‘Waking the Witch’: the weirdest song Kate Bush ever recorded
When presented with the musical works of a genius, it’s often something you didn’t know you needed until you got it. Esoteric and jarring upon initial listen, innovative songs sow a brazen seed that flourishes in the years to come. At that very flower bed, with her hands frequently dirty, was Kate Bush.
She was a master artist when it came to pulling in esoteric influences and crafting them into a compelling piece of storytelling. While critics do their best to pigeon-hole her, be it through the lens of “art rock” and “experimentalism”, she eludes all the guidelines of genre conventions.
As such, she’s carefully straddled the line between creativity and downright weirdness. You may not hear it immediately in her seminal tracks ‘Wuthering Heights’ or ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)’, but both songs hint towards the artist that exists within. In both of those tracks, it sounds like her esoteric sensibilities are being shackled, ready to burst into outright experimentation any minute.
But on ‘Waking the Witch’, Bush allows her bizarreness to flourish brazenly. Beginning with an eerie voice that whispers “Wake up!” before a series of guiding voices, bringing Bush back to land, saying, “A good morning ma’am, your early morning call”, the track descends into the deep blue depths of an imagined reality.
It’s a jarring narrative ledge that Bush hangs the song on, but heightened all the more by her musical arrangement for the track. Combining everything from ambient piano flourishes with scratchy samples that give us a peek into the matrix, it defies all pop conventions and flirts with the esoteric lands of electronic music more popular in the current day.
While some experimentation hints towards a sporadic use of studio time, where anything and everything is chucked at the wall, Bush’s performance of sonic obscurity was a deliberate method. It was used to add context to the broader narrative of the song. Speaking of the song’s fractured use of Morse code, Bush said, “That’s an effect that we managed to muck around with. It was a very experimental idea, a sort of trick really, that took us a long time to do. I wanted to give the impression of a very desperate attempt to communicate.”
Using the dystopic world her soundscape depicts allows Bush to carry forth haunting social commentary. In the song, Bush pulls on traditional mythologisation of witchcraft to tell the tale of a woman who is on trial for being a witch, where she is savagely pushed underwater to see if she will “sink or float.” In a soundscape already packed with texture, Bush adds broken sound effects and splashing noises to vividly depict the disconnect of being thrown underwater without control.
But it’s not just a scary bedtime tale of a witch’s trial, bolstered by dramatic sound production. No Bush’s experimentalism swirls around an exploration of the political and, in turn, delivers a poignant and provocative take on sexism. She explained, “I think it’s very interesting, the whole concept of witch-hunting and the fear of women’s power. 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.”
