‘Hounds of Love’: The album Kate Bush called her “most complete” work
Nothing Kate Bush ever made was supposed to be music for the masses. She always marched to the beat of her own drum whenever she went into the studio, and whether or not the general public would love her music was almost beside the point. When she hit the nail on the head, though, she was more than happy to celebrate when the rest of the world came along for the ride with her.
Then again, it’s not like she had a hard time getting on the radio back in the day. ‘Wuthering Heights’ is still an astonishing song for anyone to have as their first single, let alone someone who was barely out of their teens when they wrote it. When working on her following few albums, though, it seemed like Bush was slowly inching towards something that no one had fully grasped yet.
Even if some songs sounded scattered, there was no way anyone would argue that them being fantastic tunes. Lionheart might be considered a step down compared to her debut record, but since most people could only hope to write a song as good as these, Bush wasn’t looking at becoming a flash in the pan. She only wanted to push herself, and when she got to working on albums like The Dreaming, it was more of a forceful shove rather than a push in the studio.
The entire record was as strange as possible, with Bush pushing her voice and the typical pop song structures to see what she could get away with. It’s not necessarily an album for everybody, but with those tunes out of her system, Bush was confident enough to make two albums in one for the record Hounds of Love.
Though it’s the size of a normal album, both sides of the vinyl feel like listening to two separate projects. It’s hard to call the first side terrible by any stretch with songs like ‘Running Up That Hill’ and ‘Cloudbusting’, but Bush wasn’t only looking to make song vignettes. She wanted to tell a story, and The Ninth Wave was her way of making her own macabre fairy tale, with each song being told from the perspective of a woman who is washed out to sea.
“I think in some ways this is the most complete work that I’ve done, in some ways it is the best, and I was the happiest that I’d been compared to making other albums.”
Kate Bush
Making this kind of interconnected story was never going to be easy, but after finishing the project, Bush felt that she had never been more satisfied with one of her records, saying, “I know there’s a big theory that goes ’round that you must suffer for your art, you know, ‘it’s not real art unless you suffer.’ And I don’t believe this, because I think in some ways this is the most complete work that I’ve done, in some ways it is the best, and I was the happiest that I’d been compared to making other albums.”
But looking at the bands she was brought up with, it’s not like her turn towards this kind of story came out of nowhere. David Gilmour had worked extensively with her when she first started, and while The Ninth Wave is nowhere near as conceptual of a piece as something like The Wall, it’s a perfect short story that shows what Bush was capable of if she had the freedom to do whatever she wanted.
And looking at where she would go on later albums, she found a way to pack the same amount of punch that The Ninth Wave had on individual songs like ‘This Woman’s Work’ and ‘The Red Shoes’. Any other artist would get a bit scared of taking chances like this, but Bush has always been one to casually take risks and turn anything that she can into gold.
