‘Experiment IV’: The Kate Bush video that was banned for being too violent
When Bob Dylan created what’s considered to be the first modern music video, he likely didn’t anticipate what it would evolve into in the hands of future artistic visionaries like Kate Bush.
In today’s world, a new single is almost always accompanied by a visual that serves as a more considered extension of the song’s messages and themes, providing a glimpse into the concepts and aesthetics of the broader album rollout, which is especially impactful if the artist in question is naturally more innovative and visual in their art, like Bush, who almost always uses her music videos to tell stories that you otherwise would have overlooked by listening to the music alone.
Think of the one for ‘Wuthering Heights’ as an example, where at just 19 years old, she managed to create an image for herself as someone who unapologetically takes risks, all with only a simple backdrop and a dance she choreographed herself.
As time went on, she took more creative liberties with her videos, implementing different techniques to create fully-fledged worlds, which saw her perform an extensive interpretive dance to represent the themes of yearning through a soft, ethereal tone and minimalist backdrop in ‘Running Up That Hill’. Elsewhere, she exercises lavishness and over-the-top quirkiness, like in ‘Babooshka’, as well as more nuanced and imitative storytelling techniques, like in ‘Army Dreamers’.
Most of her concepts are fairly complicated, and in her videos, she usually either opts for simplicity or complexity to push those throughlines. In ‘Experiment IV’, for instance, a single included in the greatest hits compilation The Whole Story, Bush decided not to play the main role herself and instead enlisted a bunch of high-profile actors, including Hugh Laurie, Gary Oldman, and Dawn French, to tell the story.
While she’s taken this approach before, she took greater liberties to hire the appropriate talent to tell a story that was inherently more complex. Writing about it on her website, the singer explained that it was a story that was challenging to tell visually, but that this informed the decision to choose an old, abandoned military hospital as the setting because “it was a huge, labyrinthine hospital with incredibly long corridors”, which gave it a cold and clinical feel in keeping with its insidious themes.
The video itself is about a military operation that creates a sound that can be used to torture and kill people, coupled with Bush’s idea that something as pure and beautiful as music can be used for different, more sinister purposes, and how a plethora of tech advancements can be used in different ways, for both good and bad. In the video, we see how the sound affects people it’s inflicted upon, before Bush shows up as a personification of said sound, her face morphing into something grotesque as she wreaks havoc on those in its path.
If you’ve seen the video, you’ll probably notice that it’s mildly disturbing, though nothing out of the ordinary in today’s modern landscape, but, back in 1986, this was deemed too violent for viewers of Top of the Pops and was banned as a result. Regardless, its artistic value wasn’t completely lost, as it was also nominated for ‘Best Concept Music Video’ at the Grammys, ultimately losing out to Genesis.
Despite its controversy, the ‘Experiment IV’ video stands as a beautiful example of the songsmith’s ability to enhance her own storytelling with themes that go beyond their immediate impact. For instance, watching the video now, much of it still holds up, especially when reading it through a lens of modern uses of technology in music, as well as the lack of the human touch in government operations.
