Kate Bush – Hounds of Love

After releasing her first three albums between February 1978 and October 1980, Kate Bush’s fourth album The Dreaming followed a two-year period where she had taken greater control over the recording process. The album had shown an expansive move towards experimentalism, introducing vast and complex narratives into her work with ambitious production. The change in process and direction had proved costly for the EMI label, but rather than retreating from her new mode, she built her own studio which meant that she could develop songs at her own pace, experimenting with sounds and returning to recordings repeatedly without the financial pressure of conventional studio time. After a further three-year hiatus, she reappeared in the early autumn of 1985 with the era-defining Hounds of Love, a remarkable return to pop accessibility, but also simultaneously another bold creative step into wherever she felt drawn.

Hounds of Love is in many ways two albums, effectively divided into two very different halves. The first contains five relatively self-contained songs, including four singles: Running Up That Hill, Cloudbusting, Hounds of Love and The Big Sky, with the second side occupied entirely by The Ninth Wave, a seven-part song cycle following a woman struggling to survive after falling overboard at sea.

One of the most evocative parts of the album was the way in which it was made. Much of the material was developed using an eight-track setup and the relatively new Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument), a digital synthesiser, sampler and audio workstation. Rather than approaching those initial recordings as demos, the early recordings were subsequently transferred to 24-track tape as the album developed, with the atmosphere and energy of those earliest ideas retained and forming the energy of the songs. Running Up That Hill provides perhaps the clearest example of this. Bush created the initial song on the Fairlight and then worked with Del Palmer, who programmed the LinnDrum (a now legendary 8-bit digital drum machine) from a rhythm Bush had sung to him. What began as a remarkably simple piece of home experimentation became one of the most recognisable recordings of the decade… and beyond.

If the first half demonstrates Kate Bush’s ability to create extraordinary pop records, The Ninth Wave on the second side demonstrates just how far beyond conventional pop songwriting she was prepared to go. The seven-song sequence follows a woman alone in the ocean at night, drifting between fear, hallucination, memory and the possibility of rescue. Rather than functioning as seven separate tracks, the songs form a single narrative and musical journey, a tapestry of voices, vocals, traditional instruments and futuristic electronic hues. The album as a whole is an extraordinary contrast: an album capable of producing four accessible (and hugely commercially successful) pop singles while simultaneously dedicating half of its running time to a complex conceptual work about fear, mortality and survival. The huge success of the album (it became her first UK number-one album and remains her most commercially successful record to date) is vindication in her process and also her willingness to experiment. It pushed the boundaries of studio-based pop music, yet was immediate enough to produce some of Bush’s biggest and most enduring songs. That contrast is central to what continues to make Hounds of Love so special.

Almost forty-one years to the day of its release, it remains an unusually complete portrait of an artist who had reached the point where the studio itself had become part of the composition. When you consider what a cultural icon she has become - and continues to be for new generations each time her wonderful music is introduced to a new audience - it’s easy to forget just how innovative, fearless and utterly captivating she is.