‘Hello Earth’: Kate Bush on why she felt the song was “too big” for her
Throughout her career, Kate Bush has constantly pushed boundaries and explored new topics within her music. It’s an attitude which has duly rewarded Bush on many occasions. On the experimental track, ‘Hello Earth’, the singer initially felt it was “too big” and ambitious of a challenge, but her hard work eventually paid off.
The track celebrates the environment and the unpredictable nature of our planet. With a topic of this magnitude, Bush knew her creation needed to be treated with care. However, she faced a major stumbling block while working on ‘Hello Earth’ in the studio. Despite her best attempts, Bush couldn’t find a way to circumvent the issue that almost plagued the song.
Usually, writing a chorus isn’t an issue for Bush, who has penned some of the catchiest in the history of pop music. Instead, she built the rest of the track, and for a long while, she left the choruses blank in ‘Hello Earth’ before the answer finally arrived to her.
In a conversation with BBC Radio 1 in 1992, Bush admitted of the Hounds of Love album track: “‘Hello Earth’ was a very difficult track to write, as well, because it was… in some ways, it was too big for me. And I ended up with this song that had two huge great holes in the choruses, where the drums stopped, and everything stopped, and people would say to me, ‘What’s going to happen in these choruses,’ and I hadn’t got a clue.”
She continued: “We had the whole song. It was all there, but these huge, great holes in the choruses. And I knew I wanted to put something in there, and I’d had this idea to put a vocal piece in there that was like this traditional tune I’d heard used in the film Nosferatu. And really everything I came up with, it with was rubbish really compared to what this piece was saying.”
Much to Bush’s delight, she was allowed to use the traditional Georgian folk song, ‘Zinzkaro’, which she had recorded by the Richard Hickox Singers. After searching within her brain incessantly for a chorus, the artist finally found a piece of music which matched the eeriness of the rest of ‘Hello Earth’ and added to the song’s atmospheric feel.
Bush added of the song’s meaning: “In some ways, I thought of it as a lullaby for the Earth. And it was the idea of turning the whole thing upside down and looking at it from completely above. You know, that image of if you were lying in water at night and you were looking up at the sky all the time, I wonder if you wouldn’t get the sense of as the stars were reflected in the water, you know, a sense of like, you could be looking up at water that’s reflecting the stars from the sky that you’re in.”
‘Hello Earth’ dealt with a highly-conceptual theme and needed an equally imaginative chorus to highlight the abstractness of the creation. While Bush’s methods were unconventional, they got results, and without the use of ‘Zinkaro’, ‘Hello Earth’ would have fallen apart.
