‘Watching You Without Me’: Kate Bush’s ghost story
Nothing in the world of Kate Bush is ever as simple as it seems. No feeling is ever straightforward when told through her unique language of images and characters. No song is ever complete without a storyline. Especially when it comes to Hounds Of Love, the 1985 album tells an incredible adventurous tale where the whole second side of the record dives into her own titanic tale, complete with witches, rescue mission and, on ‘Watching You Without Me’, ghosts.
But even that’s not straightforward. The ghostly narrator of the track isn’t a classically ghoulish apparition delivering spooks from the other side. Instead, Bush is playing with the true core of what a ghost is: a spirit caught between life and death, stuck in limbo due to unfinished business.
The unfinished business of her narrator is the life she’s watching over. In the story of The Ninth Wave, the album’s conceptual second side, the protagonist is in a shipwreck and is left floating out at sea, clinging to life as she battles death. Just before this track, she’s spiralled into a horror-tinged battle with her consciousness.
After opening with ‘And Dream of Sheep’, a track about her attempt to stay away and alive, she slips under. Through the melodramatic and honestly quite scary songs ‘Under Ice’ and ‘Waking The Witch’, she’s falling deeper into sleep and losing her grip on life.
Then, ‘Watching You Without Me Begins’. Suddenly, the listener is no longer out to sea. Instead, we’re in a family home as the narrator hovers above her household, watching like a ghost, caught between her life here and the death she’s slipping into.
“I should have been home / Hours ago / But I’m not here,” she sings, watching her family worry. But it’s hopeless as the refrain echoes eerily, “You can’t hear me / You can’t hear me / You can’t feel me.” Instead, she’s left to just helplessly watch the scene, seeing her family’s obliviousness to the reality of what’s happening and getting an insight into what their life will be like if she doesn’t make it.
“There’s a ghost in our home / Just watching you without me,” she sings as she haunts them with her body lying lifeless at sea and her spirit lingering here.
“I find this really horrific,” Kate Bush herself said, “These are all like my own personal worst nightmares, I guess, put into song.” To her, the idea of watching over her family with no way of communicating with them or reaching out, being stuck in this perpetual state of torturous isolation with her loved ones unable to feel her presence, is hellish.
To her, it would be better to just die fully or, ideally, to live. She puts this into song, too, as her character gets some fight. The next track, ‘Jig Of Life,’ captures that. The rousing folk tune sounds like a battle for survival and a mission to hold onto living in all its glory. This ghost story serves as a turning point as she sees life without her and decides to rejoin it.
