Left: Kate performing in her “Before The Dawn” show in 2014. The 22-night concert residency, held at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, sold out within 15 minutes online, 35 years after Kate’s last tour.
And hopefully in a good way.
“Here I go,” indeed!
Released in May 1985, Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms was the first album to sell a million copies on compact disc. There was, however, a more fitting herald of the CD age on the way. That September, the release of Kate Bush’s fifth album marked the elevation of a thoroughly modern pop edifice – shiny, silvered music seemingly made for the new format.
The casual observer, noting the singer’s performance of the title track on Top of the Pops in February 1986 (speeding the song on its way to Number 18 in the UK singles chart) might have wondered if this signalled the assimilation of a free spirit by the earthbound ’80s. Here was Bush wih big hairspray hair, in a double-breasted pants suit offset by a demure red bow, a world away from the eccentric personae – ballet dunce; Aboriginal space woman – she’d assumed to deliver songs from The Dreaming, three years previously. But the casual observer would have been mistaken. Beneath its thin patina of sophistication, “Hounds of Love” is a song that comes surging straight from the hindbrain, propelled by the primal impulse of fight-or-flight.
No matter how refined the circumstances of its creation – built at leisure in Bush’s new 48-track studio – or how newfangled its production -- still tangible in the hi-tech stabs and pads of Fairlight, and the crispness of Jonathan Williams’ cello – “Hounds of Love” is red in tooth and claw, its breathless, atavistic fear of capture mixed with almost supernatural rapture. Love is thundering through the psychosexual woods, hunting down somebody terrified of what it means to surrender to another person.
The song opens with a quote from British horror film Night of the Demon [“It’s in the trees! It’s coming!”] but that’s the only moment it feels like theatre. From then on, “Hounds of Love” maintains a dizzying emotional velocity, the relentless double drumming of Charlie Morgan and Stuart Elliott stamping down on the accelerator. Bush’s voice might dip and soften, but those drums are merciless, while the strident backing vocals, like a hunting horn call, goad her on if introspection threatens to slow her down.
In its unstoppable forward thrust, it has the inarguable logic of a dream, although not the way meant by Rolling Stone magazine in its cold review of the album: “Still a precoocious, coddled child at 27, Kate Bush loses herself in daydreams and then turns them into songs.” But it is a mature, womanly voice that rings out of “Hounds of Love,” not a fey or elfin one, and certainly not one that asks to be patronised. Neither is this a song ignorant of the ways of the world. (Coincidentally, the album pushed Madonna’s Like a Virgin from the top of the UK charts, another record named after a single that wasn’t quite as unworldly as it appeared.) The line “I’ve always been a coward / And I don’t know what’s good for me” speaks of experience, but not as much as the delirious cry of “Here I go . . .” uttered in full awareness that the ground is about to give way under her, that is the very second before the falling begins.
This is a woman who’s been here before. She knows what to expect. The Dreaming closed with the complete retreat of “Get Out of My House” – “I am the concierge chez-moi, honey / Won’t let you in for love nor money” – a shutting down, a locking of door, a definitive no. Four years after Hounds of Love, Bush's next album would open with the blissful multiple-yeses of “The Sensual World.” Right in the middle is “Hounds of Love,” torn by competing instincts, trembling on the brink. Here I go. Don’t let me go.
It is part of “Hounds of Love”’s startling power, however, that this is not the song’s only exhilarating emotional drop. It never lets up, every line heightening the pitch, closing the distance between song and listener. “Take my shoes off / And throw them in the lake” might be a ploy to shake the hounds off the scent, but it’s delivered with such guttural, throaty abandon that it’s hard not to feel that it’s a rejection of every trapping of convention. The need for freedom is so great, she’s prepared to run into oblivion: "I’ll be two steps on the water." There’s also the image of a fox, caught by dogs: “He let me take him in my hands / His little heart it beats so fast . . .”
The shout-out to the dead in The Red Shoes’ “Moments of Pleasure” might come close, but this is surely the most instantly, unexpectedly heart-breaking moment in Bush’s work. The tenderness, this moment of compassion amid all the hectic human drama, is incredibly moving – a reminder, too, that tamed creatures can be more savage than wild things. No wonder this bolting, racing, shoe-hurling woman is scared of standing still.
She talks herself around in the end, or so it seems, but the song remains an astoundingly vivid, brilliantly concise depiction of a moment when life could change forever. It ends with a suddeness that makes it seem like she’s hit the ground and you’ve hit it with her, breathlessly waiting for an answer to the question: “Do you know what I really need?” The uncertainly, however, is not reflected in the confidence – the perfect, dazzling completeness – of the song’s execution. On “Hounds of Love,” Kate Bush is going at full pelt, chasing the horizon, running her vision to ground. Not really the hunted, but the hunter all along.
– Mojo: The Music Magazine
October 2014
October 2014
About the song’s music video, which Kate herself directed, Wikipedia notes:
It was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller film The 39 Steps (1935) and a Hitchcock lookalike features in it (a nod to the director’s famous cameo appearances in his movies).
Related Off-site Links:
Here’s Kate Bush’s Best Songs to Celebrate Her 65th Birthday – Matthew Doherty (We Got This Covered, July 30, 2023).
Kate Bush Says “A Light Has Gone Out” as She Pays Tribute to Sinéad O’Connor – Zoe Delaney (Mirror, July 28, 2023).
The Kate Bush Song Inspired by J. Robert Oppenheimer – Jay Tayson (Far Out, July 25, 2023).
Hounds of Love: Why Kate Bush’s Classic Album Still Connects
– Joe Tiller (Dig!, September 16, 2022).
Big Boi Suggests a Kate Bush Collaboration May Be On the Way – Jack Whatley (Far Out, July 27, 2020).
Ranking All of Kate Bush’s Studio Albums – Jack Whatley (Far Out, July 30, 2020).
For more of Kate Bush at The Wild Reed, see:
• The Kate Bush Renaissance of 2022
• “A Kind of Elemental Force”
• Elizabeth Aubrey: Quote of the Day – June 19, 2022
• Ben Hewitt on the 40th Anniversary of Kate Bush’s Never for Ever
• Happy Birthday, Kate! (2020)
• Mark Beaumont: Quote of the Day – July 20, 2018
• Celebrating the Unique and Influential Kate Bush
• “A Dark Timelessness and Stillness Surrounds Her Wild Abandonment”
• “Can You See the Lark Ascending?”
• Nick Coleman: Quote of the Day – August 17, 2014
• Wow!
• Scaling the Heights
• “Oh, Yeah!”
• Celebrating Bloomsday in St. Paul (and with Kate Bush)
• “Rosabelle, Believe . . .”
• Just in Time for Winter
• “Call Upon Those You Love”
• A Song of Summer
• “There’s Light in Love, You See”
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