The 1982 Listening Post - Kate Bush - The Dreaming

 Reviewed by Doug Harvey

Released: September 13 1982 Kate Bush The Dreaming Genre: No Light Without Shadow, No Harmony Without Cacophony, No “Hounds” Without “The Dreaming” Allen’s Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Doug’s Rating: 5 out of 5 Highlights: Sat In Your Lap There Goes A Tenner Get Out Of My House There’s recently been a flukish revival of interest in Kate Bush, due to the inclusion of “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” as a pivotal plot element on the soundtrack of Season Four of the retro-80s sci-fi Netflix show “Stranger Things,” resulting in a massive spurt in sales and Bush’s induction in the Guinness Book of Records for Oldest Female Artist To Reach Number One, Longest Time For A Track To Reach Number One On The UK’s Official Singles Chart, and Longest Gap Between Number Ones. While it’s great that a new generation has been made aware of Bush’s remarkable talents, and the enormity of her accomplishment with the “Hounds of Love” album, the déja vu is even more striking when you consider that when “Running” became Bush’s big North American breakthrough in 1985, it was in the wake of the lowest-selling, most misunderstood, and perhaps most extraordinary artistic accomplishment of her career. 1982’s “The Dreaming” was the first of Kate Bush’s albums produced entirely by the artiste, and the first written from scratch - she’d previously been depending on a backlog of prog piano balladry dating to the onset of puberty, which showed. In contrast, “The Dreaming” was reverse engineered - Bush building songs on top of looped rhythm tracks and electronic soundscapes, applying her accomplished and idiosyncratic song craft on top of experimental musical structures. Much of this was inspired by the sampling and looping capacities of the Fairlight synthesizer, which had recently revitalized Peter Gabriel’s sonic vocabulary - not a coincidence, as Bush had close ties with Gabriel and had sung the cryptic “Jeux sans frontières” vocal hook on his1980 hit “Games Without Frontiers,” amongst other collaborations (their hit duet “Don’t Give Up” was a major factor in her 1986 year of post-“Hounds” superstardom). Yet in spite of its reputation for alienating experimentalism, “The Dreaming” is, at its core, a collection of finely-but-oddly-crafted piano-composed songs featuring layers of virtuosic pop vocal overdubs - the same basic formula that originally brought Bush to (UK) superstardom. The album opens with “Sat In Your Lap,” the first single, which had been recorded and released well over a year earlier, but nevertheless sets the bar for the LPs sonic challenges, as well as one its the main conceptual threads - that of spiritual crisis, frustration, and despair. Having peaked at #11 in the UK charts, it also foreshadowed the album’s chilly reception. As mentioned, “The Dreaming” remains Bush’s lowest-selling album, barely shifting 75,000 units in the 40 years since its release(!), her -ahem- 1986 greatest hits collection “The Whole Story,” by contrast has sold 1.5+ million copies. “Sat In Your Lap” is explicit in its references to various spiritual tourist destinations (Mecca, Tibet, Salisbury), though Bush is cagey about specific disciplines. References to Gurdjieff, Vedanta, and occult visualization exercises crop up elsewhere in her discography, and it seems likely that her specific practices are as much a piecemeal collage as her musical vocabulary. Nevertheless, lyrics like - I've been doing it for years My goal is moving near It says, "Look! I'm over here" Then it up and disappears - pretty explicitly equates Bush’s frustrated spiritual aspiration with the difficulty of realizing her enormous creative ambitions - the very ones shaping the remarkable racket these lyrics grace. Over an urgent (though arcless) bed made from percussive piano vamps, very 80s gated drum patterns, + bursts of speedy synth-trumpets, Bush rapidly alternates between conventional and avant-garde vocal techniques. These include her crowd-pleasing winsome girly-voice, but also echo-laden guttural shouts, percussive vocalizations that sound like somebody getting punched in the stomach, and histrionic narrative rants with more than just a smidgen of the schizophrenic. Which turns out to just be a sampler of the yodels, chirps, whines, and caterwauls she brings to bear over the course of “The Dreaming.” Bracing! The next track is probably the most user-friendly number on the LP, though it tanked even worse in the singles charts. “There Goes A Tenner” is a jaunty Music Hall-style tune about a botched bank robbery, which introduces two more of Bush’s primary narrative devices. Deployed throughout “The Dreaming,” cinematic framing - close-ups, flashbacks, soliloquies, montage, etc. - create formalist structures that resonate or clash with their musical beds. The jaunty songs