Walking Out In the Big Sky: Kate Bush’s 'Hounds of Love' Turns 40

The first time I listened to Hounds of Love, when my teen years smudged into college adulthood, everything I’d listened to before then no longer mattered. And, in many ways, nothing I’ve listened to since has mattered, either. When those first notes, thuds of a LinnDrum spangling into a cello sampled on a galloping Fairlight CMI riff, in “Running Up That Hill” appeared, everything around me evaporated. How many times does a person get to experience that, an instant where the world’s orneriest clatter suddenly stills in the glory of pop newness? Once, at most. A handful of times, if you’re lucky enough. Years stretch on and Kate Bush’s songs fall into new laps, which is a different kind of luck altogether. If we were to chart the lifespan of pop music, from its parlor beginnings to its focus-group present, I’d reckon there have been less than a dozen albums that have confounded me enough to ask, “How the fuck did this get made?” But, ceaselessly, Hounds of Love, released on this day in 1985, rings the bell.

Three years earlier, the sepia of Kate Bush’s fourth album, The Dreaming, came apart amid low sales and a peak of #157 on the Billboard 200. MTV and college radio helped the album’s presence in the States but, in the residuum of The Kick Inside, Lionheart, and Never for Ever, Kate’s fifth LP was a commercial failure globally (in the UK, it peaked at #3). It cost a lot of money to make and EMI weren’t particularly thrilled with the turnout. But the music was dense, inventive, and overwhelming. Still is. In the 1980s, Kate’s body of work suffered at the hands of misogynistic journalists, men who labeled her ideas and self-advocacy as “hysterical.” Simon Reynolds’ categorization of The Dreaming always felt more potent and fair to me, when he called it a “delirious, head-spinning experience.” The coolest part about that record is that it sounds unlike anything else ever yet still on the precipice of impossible, and “Leave It Open” still feels especially unthinkable, with its “we let the weirdness in” truth and Kate’s ability to bring even her most unlikely or abstract ideas to life through sampling on her Fairlight, a thorny and complicated piece of technology she would update on her own over and over. And some of those ideas, like “Sat In Your Lap,” exist because Kate picked Stevie Wonder’s brain about the CMI after his Wembley show in 1980.

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But perhaps my friend Elise put it more perfectly, when she called The Dreaming a “witches’ brew of sweat, blood, and the desire to consume any obstacle whole.” Because, indeed, voices seem to just come from anywhere in Kate’s work, spoken in languages pulled from the margins of art and people we’ve spent decades interacting with. The Dreaming’s characters were formed from a covey of sources, like The Shining (“Get Out of My House”), Harry Houdini (“Houdini”), and Vietnam War documentaries (“Pull Out the Pin”). She utilized instruments like didgeridoos, mandolins, and polyrhythmic percussion. Her time-signatures were beyond off-kilter, warped to fit her measurements, as she investigated existentialism (“Sat in Your Lap”) and personality crises (“Leave It Open”). Kate, ever the unprecedented, took a step further into the kind of out-of-the-box pop obliteration Peter Gabriel fussed with on his self-titleds, when he used a Fairlight to alter pitches and harvest man-made noise, like broken glass and laughter. She herself once called The Dreaming her “she’s gone mad album.” Considering that the Roman Catholicism hangover of “Suspended in Gaffa”—strange meter, “Can I have it all?” chorus, warbling Broadway vaunt, and all—is the most “ordinary” effort present, Kate’s self-assessment lends itself well to her bizarre imagination, a pileup of styles and oddities yet to be truly untangled.

The summer after The Dreaming, Kate and her partner Del Palmer fled to a 17th-century farmhouse in London and built a 48-track studio in her family barn in Welling to combat any budgetary ailments. She started taping demos on an 8-track with a LinnDrum, Fairlight, and piano before transferring the recordings to a 24-track and completing overdubs at Windmill Lane in Dublin in early 1984. The mixing process would take a year to complete, wrapping up in June 1985. A month later, a single would come—“Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)”—and chart in fourteen countries. Like they had in 1982, Kate’s referentialism was a skyscraper of offbeaten, deep-pocketed curiousness. She quoted a chorus from the “Blood Red Roses” sea shanty, pulled lines from a seance scene (spoken by Maurice Denham) in Night of the Demon, turned a piece of “Tsintskaro,” performed by the Richard Hickox Singers, into the “Hello Earth” chorale, and lifted audio from a space shuttle mission.

