Why does Kate Bush have a key in her mouth on the album cover of ‘The Dreaming’?
Kate Bush has always been more than simply a singer. From the very beginning, her artistry has stretched far beyond just the music and into the worlds of dance, art, acting, storytelling, production and beyond. It was always bound to be the case ever since she spent her first record label advance on interpretive dance lessons. However, each strain of her creativity feeds into one another, and on The Dreaming, an album often considered her most adventurous and experimental, even the cover artwork plays a vital role.
While often overlooked for records like Hounds Of Love or The Kick Inside, The Dreaming is an essential moment in Bush’s career. Following her breakthrough with ‘Wuthering Heights’ and the success of her 1978 debut, the artist instantly started to struggle with the pressures that come along with publicity. She spoke at length about her feelings regarding her second album, Lionheart, claiming she is “not really happy with it”. After the success of her debut, her label wanted to keep the momentum going, pushing for a new album only a few months later. “I felt very squashed in by the lack of time,” Bush said, quickly realising exactly how she liked to work.
Bush liked to work slowly, precisely and passionately. After Lionheart left her feeling odd, she stood her ground more, demanding more control over the production of her albums and more space to view them as a full and thorough project with the right visuals, space for storytelling and no external pressures. Never For Ever was the first step, but her 1983 album The Dreaming was those demands coming to fruition as the first record Bush fully self-produced, leading to her most experimental album to date.
As a record, The Dreaming feels like an anthology of stories and characters or a series of dreams. It was by no means her most commercially successful album as its sonic build is wild and weird, but Bush loved it that way, joking in 1992, “That was my ‘She’s gone mad’ album.” Across the songs, she dives into a series of different inspirations, from public figures and authors to historical events, using everything from the lyrics and instruments to the music videos and even the artwork to tell the story, including the detail of the key in her mouth on the album cover.
But why does Kate Bush have a key in her mouth on the cover of The Dreaming?
The key ties into one of the album’s songs, ‘Houdini’. The album’s ninth track is inspired not so much by the man who gives the song its name as by his wife, as Bush borrows the story of Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, or Bess Houdini.
For years before Houdini became famous, the couple worked together as a vaudeville act where Bess would be his stage assistant. When he later became the world-famous escape artist, people had suspicions that Bess would kiss Houdini before his trick, secretly passing him a key from her mouth into his. Kate Bush sings about that in the song, giving her the idea for the cover as she croons, “With a kiss, I’d pass the key.”
But ‘Houdini’ is about more than just this suspected trickery. “It proved to be the most difficult lyric of all the songs and the most emotionally demanding,” she once said of the track, adding, “I was so aware of trying to do justice to the beauty of the subject and trying to understand what it must have been like to have been in love with such an extraordinary man, and to have been loved by him.”
The song tells the tale of the couple’s love as Bess spent the years after Houdini’s death attempting to reach him on the other side through seances and the secret code they came up with together; “Rosabelle – answer – tell – pray answer – look – tell – answer answer – tell.” In her lyrics, Bush imagines a scene where, finally, Bess gets her answer from the beyond and hears from her beloved.
Clearly, this Kate Bush song, this story and this scene meant a lot to her as a central moment of the album as on it’s cover, she acts out that image, leaning into a kiss with a key visible on her tongue.
