Prog Progress 1985: Kate Bush - Hounds of Love

Hi, everyone! Welcome to Prog Progress, a blog series in which I journey through the history of progressive rock by reviewing one album from every year of the genre's existence. You can read more about the project here. You can learn about what I think are some of the roots of progressive rock here. You can see links for the whole series here.

 

It's been a while, hasn't it? Looking back, I now realize that it's been over a year since I last published a "Prog Progress" entry (1984's Powerslave), which I believe is the longest gap between posts in this series. I'd like to think that it won't be that long again until I get to 1986, but realistically, it's not unlikely that it will take me that long. Turns out having kids is really time-consuming! Who knew! Regardless, I need to make at least one post per year if I at least want to keep pace with, you know, the march of time, so at the very least, I guess I'll see y'all again sometime around June 2023.

In the year-plus since that Iron Maiden post, a lot has happened, most of it largely depressing. However, most relevant to this post, one somewhat significant, not depressing occurrence is that Netflix released the first half of the fourth season of Stranger Things. I don't watch Stranger Things (watched the first season, decided it wasn't for me). I wouldn't normally be mentioning contemporary television series in a post about progressive rock in the '80s, but if you watch Stranger Things or just follow popular music discourse, you probably know where I'm going with this: one episode has a very prominent use of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)," the opening track and lead single from her 1985 album Hounds of Love. Since I'm not a Stranger Things viewer, I haven't seen the episode in question, but it's apparently an absolute banger of a moment when the "Running Up That Hill" needle drop hits, so much so that people have been streaming the hell out of this song, which has rocketed "Running Up That Hill" to #1 on the UK Singles Chart (her highest-charting UK single in 44 years) and #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States (her highest-charting US single ever). Kate Bush has never exactly been an unknown artist, but she's been pretty far outside of mainstream pop music attention for a decade or three in terms of what "the kids these days" are listening to, but now, thanks to this fairly preposterous series of events, Kate Bush generally and Hounds of Love specifically are having something of a popular renaissance.

This makes writing this post feel a little different than writing the other prog entries did. If you've been reading the whole series, you'll know that my tone in these is usually flavored with at least a little bemusement—much as I love progressive rock, it's not lost on me that a lot of it is deeply silly as well as being thoroughly out of fashion, and I like to have fun with that in the posts. But now, an artist who is no less weird than a lot of the prog rock I've already covered here has against all odds become a chart-topping presence again.

It's a wonderful little cosmic accident that I will savor for as long as it lasts, because Kate Bush is definitely weird stuff. In fact, one of the reasons that I'd planned for year to cover Kate Bush in this blog series is, back at her mid-'80s commercial peak, her status as a weirdo interloper among the pop music mainstream. I've talked at some length about how in the post-'70s fracturing of UK progressive rock, the tropes and ideas of progressive music starting finding homes in adjacent genres, most notably arena rock and pop, and Kate Bush is a direct beneficiary of this movement and probably even the torchbearer for the full potential in prog's diversifying from "rock" to "art pop." She's really something special, and that goes right back to her inception as an artist.

As a teenager in the '70s, Bush was something of a prodigy, having taught herself multiple instruments and written a substantial number of songs by the time she was 16. Somehow, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd got a hold of her demo tape that her family had been circulating to record labels, and he apparently liked it enough to finance and help produce another demo, which resulted in her getting signed to Pink Floyd's parent label, EMI[1]. EMI sat on her material for a couple years before allowing her to record and release her first album, The Kick Inside, in 1978. It's a pretty auspicious debut: the record peaked at #3 on the UK albums chart and did even better internationally, reaching #1 in Portugal and the Netherlands as well as #2 in Belgium, Finland, and New Zealand. More importantly, the album's debut single, "Wuthering Heights," went to #1 in the UK, Australia, Portugal, New Zealand, Ireland, and Italy. In terms of pure music-industry crassness, this album moved some units. I don't normally focus on the commercial aspects of the music in this series, but I am here just to emphasize two things: first, that Kate Bush truly was working in the realm of pop (at least in the broad sense of having popular, mainstream success), and second, she did this in spite of the waning influence of pure progressive rock. These two things together are notable because as it arrived (and would continue in her next few releases), Bush's music was distinctly proggy, especially in pedigree. David Gilmour helped produce the album, and a good portion of the Alan Parsons Project were session musicians on a number of the album's tracks. You've also got the typical mythic/literary flourishes often found in prog, no less obvious than in the smash-hit lead single "Wuthering Heights," a song sung from the perspective of Catherine's ghost from the titular Emily Brontë novel[2]. Then you've got the music itself, which has definitely proggy touches like a Hammond organ, a mandolin, synths, and the typical flourishes of unconventional instrumentation (a boobam on one track, literal beer bottles on another).