Kate split her fifth album’s two sides into adjoining suites, the first titled Hounds of Love and the conceptual second titled The Ninth Wave. In the latter, Kate goes on a “vision quest,” using Lord Tennyson’s Arthurian poetry as a template for her own surveys of mortality and reincarnation and singing about two selves arguing over survival (“Jig of Life”), the bardo between consciousness and unconsciousness (“And Dream of Sleep”), necromancy (“Waking the Witch”), and the marriage of body and soul (“The Morning Fog”). Across the former, nature and parenthood (“Cloudbusting,” “Mother Stands for Comfort”), gender division (“Running Up That Hill”), and sensuality (“The Big Sky”) all couple yet contrast in Kate’s musique concrete. She employs Gregorian chants, film audio, church bells, primal screams, drones, and seabirds; her brother plays the balalaika, didgeridoo, and fujara; the double bass line on “Watching You Without Me” thrums against ribbons of her glitchy, pulverized vocal.

Though I despise using the word “wunderkind,” it’s hard to find a context that better works in Kate Bush’s favor. While at St. Joseph’s Convent Grammar School in Abbey Wood—and after record labels rejected it—a family friend passed one of Kate’s 50-song demo tapes onto David Gilmour, who’d welcome her into his own studio to make a demo tape of “Passing Through Air” in 1973. A year later, he’d bankroll two more songs for her, both of which would land on the desk of Gilmour’s friend, Andrew Powell, and a sound engineer by the name of Geoff Emerick. Eventually, EMI exec Terry Slater caught wind of the tunes and inked Kate to a recording contract and threw a large advance her way, which she’d use to pay for her enrollment in Lindsay Kemp’s interpretive dance classes and Adam Darius’ mime training. Around the same time, she assembled the KT Bush Band with Palmer, Brian Bath, and Vic King and demoed at least two-hundred songs. She was nineteen years old when her debut single, “Wuthering Heights,” produced by Powell, topped the UK singles chart in 1978.

Kate’s image, upon the release of The Kick Inside forty-seven years ago, was archaic and pre-code, yet her musicianship was already preposterously cutting-edge. A prodigy created from the rib she was, writing songs with the wit of Bacharach and the literary idiom of a Rhodes scholar. None of her peers were earning their stripes by singing about homosexuality, incest, and religion, yet her convictions would only grow more muscular and stubborn in the succeeding years. Hell, she’s been an LGBTQ+ icon for longer than many of us queers have been alive. Rufus Wainwright, in 2005, said that “her attitude towards love and society’s treatment of love is very combative and most gay people can connect with that.” In the souvenir of our living, a wondrous voltage beckons as The Dreaming and Hounds of Love feed off each other—a generous foreword and its startling epilogue, with spellbinding production that banished straight men back to the dust that grew them. Hounds of Love, as it were, represented a femme starlet perfecting pop music without abandoning the concepts that had refracted through her first four albums: autonomy, sexuality, the consciousness of gender, and parent-child relationships, told through cryptic, fragmented lyricism and metaphysical color.

The album, which had gone #1 in the UK and was certified platinum in the country twice, was initially met with mixed reception by American critics. While Sounds, NME, and Record Mirror raved about Kate’s boundarylessness across the pond, Rolling Stone bemoaned her for “overdecorat[ing] her songs with exotica.” Now, I am not one to usually grieve for a musician getting their flowers too late, because getting any flowers at all can so often be a miracle, but American audiences’ commercial dismissal of Kate’s music was a blemish for some thirty-odd years. But then came 2022, when the fourth season of Stranger Things used “Running Up That Hill” as a plot device, pushed the song back onto the pop charts for the first time in thirty-seven years, and introduced a new generation to Kate’s voice. It soared to #3 on the Hot 100 in the United States, matching its initial peak in the UK in 1985. On her website, Kate wrote in response, “I have an image of a river that suddenly floods and becomes many, many tributaries—a billion streams—on their way to the sea. Each one of these streams is one of you. Thank you so much for sending this song on such an impossibly astonishing journey.”

