Hitler, Witches and Horror: Kate Bush’s five creepiest songs
Kate Bush is a visionary. While crafting her delicate and haunting world, the singer often looks at the images around her and how worlds are created from much smaller seeds, seeds that are often planted as a result of the more sinister, darker corners of our minds. Bush isn’t a purveyor of the macabre, but her fantastical concepts are littered with such symbols, even if that which they represent is tough to swallow.
Bush rarely plays on themes of darkness as a tool for disgust. Rather, she utilises ‘otherness’ as a means to challenge, provoke, satirise, and criticise. Audiences and critics like to shoehorn her music into reductive labels like “art rock” and “experimentalism”, but that often comes at the expense of Bush’s inherent curiosity and how she transforms this insatiability into the purest form of art.
While most of Bush’s mainstream hits aren’t so much what you might call “scary”, especially if you’re looking at songs like ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)’, ‘Babooshka’ or even the recent ‘Army Dreamers’ resurgence, there lies a set of semi-hidden gems rooted in some of the most creepy and frightening narratives you could ever imagine.
Some might not see an issue with the idea of entertaining a date with a stranger, for instance, but what if that stranger turned out to be the world’s most hated dictator? We might dabble in isolation from time to time, but what if that was your whole life? What if you saw someone who needed help but seemed trapped, lost to the hopelessness of impenetrable barriers? What if you realised that person was you?
Kate Bush’s creepiest songs:
5. ‘Heads We’re Dancing’
Ever since the release of Oppenheimer, conversations about the famous theoretical physicist have been rife. Back in 1989, however, this wasn’t exactly the case, and in fact, most people didn’t know him by name at all. However, Bush encountered the name one day when meeting up with a friend who posed an interesting debate about how seduced we become by ignorance when faced with a problematic truth.
“It was all started by a family friend, years ago, who’d been to dinner and sat next to this guy who was really fascinating, so charming,” Bush once explained, “They sat all night chatting and joking.” Becoming increasingly fascinated by the idea of dancing with the devil, she wrote ‘Heads We’re Dancing’, but this time, the story involved someone far worse than J. Robert Oppenheimer.
“What if you met the Devil? The Ultimate One: charming, elegant, well spoken,” Bush said, explaining the premise behind the song. Adding, “Then it turned into this whole idea of a girl being at a dance and this guy coming up, cocky and charming, and she dances with him.” As a result, ‘Heads We’re Dancing’ took inspiration from the infamous dictator by conceptualising moral ambivalence in art. As the singer put it: “Maybe evil is not always in the guise you expect it to be.”
4. ‘Get Out of My House’
“The Shining is the only book I’ve read that has frightened me,” Bush once said. “While reading it I swamped around in its snowy imagery and avoided visiting certain floors of the big, cold hotel, empty for the winter,” she added. Sitting on her 1982 album, The Dreaming, ‘Get Out of My House’ explores the same terrifying universe as the indisputably horrifying Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
Taking inspiration from such a harrowing setting, ‘Get Out of My House’ places its narrator in a similar environment, taking on the essence of an asylum, with murky and jarring musical arrangements that give off the same sense of claustrophobia. The track seems like an audible manifestation of walls closing in, with sounds that build until its inescapable fearmongering threatens to overwhelm.
Beyond its more obvious terror-invoking charm, however, the song actually holds a more profound meaning: according to Bush, it could also be about the various experiences and entities humans encounter and go through before they decide to start fending for themselves, akin to the original story in the book. In her own words: “‘Get Out of My House’ was more to do with the book than the film, just to say that,” she said. Adding: “But whatever is going on in your life when you’re writing has to somehow seep into your work.”
3. ‘Mother Stands for Comfort’
In today’s true crime-obsessed world, we often ponder the question: What if we were ever related to a killer? Or worse, what if we were the parents of one? In ‘Mother Stands for Comfort’, which is also one of the most stripped-back songs on 1985’s Hounds of Love, Bush delivers a haunting vocal amid an influx of featherlight arrangements, creating the perfect atmosphere for such a complicated concept.
Narrative aside, the unsettling feeling the track conveys is entirely deliberate. As Bush once explained, the track is supposed to be “unfeeling in a way”, which is made possible by “the cold qualities of the synths and machines”. She continued, discussing that there “are many different kinds of love” and that ‘Mother Stands for Comfort’ is about “the love of a mother, and in this case, she’s the mother of a murdered, in that she’s basically prepared to protect her song against anything.”
In true Bush fashion, there is no way you can apply dichotomous meaning to the number: it’s a complicated matter and one that addresses the ways the son uses the mother as she tries to protect him. It’s melancholic but also strangely sentimental, but then again, who knows how we’re supposed to feel when faced with such a strange and almost abstract-seeming story?
2. ‘Under Ice’
The operatic and graceful ‘Under Ice’ may be spine-tingling to listen to, but the inspiration behind the ‘Under Ice’ is even more chilling. Bush first wrote the song about the idea of isolation, accompanied by the vivid imagery of being near a frozen river, completely alone and completely exhausted. However, if you fall asleep, there’s a chance you might roll over and drown with no one around to save you.
It’s a sort of nightmare situation, where the cold of the ice has caused you to become somewhat deluded, so the moment you see someone under the ice, you’re not sure how they got there, who they are, and worse – how to help them. At the end of the song, however, the worst outcome is revealed: the person beneath the ice, in the water, is actually the narrator.
“It’s that person all alone in this absolute cold wilderness of white, and seeing themselves under the ice, drowning, to which they wake up and find themselves under the water,” Bush once explained, which is reflected in the final lyrics: “Trying to get out of the cold water / It’s me. / Something, someone–help them / It’s me.”
1. ‘Waking the Witch’
In keeping with the drowning theme, ‘Waking the Witch’ begins with an eery voice whispering: “Wake up!” This is followed by: “A good morning ma’am, your early morning call”, along with a series of additional voices urging the narrator to come back to reality. “My mother’s in there, my father, my brothers Paddy and John, Brian Tench – the guy that mixed the album with us – is in there, Del is in there, Robbie Coltrane does one of the voices,” Bush once explained, all of which setting the tone for a deeply poignant track about losing yourself.
Similar to ‘Under Ice’, ‘Waking the Witch’ explores the loss of self through the haunting tropes of the musical arrangements, but this piece feels like the next chapter, in which the more demonic aspects of witch hunts and taking women down roam free. “I think it’s very interesting the whole concept of witch-hunting and the fear of women’s power,” Bush explained. Adding: “In a way, it’s very sexist behaviour, and I feel that female intuition and instincts are very strong and are still put down, really.”
In the song, the narrator is on trial for being a witch, and to determine whether she is guilty or not, they push her underwater to see if she will “sink or float”. This powerful message is made even more poignant by the addition of jolty sound effects that create the sound and feeling of being underwater. It’s a truly frightening concept, even if it’s just fiction.
