Kate Bush and the seances that attempted to contact Harry Houdini
No one can ever question Kate Bush’s commitment to the mad world of her music.
Not only did the artist claw back full control, teaching herself to produce just to make sure her vision was never messed with, but she even took her lyrical content so seriously that it led her into the world of the paranormal.
There are many reasons why Kate Bush is a truly singular artist, with number one, and the most obvious, being her voice. When she first emerged with ‘Wuthering Heights’, appearing on Top of the Pops in March 1978, audiences sat up in their armchairs, where half of them wondered ‘what is that?’ in a horrified kind of way, itched and scratched by the high pitch of her vocals, and the other half wondered the same in pure amazement, and thus her career began.
But another reason why Bush exists in a realm of her own is because of her lyricism. While the typical topics of love, loss, anger and so on do creep in, you’d struggle to find a track in her discography that could be described as ‘universal’. Artists are often sold a lie that in order to be successful, they must be broad and vague. Bush operated on the complete opposite path, backing her albums with hyper-specific situations, made-up tales, mysterious influences, ghost stories and beyond.
Has anyone ever actually figured out what on earth she’s talking about on ‘The Man With the Child in His Eyes’? As the years went on, her stories only seemed to get more niche, with half of Hounds of Love standing as Bush’s own Titanic story, while on 50 Words For Snow, she’s imagining an odd scene where someone falls in love with a snowman, and in between there are murder plots, political conspiracies, religious retellings, or readaptations of famous ballets.
Time and time again, real-life people float in as Bush seemed to be endlessly fascinated by history, but specifically the weird facts in history that might otherwise be forgotten, or the figures all too often left out. On ‘Houdini’, she sings about one of them, and it’s not the famous Harry Houdini, but his wife, Bess Houdini.
History often forgets the women who stand alongside famous men, no matter how much they contribute, and Bess is no different. A performer in her own right, she wasn’t just Houdini’s wife, but she was also his stage assistant and helped him plan and organise his shows, and when people accused Houdini of trickery, the finger was often pointed at Bess, claiming she must surely somehow be helping him.
The pair were also completely in love, so much so, that they made a pact to stay connected, even after death, for which they’d long since devised a secret code language where certain numbers correlated to certain words, and in doing so, they wrote a code they promised to somehow share from the beyond. It went, “Rosabelle – answer – tell – pray answer – look – tell – answer answer – tell”, with Rosabelle being the name of a song Houdini first heard his wife sing, and the code his promise to reach her, even after he was gone.
After Houdini’s death in 1926, she was desperate for that sign, so she began hosting seances, hoping her husband would send her the message. She tried for ten years, reportedly leaving a candle constantly burning alongside his picture until eventually, she had to give up. She did, however, ask a friend to continue the mission, and still today, a yearly seance is held on Halloween, all still waiting for Houdini to give the secret code.
When Bush heard that story, she was fascinated. “It is such a beautiful and strange story that I thought I had very little to do, other than tell it like it was,” she said, desperate to turn it into song, but when she tried to put it into words, she worried she wouldn’t do it justice. “It proved to be the most difficult lyric of all the songs and the most emotionally demanding. I was so aware of trying to do justice to the beauty of the subject, and trying to understand what it must have been like to have been in love with such an extraordinary man, and to have been loved by him,” she admitted.
The result, regardless, was ‘Houdini’, a pining and desperate tune, sung from Bess’ perspective as she waits and hopes for that code, praying for her husband to pull off a trick, just once more.