But at the same time, Kate Bush's music doesn't exactly feel like progressive rock—not in the sense of the genre as it existed in 1978, at least. There's not a lot on The Kick Inside or her subsequent records that sounds especially improvisatory, nor are there the lengthy solos or instrumental passages typical of '70s prog. On a more conceptual level, this isn't particularly band-oriented music; a lot of prog, especially that classic wave in the '70s, takes its cues from jazz in terms of the idea that a given song is about the interplay of people in the room, who trade off time in the spotlight with solos before rejoining the whole group[3]. Progressive rock in its purest form is remarkably collaborative. With Kate Bush, however, everything is clearly subordinate to one person's vision: her own. She wrote all of the songs on The Kick Inside (as well as on her future albums), and for all of the baroque, proggy touches in instrumentation, Bush's vocals and piano take the lead pretty definitively on each song, with the rest of the musicians filling out texture as they follow that lead.

This sort of monolithic realization of a single person's vision would become even clearer on her second album (Lionheart, which came out just a few months after The Kick Inside), when Bush began co-producing the music; by her fourth album (1982's The Dreaming), Bush was the sole producer on her work. By the fifth album (and this post's ostensible focus), The Hounds of Love, Bush had mostly cycled through the label-approved Alan Parsons Project musicians and had formed a stable of studio musicians of her own choosing. This sort of auteurist control over all levels of the production isn't unheard of in the broader realm of pop music (Prince comes to mind), but within the framework of prog, it's pretty singular; the closest analog I can think of is Robert Fripp's famously draconian leadership over King Crimson, but even then, the band's recordings are highly inflected with improvisation and a live interplay of musicians trading the lead that you simply do not see in Bush's work. Taken as it is, this foregrounding of a singular figure backed by studio magicians makes Bush's music a lot closer to the structure of pop, or at least the more pop-oriented rock acts of the era like David Bowie, with Bush being, in her own off-beat way, the star that the whole recording revolves around. This is why I think Bush is such an interesting figure to talk about in the context of prog rock: it is clearly prog on some level, but rearranged into the shape of pop and pop stardom.

Since it's already come up, I guess I'd better actually start talking about the main show, i.e. The Hounds of Love. In the context of this prog-pop duality of Bush's, The Hounds of Love is actually a pretty interesting case study, as it's structured so that the two sides of the LP each focus on bringing out one of those genres. Side one of the album (the first five tracks, if you're not listening on vinyl) is simply labeled "Hounds of Love" on the back cover and is a collection of propulsive songs seemingly designed to appeal to all the Kate Bush fans who fell in love with her as the kind of left-of-center pop artist who did "Wuthering Heights." It's probably the most conventional stretch of music in her entire career up to that point, and each of the songs is broad and approachable in the way you expect of pop music (albeit in that dreamy, cock-eyed way that a lot of UK musicians approached "pop" in the '80s). Here you'll find Bush's most well-known songs (outside of "Wuthering Heights"): the rollicking rock of "The Big Sky," the chamber-pop of "Cloudbursting," the synth-pop of the title track, and yes, the immortal "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)." That's not to say that any of these songs involve Kate Bush sanding off the bizarre edges that often make her music interesting (she barks like a dog on the title track, after all), but these songs are certainly foregrounding the side of Bush that knows how to write a track you just want to listen to again and again. They've all got huge hooks and sticky melodies, and taken as a whole, that first side is just irresistible, banger after banger after banger. A lot of the press surrounding the album's release had to do with painting the record as Bush reemerging as a major commercial player after a few albums in the wilderness, and that's absolutely to the credit of the "Hounds of Love" side.

And then you get Side Two, labeled "The Ninth Wave" on the album packaging, which pointedly not a bid to reemerge as a commercial player. "The Ninth Wave" is an ambitious, genre-bending, side-long suite threading together seven tracks to tell an impressionistic story of a woman's mythical journey through birth, life, and death inspired by the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In terms of the music itself, it's a radical break with the first half of the record on the level of what David Bowie and Brian Eno did on the Berlin trilogy or what Peter Gabriel was doing on his first few solo records; instead of the pristine, left-of-center pop songs of Side One, "The Ninth Wave" presents melodies that snake along in unpredictable directions among richly textured, open-ended soundscapes occasionally punctuated by string hits and other studio trickery (as well as, in one memorable instance, an Irish jig). An epigraph in the liner notes indicates that the suite was inspired by Tennyson's Idylls of the King, a cycle of poems about King Arthur and Camelot[4], and it seems that not just the lyrics (more on that in a minute) but also the music itself is rooted in a kernel of that Tennyson work: for as abstract and experimental as the record gets in this section (and it is, often flirting with ambient and electronic structures), "The Ninth Wave" is nonetheless organized around traditional and at times even pre-modern European folk music, not just in the musical structures but in the instrumentation as well, which includes a Slovakian shepherd's flute, bagpipes, an Irish drum, and other indigenous European instruments. The way "The Ninth Wave" weaves together '80s studio experimentation with music from the deep past stretches the album back from whatever avant-garde it occupies in its present to connect it to a profound well of myth and history in the same way that Tennyson was linking his Victorian moment with the national and moral tradition of Arthurian legend. Bush is, in a way, insisting on her role in the continuum of the national, continental, and artistic lineage that Tennyson (and any number of other poets and artists) claims. I hope it goes without saying, but this is prog as hell: the sense of myth, the assertion of ostensibly popular music into the realm of high culture, the fusion of traditional European idioms with modern rock/pop shapes, the couching of all of this with a side-long suite of continuous music. If Hounds of Love Side One was the distillation of Bush's commercial pop impulses, then Side Two is certainly the culmination of her pedigree within the world of progressive rock. As a piece, it's stunning.