are dark. The mental songs are funny. It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world. Delivered in a slippery stew of clichéd English accents veering from cockney to Lord Snooty, “There Goes A Tenner” begins as an homage to Ealing Studio and Hollywood capers and climaxes with a visionary time-shift, with the protagonist left frozen in a kaleidoscope corona of explosive debris and floating banknotes, trailing off with the odd comment “There's a ten-shilling note. Remember them? That's when we used to vote for him.” (Especially odd because, as wikipedia larns us, the final version of the 10s note - discontinued in 1970 - had a portrait of Queen Elizabeth on it.) "Pull Out The Pin" takes both of these aforementioned narrative devices - the cinematic framing and the frozen moment — and pushes them into a more hardcore contemporary genre — Arsenic and Old Lace morphs into Apocalypse Now. It’s a riveting narrative that unfolds inside the mind of a North Vietnamese soldier as he’s preparing to grenade his American counterpart. You learn to ride the Earth When you're living on your belly and the enemy are city-births Who need radar? We use scent They stink of the west, stink of sweat Stink of cologne and baccy, and all their Yankee hash With my silver Buddha And my silver bullet (I'm pulling on the pin) Just one thing in it: Me or him And I love life! (pull out the pin) Musically, "Pull Out The Pin" is propelled by a mash-up of Martin Denny exotica and slinky Joni Jaco Jazz grooves (courtesy folk rock genius Danny Thompson, who also gave Pentangle and Donovan the funk) that mutate into an industrial/postpunk chant, hovering helicopter sound effects, and an angular Robert Fripp-like guitar solo from Brian Bath, while narratively the pin appears to be arrested mid-pull. “Suspended in Gaffa” is another of the more superficially conventional numbers, portraying the same Dark Night of the Soul described in “Sat in Your Lap,” but in waltz time, with clickity-clack percussion, nearly inaudible girly-vox whispers, and ambient washes of synth. It makes a gorgeous bed of sound for a lyric that is sorrowful and humorous; Beckett-like in its spare description of the futility of trying to recapture fleeting glimpses of the numinous: “Am I doing it? Can I have it all now? I want it all. I can’t have it all.” Propelled by a marching beat, “Leave it Open” introduces another of the LP’s major themes: the patrolling of the boundaries between inner and outer, self and others, property, territory, etc. and the need to know when to keep your mouth, eyes, mind, and heart open or shut. It’s an amorphous metaphor, a wide net made even more indeterminate by the use of heavy electronic effects - particularly phasing - on the already extremely mannered multitracked vocals. For example, without printed lyrics one is unlikely to understand the chorus-chant-thing to be stating “Harm in us, but power to arm,” or the final vocal arabesque to be repeating “We let the weirdness in” - let alone what the hell Kate is on about with these proclamations. Which seems to be the point - the opening lines state (almost intelligibly): With my ego in my gut, My babbling mouth would wash it up. (But now I've started learning how,) I keep it shut. The emotional impact of the music itself is unequivocal, almost martial in its advocacy of its primary sensual validity compared to the always-compromised truthiness of verbal utterances. A powerful sonic experience - though perhaps the least memorable track on the album - “Leave It Open” closes out side one of the LP, which, much like its acclaimed follow-up, follows a grab-bag first act with a masterful suite of interlinked prog-operatic vignettes. The album’s title track opens side two with a bang, literally. Actually more than one, as the first sound is the visceral thump of a Linn drum pattern, followed hard on by a sampled sound effect of a screeching and crashing car, and the lyric “Bang goes another kanga on the bonnet of the van” enunciated with another of Bush’s eccentric theatrical accents, an Aussie drawl that comes and goes as needed. The mood is ominous, with Rolf Harris’ didgeridoo and brother Paddy Bush’s bullroarer mixing with tribal beats, droning synth, and layered vocals. The “chorus” is astounding - the drums and drones back off and are supplemented by an array of animal noises, over which a melody is whistled (apparently through the Fairlight) and Bush utters a staccato chant that sounds like a hebephrenic stutter but on closer inspection consists of fragmented phonemes making up the word “Dreamtime.” The song is also about as close to political commentary as can be found on the album, condemning, in its roundabout way, the Australian colonial government’s genocidal policies towards the oldest surviving continuous culture on our planet. (They have since apologized.) The odd coda to “The Dreaming” is a