way to the panic she feels as her husband plunges “bound and drowned” into the tank of water that could so easily take his life. Kate’s vocals here are incredible, morphing from the tenderness of the kiss to absolute horror as she watches her loved one attempt to escape what seems like certain death. As a string sextet and that toffee-like bass bring things back into order, we find ourselves in another séance. This time there’s no trickery - the medium uses a phrase “Rosabel, believe”, a phrase that Houdini and his wife agreed in secret, so that if he died, she would know it was truly him reaching out from the afterlife “Not even eternity can hold Houdini”. It’s remarkable to think that much of this song is based around true aspects of Houdini’s life – that Mr and Mrs Houdini did agree a secret phrase so that they could reach out to each other even after death. This song, perhaps more than any other, shows what a gifted song-writer Kate Bush is.
The last track on the album is mad, with an intro that’s heavy with drums and chants of “hee-haw”. Apparently inspired by Jack Nicholson’s part in “The Shining”, Get out of my House is another song about fear and the demons that hide in the deepest corners of our psyche “I see the hackles on the cat…standing” she screams….but amidst all the torment, it’s easy to miss the haunting words “Let me in” and “It’s cold out here” barely audible and buried deep in the mix. “No stranger’s feet will enter me” Kate’s vocals soar to a crescendo and with so much else going on in the track you feel tossed around like a leaf in a gale, unable to fathom out what’s happening to you. Quite why at the end of the song, the heroine transforms into braying donkey, we may never know.
And that’s it. If you have taken my advice and listened to this album in the dark, at this point you’ll still be sat motionless, wondering what the hell just happened. I get a strange sensation in the immediate aftermath of listening to this recording….all my senses seem to be on overdrive and my nerves are tingling. I love the Boomtown Rats and the energy in their music but the Rats offer a completely different musical experience to Kate Bush – it’s as if they’re at the opposite end of a wonderous musical spectrum. The Rats bring me out of myself – listening to Looking After Number One at the start of what’s probably gonna be a shit day, can feel like putting on a bullet-proof vest! But Kate Bush’s music offers something very different – an escape at the end of that difficult day and no more so than if I listen to The Dreaming in the dark. It’s my musical isolation-tank in which I can escape to seances with Houdini, night flights to Malta or to the Vietnamese jungle. Stunning.