Homage to happenstance: The Kate Bush song about strange coincidences
Few artists have honed a sound as otherworldly and ethereal as Kate Bush has. Between her soaring vocals in ‘Wuthering Heights’ and the dreamy comfort of ‘Cloudbusting’, she became an art-pop icon, enhancing her peculiar sonic storytelling with synths and strings. There’s a mysticism to her music, an enduring eccentricity that even won ‘Running Up That Hill’ a spot on the Stranger Things soundtrack and a subsequent revival.
The further you delve into Bush’s catalogue, the stranger sonic depths you encounter, one of which can be found on her 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside. ‘Strange Phenomena’ may never have reached the heights of the album’s stand-out track, ‘Wuthering Heights’, but it’s no less weird or wonder-inducing.
Extra-terrestrial synths and soft pianos underscore Bush’s words as she sings of curious coincidences and deja vu, wondering if they might mean more than they seem. “Every girl knows about the punctual blues,” she sings, “But who’s to know the power behind our moves?” The song is not only strange in its instrumentation; it charts instances of strangeness in its lyricism.
“‘Strange Phenomena’ is about how coincidences cluster together,” Bush once explained to Music Talk. Throughout the song, Bush is haunted by names and words and runs into friends in abundance, raising her hat to the “strange phenomena” to the “hand a-moulding us”. As the coincidences begin to add up, she can’t help but acknowledge it as more than happenstance, to attribute it to some higher power.
Bush suggested that these clusters happen to us often, though they often go unnoticed. “We are surrounded by strange phenomena,” she explained, “but very few people are aware of it. Most take it as being part of everyday life.”
Perhaps it’s this unacknowledged universal experience that makes Bush’s track feel so uncanny. We’ve all run into a friend we were just thinking about, we’ve all had unexplained deja vu, and we’ve all experienced our own form of strange phenomena. It’s part of the human experience and that’s an area that the ethereal Bush resides most keenly in.
As pianos and percussion swell around her tales of clustered coincidences, her distinctive delivery swinging high and low, she seems to embody that strange feeling.
Though ‘Strange Phenomena’ is one of the most distilled versions of Bush’s strange sonic storytelling, finding its focus in strangeness itself, her discography more widely displays a penchant for this kind of songwriting. For music that treads the line between the everyday and the otherworldly, the human and the spiritual.
Listen to ‘Strange Phenomena’ below.
