Kate Bush album ‘The Dreaming’ turns 40: A declaration of her art
You may have missed it, should you have spent a large part of 2022 with your head in the sand, but Kate Bush is experiencing a bit of a renaissance of late. The use of her classic single ‘Running up That Hill’ as a central motif in the fourth season of the hit Netflix series Stranger Things endeared the singer-songwriter to a brand new generation of listeners. It rocketed the song to number one and reportedly bagged Bush, the writer and performer of the song, a cool £250,000 a week while it did. But, there is so much more to Kate Bush than that song.
Across many songs and albums, Bush has neatly portrayed herself as one of Britain’s finest songwriting talents. Refusing to conform to the societal norms of women making pop music, Bush declined to devote herself to image, denied the apparent necessity of a love interest in all of her songs and dove head first into a plethora of different influences, inspirations and musical sparks of creativity. Perhaps one of the finest moments of this ethos is her 1982 album The Dreaming.
Released three years before Bush acquired the definitive sound of 1985’s Hounds of love, the record represents a crossroads moment for Bush. A few years down the road from Never Forever — an album that would see Bush begin to break out of the image that had been originally crafted for her by record companies — The dreaming sees Bush exercise her songwriting muscles and refuse to be pigeonholed any longer.
1982 saw Kate Bush really begin to enact her vision and take creative control into her own hands. The previous records had proved that Bush was more than just a songwriter, she was a bonafide visionary, and now she was given a chance to put it all on to wax. Having proved herself as one of Britain’s best, this is the album that saw Bush set about making her footprint on the industry. Doing away with the need for chart-busting singles, Bush devoted the record to finding her expression without the comforts of her previous efforts.
“After the last album, Never For Ever, I started writing some new songs,” reflected Bush in 1982 to Poppix. “They were very different from anything I’d ever written before – they were much more rhythmic and, in a way, a completely new side to my music. I was using different instruments, and everything was changing, and I felt that really the best thing to do would be to make this album a real departure – make it completely different. And the only way to achieve this was to sever all the links I had had with the older stuff. The main link was engineer Jon Kelly. Every time I was in the studio, Jon was there helping me, so I felt that in order to make the stuff different enough I would have to stop working with Jon. He really wanted to keep working with me, but we discussed it and realised that it was for the best.”
The album isn’t as full of pop hits as her previous albums, but this is the moment Bush began to become the legend we all know and love today. Taking control of her own destiny, Bush began to break through an unspoken glass ceiling with this LP, and even aside from the great songs on the LP, it’s a landmark moment in Bush’s career. “Yes, it’s very important for me to change,” Bush continued with Poppix. “In fact, as soon as the songs began to be written, I knew that the album was going to be quite different. I’d hate it, especially now, if my albums became similar because so much happens to me between each album – my views change quite drastically. What’s nice about this album is that it’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”
In fact, the record is most neatly summarised a few years after it came out. In 1989, Bush recalls her “first production” as one of the most difficult she had to make, complaining: “People thought I’d gone mad, the album wasn’t warmly received by critics. People told me it was a commercial disaster, but it reached number three, so that’s their problem.”
A few years later, Bush had seemed to come to that same notion: “I look back at that record, and it seems mad. I heard it about three years ago and couldn’t believe it. There’s a lot of anger in it. There’s a lot of ‘I’m an artist, right!'” The truth is, the record is a declaration of the artist Bush would become and a proclamation for how music itself would transform over the decade ahead. Haunting vocals and big and bold rhythm are all married to a motif that few can decipher but will likely laud as her genius.
Listen to Kate Bush’s The Dreaming below and discover the bones of the artist that would change the world 40 years later.