continuation of the didgeridoo drone superimposed with a fragment of the swinging but sorrowful Irish folk instrumental backing that reappears in the climax of the following track, "Night Of The Swallow,” which begins as a sparse piano ballad. The segue is seamless, and provides yet another glitch in the narrative matrix that blurs the spatial and temporal boundaries of these seemingly disparate stories. “Night Of The Swallow” is a story about another disruption of territorial boundaries - a pilot preparing for a clandestine nightflight, apparently smuggling human cargo from the white cliffs of Dover to safety in Malta, while his lover pleads for him not to take the risk - threatening to turn him in rather than stand by helplessly. Bush alternates masterfully between these two voices, and the musical backing shifts between a simmering piano and synth with minimal drums to a swaggering, exultant, desperate blast of trad Irish swing - repetitive in a loopy way that resonates with the swooping hypnotic “Let me go…” chorus on top of it, not to mention the pervasive digital nuances of the Fairlight sampler and Linn drum machine, almost offhandedly generating the new genre of TechnoCeltic, which - along with the drink - is said to have driven poor Shane McGowan off his knob! Another auteurist masterpiece. Throughout her career, Bush’s virtuosity as a singer depends as much on her acting gift as her technical vocal accomplishments. The emotional spectrum encompassed across her oeuvre is as comprehensive as any great theatrical player’s. The Dreaming’s tilt towards narrative darkness - fear, rage, betrayal, contempt, loss, regret, spiritual crisis, alienation, madness and death death death - is communicated at least as much through her ability to conjure these states through vocal tone, timbre, dynamics, and accent as it is through her often-cryptic lyrics and exuberant, experimental soundscaping. "All The Love” moves away from the fictive cinematic storytelling of the first Side 2 tracks, into another ambiguous, amorphous space - starting from the opening conundrum - “The first time I died was in the arms of good friends of mine” through to the improbably heartrending collage of truncated messages from Bush’s actual malfunctioning answering machine, which construct a Matrix-level bubble of alienation. “Why oh why didn't I take the BLUE pill?” “Although we are often surrounded by people and friends, we are all ultimately alone,” the artist observed in the Oct 1982 issue of the Kate Bush Club newsletter. Indeed. Yet Bush’s musical settings are exquisite - and shared with at least 75,000 other humans - exposing Bush’s underlying faith in the capacity for aural sensuality - and art - to bridge the gap. Nevertheless, the text of the song is distinctly solipsisitic: “Only tragedy allows the release Of love and grief never normally seen. I didn't want to let them see me weep, I didn't want to let them see me weak, But I know I have shown That I stand at the gates alone.” With it’s piano/slinky bass combo and smart, mournful lyrics about human relations, "All The Love” strongly conjures Joni Mitchell’s then-recent reinvention as a jazz-fusion diva. But, as with all great popular artists, Bush’s baroque collage aesthetic transcends any single influence. The sad groove of the intro is exquisitely interrupted by a solo boy soprano singing “We needed you… to love us too… we wait for your move” over a loose beat of what sounds like the same Fairlight phoneme samples Bush used in her chilling cover of Donovan’s “The Reedy River” - the B-side of “Sat In Your Lap.” The effect is breathtaking. And the heartbreaking barrage of answering-machine farewells at the end is a landmark use of musique concrete sampling in popular music. Bush shifts into a harder narrative focus with “Houdini," whose “with a kiss I’d pass the key” inspired the powerful archetypal LP cover image - appropriately, as this song is perhaps the heart of “The Dreaming” - a cubist picture of the séances held by Houdini’s widow Beth to test the possibility of life after death. “Houdini" is performed in the voice of Beth speaking to the to the escape artist (and militant spiritualist debunker)’s memory or spirit or something, employing string quartet interludes to structure pauses into the narrative in a way more reminiscent of great cinematic storytellers than singer-songwriters. Speaking of great cinematic storytellers, “The Dreaming”’s final cut "Get Out Of My House” has been alleged (and persuasively so) to have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” Summarizing the album’s themes of isolation, alienation, control, madness, territoriality, and bodily vulnerability, "Get Out” is a tour-de-force of danceable bad vibrations. Opening with a foreshadowing of the guitar-flourish-decorated braying-donkey climax, "Get Out” quickly focuses on the propulsively tribal rhythmical spine that