The 1985 album Kate Bush worried she would never finish: “A lot of work”
“Artists shouldn’t be made famous,” Kate Bush once said. “They have this huge aura of almost god-like quality about them, just because their craft makes a lot of money. And at the same time it is a forced importance… It is man-made, so the press can feed off it.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: one of the main reasons Bush is regarded in the highest possible terms is because, despite having an illustrious catalogue of hits, she is decisively elusive while doing it. Nothing is ever rushed; every minute decision is meticulously considered, and if she doesn’t want to do something? Well, she’s not doing it.
Obviously, she bolted out of the gate in 1978 with ‘Wuthering Heights’, but it was her unflinching ability to maintain a steady stream of acclaim even years and albums later that truly solidified the fact she was anything but a one-trick pony. Indeed, with her biggest success arriving five records in, it was clear that her ideas for reinvention never stopped flowing.
Yet when it came to that album in question, Hounds of Love, what became more than apparent through the process of making it was that it ebbed with a free-spiritedness that Bush even struggled to contain herself, despite it being a craft of her own creation. Sure, she was never overtly swayed by the notions of fame or attention, but knew deep down that she had to produce something.
“I never was so pleased to finish anything in my life,” she confessed, after the album was out in the world and had stormed the charts. “There were times I never thought it would be finished. It was just such a lot of work, all of it was so much work, you know, the lyrics, trying to piece the thing together.” That’s just par for the course when you’re creating a magnum opus, after all.
But even still, the process wasn’t entirely painstaking as Bush may have made out in that statement – in fact, quite the opposite. “I did love it, I did enjoy it, and everyone who worked on the album was wonderful. And it was really, in some ways, I think, the happiest I’ve been when I’d been writing and making an album,” she dreamily mused.
Bush said she had never believed in one suffering for their art. She wasn’t wrong, either: what’s the point in artists resenting their own work because it’s either so torturous or tedious? It’s this defiant act of refusing to be drawn into self-absorption which has undeniably kept the singer above water for so long, even when she has been at the furthest possible point away from the spotlight.
Hounds of Love is the definition of a real passion project, if ever you were to need one. At that point in her career, Bush didn’t technically need to create a chart-topping record, as she had had enough success already to see her coast quite easily. But the point was that she genuinely wanted to, and that’s exactly the secret ingredient that makes era-dominant hits like ‘Running Up That Hill’ so irresistible.
If Hounds of Love had never been finished, of course, the modern music world would have been far worse off for it. Yet in Bush’s world, it would only have reflected a never-ending process of pursuit, wherein she never stopped chasing that golden elixir. In many ways, every artist should have that sense of incomplete business to spur them forwards.