But as my friends went out and bought up all the Hounds of Love LPs in Northeast Ohio, I was at home, swooning over the bucolic phantasy in “Cloudbusting”—a hypnagogic outcome of Kate Bush’s reading of Peter Reich’s memoir A Book of Dreams and her fixation on the stories of Peter and his father, Austrian psychiatrist and inventor Wilhelm Reich, making rain together on their farm called Orgonon. I drank in the marching, symphonic frequency of “Cloudbusting” and its enchanting love for technology in a nearby cosmos. Kate sang, “You’re like my yo-yo that glowed in the dark. What made it special made it dangerous, so I bury it and forget,” and I took safety at its altar of supernatural, ingenious whimsy. Too, I am bowled over by “Hounds of Love” and its blown-out, gated percussion (courtesy of Stuart Elliott and Charlie Morgan) and widescreen panning of Kate’s Yamaha CS-80. A cello, played by Jonathan Williams, swells in the backdrop before it bursts; “ooh-oohs” collage into barks. I think, with all of my flailing, embarrassing might, that no other album sequence in recorded history is quite as spectacular as the first twenty-one minutes of Hounds of Love. And then, unbelievably, it goes on for another twenty-six.

You can reasonably separate popular music’s futurism into distinct chapters that have played out across seventy years: Les Paul inventing his solid-body guitar in 1952, Brian Wilson slicing tape in 1966, the Beatles using a multi-track on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, the deep bass kicks of the Roland TR-808 taking over English New Wave and East Coast rap, Kate Bush’s Fairlight maneuvers between 1980 and 1985, and the popularization of Pro Tools in the ensuing decade, on albums like Homogenic, The Soft Bulletin, and Kid A.

And to many, Kate Bush was more than a three-dollar bill in pop music’s bottlenecked excess. She was a DIY auteur whose grasp on her art, collaboration, production, and image has since lent itself to four decades of idiosyncrasy. She was curious to an almost-violent degree; her visuals were as physical as they were filmic. And the eccentrics who’ve doted on her canon are having progeny of their own now. You can hear Kate even still, in the voices of Fiona Apple, Björk, Julia Holter, and Taylor Swift, because they all put a piece of Tori Amos’ style into their own. And Amos once said, twenty-seven years ago, that “[The Ninth Wave] turned me inside out. It changed my life.”

Perhaps we don’t get those two really good Grimes albums in the first half of the 2010s without Hounds of Love. We certainly don’t get Imogen Heap’s catalogue, nor do we get Karin Dreijer’s output, Fever Ray, the Knife, or otherwise, without it. It’s maddening to recall the scope of Kate Bush’s ancestry: ANOHNI, Florence Welch, Joanna Newsom, FKA twigs, SOPHIE, Beth Orton, Zola Jesus, OutKast, Lady Gaga, and even Radiohead have plumbed her vernacular and expressive genius. Isabella Summers! Suede made Dog Man Star thirty-one years ago because Hounds of Love existed first. Jenny Hval said something about Kate that I haven’t forgotten: “It’s as if she is a reporter, reporting from the war zone of human experience.”

There is a faint whisper in the universe—an echoing afterglow that’s been traveling through space for thirteen billion years—that falls silent in the soupy bedlam of Earth’s noise. So it is funny to me then that Kate Bush, in all the crevices of Hounds of Love, where finely-crafted pop hooks meet a surfeit of avant-garde intensities, is as solved now as she was forty years ago—which is to say: not at all. Nearly half a century later and none of us know how to explain Hounds of Love. And still, its voice falls into us, whether we can hear it or not. “I don’t know what’s good for me,” it sings. “I need love, love, love, love, love.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

Walking Out In the Big Sky: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love Turns 40

On this day in 1985, the English singer, songwriter, dancer, and producer released her masterwork—finely-crafted pop hooks and a surfeit of avant-garde intensities that chases after ideas of autonomy, sexuality, nature, the consciousness of gender, and parent-child relationships.