The album Kate Bush made “under a lot of pressure”
It’s hard to imagine Kate Bush being rocked by nerves or critique. As an artist so singular, unique and wildly talented, her work explored new and exciting places with a kind of ease that only she could pull off. However, when it came to making one record, the singer admitted to feeling the pressure.
Even on her debut album, Bush burst onto the scene with a clear vision. She has forged a world of rich storytelling, vocal acrobatics and a complete and utter disregard for genre. She stands out as a peerless artist who mixed elements of rock, pop, theatricality and even modern dance to find a style that was only her own.
It makes sense then that Bush quickly took over control of producing her albums. Her work had always been an in-house affair, rarely inviting anyone beyond a tight circle of collaborators into the mix. From her first releases to her final ones, she stayed loyal to a crack team of the musicians and trusted in her own ability to write songs and translate them to tape exactly how she wanted.
When making music as intricate and specific as Bush’s, it must be hard to trust in a producer to nail it. By the time her first album came around, she was already tired of trying after admitting to being disappointed in her sophomore release, Lionheart, due to its production. From Never For Ever onwards, she took over the ropes both in the studio and behind the sound desk.
It worked in her favour in the long run as her self-produced albums stand at her best, but at the time, her second attempt, The Dreaming, was met with critique. It is her lowest-selling album, as people declared it inaccessible. Bush herself said, “That was my ‘She’s gone mad’ album.”
But all that meant that the pressure on her follow up was even higher. When it came to make Hounds Of Love, her 1985 classic album, she almost gave in. “I think it was probably the most difficult stage I’ve been at so far,” she said of the process. “Because The Dreaming, the album before… I’d never produced an album before that one. And because it had a lot of unfavorable attention from some people, I think it was felt that me producing Hounds of Love wasn’t such a good idea.”
The critique from her last album had rocked her confidence as she continued, “For the first time I felt I was actually meeting resistance artistically. I felt the album had done very well to reach number three, but I felt under a lot of pressure and I wanted to stay as close to my work as possible.”
The pressure almost made her hand over the ropes to a different producer, left doubting whether she was good enough or whether her vision was the right one or was simply too strange for listeners. In hindsight though, she felt it was an important moment of reflection. “But it was very important that it happened to me because it made me think, ‘Right. Do I really want to produce my own stuff?’ You know, ‘Do I really care about being famous?’ And I was very pleased with myself that, no, it didn’t matter as much as making a good album.”
She stuck to her course and once again produced her album all alone, making the masterpiece Hounds Of Love. Using the pressure to her advantage, she decided to move into her own studio to block out external pressures and voices.
“So we started Hounds of Love in our own studio, and I started to find out an awful lot of things that I wouldn’t have realized otherwise,” Bush said of the process. “I relaxed tremendously within my own environment, for a start. And also, on The Dreaming, because I was working in such an experimental way, the studio costs were becoming absolutely phenomenal, and I really don’t think I could have afforded to have made Hounds of Love in a commercial setup. So, here I was in a situation of having as much creative control, really, as I could ever ask for.”
They say that if you can’t stand the heat you should get out of the kitchen. But in Kate Bush’s case, all that heat only made her creative fire burn brighter.