carries it through to its frayed apocalyptic climax - and Bush’s anxious narration, which quickly escalates into a vigorous and unrestrained paranoia. The unrelenting momentum of fear generates a narrative split where the voice of the trapped house occupant is replaced by a “concierge” who overlays a sleazy “Cabaret” calm over the proceedings - but just briefly. From the 2:13 mark, one of the central rhythmical elements is Ms. Bush’s repeated hysterical shrieking of the phrase “Get out of my house!”, rendered conspicuously low in the mix - but in a way that establishes a sense of pending cacophonous doom. This mixture reaches a kind of equilibrium, over which Kate and (brother Paddy?) articulate a shadow version of The Runaway Bunny (“I turn into a bird … I turn into the wind … I change into the Mule …) which culminates with the aforementioned donkey apocalypse, which then fades into what sounds to me like an appropriated aboriginal chant, or something from WIRE’s “dugga” phase. Whatever, it works. Back in the day, my friend Carol Vernallis made an obsessive art school video interpreting “Get Out” as a glitch snapshot of unwanted pregnancy, with the “Get out” injunction directed at Mr. Fetus. I’ll buy that! But it must be said that Bush operates on a deep psychological level that supports innumerable specific interpretations. One of the underemphasized lyrics, responding to the concierge’s speaking of the law, is an unattributed "It's cold out here!" - harkening back to Bush’s breakthrough hit “Wuthering Heights” - “It’s me Cathy, let me into your window, I’m so cold” The self as a house - requiring defense, but subject to haunting - is one of Bush’s central philosophical zingers. In more personal terms, she seems to seek closure on the first phase of her own artistic arc - marked by a playful emotional openness that naively ignored the incompatibility of hippy philosophy with celebrity culture. Clearly, she felt invaded, and her response was to board up the windows and change the locks. “The Dreaming” was recorded at Abbey Road studios, and Kate was living and working in London at the height of of the social unrest that culminated in the election of Margaret Thatcher and the ensuing 2-month-long Falklands War, which was being waged just as the finishing touches on the album were put in place. Bush moved from her London home to a farmhouse in the countryside in Kent, where she installed her family (and a state of the art recording studio) and disappeared from public view for the next couple of years. When she reemerged, it was with “Hounds of Love.” … I chose “The Dreaming” for my initial contribution to this forum because I’ve thought about it a lot. I actually pitched a book about it to the 33 1/3 guy in the early days, but he passed. It’d been in my Desert Island Ten list since I first heard it. Still, I totally get how a lot of people were completely alienated by it, whether because of its deviation from Bush’s (relatively) conventional romantic persona, its perceived abandonment of populist forms in favor of avant-gardism, or its sheer sonic weirdness. Polarizing Bush fans, it was a major commercial and critical disappointment - the most traumatic in a career that had unfolded in a cloud of rapturous approval since the artist was a precocious adolescent mentored by Dave Gilmour of “Not Syd Barrett” fame. You’d think that an album that was so narratively occupied with encapsulating a series of painful, anxiety-filled, and downright frightening scenarios would be a bummer listening experience, but “The Dreaming” is ultimately an exhilarating entertainment, alchemically transforming its dark content with a supernova of creative radiation emanating from the heart and mind of a 23-year-old breaking free. Brilliant as it is, the “Hounds Of Love” LP smacks conciliatory, as has every recording since to a greater or lesser degree. “The Dreaming” is an album crafted - written, performed, and produced - by a phenomenally ambitious 23-year-old(!) auteur who assumed her audience would trust her as a guide into whatever zany antics or earthshaking formalist deconstructions she might lead them … but was mistaken. But “Hounds Of Love” isn’t an artistic retreat so much as a gentler reiteration of the same insights - aesthetic and philosophical - that animated “The Dreaming.” Not without its dark side (“Mother will hide the murderer” anyone?), “Hounds” is deeply positive: erotic, sensual, spiritually uplifting and psychologically affirmative, rooted in 2 years worth of pastoral, familial retreat. It’s belovedness is well-earned. Nobody’s going to escape the grasp of Vecna listening to “Get Out Of My House.” In fact that’s probably what Vecna had on his Walkman! That’s the thing, and a thing of which Bush is well aware - it’s all about the balance. There’s no light without shadow, no harmony without cacophony, no “Hounds” without “The Dreaming.”