And yet, at the same time, if you were to listen to a random minute of "The Ninth Wave," you probably wouldn't peg it as prog in the same way that you could of a lot of Yes or Gentle Giant or (to use an example recently[6] covered on this blog) Marillion. It's too outré, too ambient, too folksy. This is also true of Side One as well, though in the other direction: it's simply too pop. And yet, it's hard to describe Hounds of Love in a way that doesn't make it sound like prog, at least on paper. In the context of this blog series, the cool thing about Kate Bush is her ability (especially on Hounds of Love but really, throughout her career) to take the theoretical parameters of prog and make them sound like no prog you've ever heard before—a true embodiment of the "progressive" ethos of prog, not just progressing rock(ish) music but progressing the genre itself into new forms. I've talked about this on the last few entries in this series, so I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but one of the things that I find most interesting about what happens to prog in the '80s is that prog's mainline implosion at the end of the '70s kind of necessitated the blowing up of the expectations of what the classic prog acts established as the expectations for the genre, and what interests me least about prog in the '80s are the acts that try to keep those old expectations alive (i.e. neo-prog, i.e. Marillion and their cohort). Whether it's the flourishing of progressive metal or the cross-breeding of arena rock with proggy instrumental textures[7], the people carrying the torch forward for the genre in my mind were those least likely to be precious about its boundaries as a genre. Kate Bush, with her singular vision and top-to-bottom ownership of the production process, is a bigger part of that vanguard of post-prog artists than anyone else I've yet covered on this blog.

When talking about her ability to move prog into the future, it isn't lost on me that Bush is a woman. Within the world of pop, a female-fronted act isn't all that anomalous[8], but within prog (especially British prog), it's a rarity to the point of near non-existence[9]. For reasons I've never quite been able to figure out, progressive rock is heavily masculine-presenting, and it's hard not to speculate (though also hard to say for certain) that Kate Bush's foregrounding of pop melody and experimental eccentricity (both realms historically more gender-diverse, though prog's abysmal record is a low bar to clear) gives her a backdoor into progressive music that she might not have had otherwise. Whatever the case, Kate Bush seems especially conscious of gender and her place within a masculinized world on Hounds of Love. Side One's songs are full of gendered angst, none more so than "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)," in which the titular deal with God involves Bush's speaker hypothetically flipping genders with her significant other so they can understand the pain they inflict upon each other (and, implicitly, the uphill climb women face in a masculine society).

But the part of the album where this idea comes into full fruition is "The Ninth Wave," which is, as previously mentioned, inspired by Tennyson's Arthurian cycle, but what I didn't point out before is that all the Camelot stuff is purely subtextual; the literal lyrical thread of Side Two involves the story of a woman who is adrift at sea and experiences some kind of vision that lays out her whole life in mythical terms as she battles what seem to be near-fatal conditions on the ocean. A lot of this is, like the music, somewhat abstract and hard to parse, but what comes through clearly is the importance of this narrator's identity as a woman, maybe even a kind of ur-woman who has a primordial connection with the feminine experience throughout human history. Significantly, during one sequence in the suite (the song "Waking the Witch"[10]), the woman's vision seems to link her struggles to stay afloat at sea with a witch trial where the accused woman was thrown into water (maybe as execution, maybe as a test of her witchiness). Witch trials are somewhat notorious for using specious evidence to prosecute women who were perceived as having transgressed or abandoned their ordained (usually subservient) role within society, and whatever else Kate Bush is communicating on this album (I'm not sure of everything), it is obsessed with this idea of transgressing and transcending the limitations placed on women by a patriarchal society. And it works on a metatextual level, too; Hounds of Love shows Bush claiming a stake in the Victorian gender morality of Tennyson's Idylls of the King and the by-then nostalgic boys club of progressive rock. She has, in a way, made good on the premise of "Running Up That Hill": she's run up the hill of success in a patriarchal world. But also, by making music that is so fully her own, both in terms of its production and also it's distinctly non-prog sound, she's also improved upon that premise. She's run up that hill, for sure, but she didn't need God to let her switch places with a man; she's done it as a woman.

I still don't exactly know why prog is so dude-heavy, but at times I wonder if it's a problem with how we've tended to define what prog is. If the sound of prog is based on a few influential records made by men[11] (a definition this blog is certainly guilty of perpetrating), it's possible that this just makes prog systemically inclined to drawing its own boundaries around music that primarily men tend to make. I don't want to be too gender-essentialist about this, and obviously women and nonbinary people are capable of making something that sounds like, I dunno, Close to the Edge. But it's also true that different life experiences and different contexts create different perspectives and subcultures and approaches to art, and how many nuances and innovations of prog's sound by people who aren't men have just been left by the wayside because it simply didn't fit the sometimes rigid format occasionally pressed onto the genre. Maybe there's a different definition of prog that skews toward fuller, richer, more gender-inclusive music made under the broad philosophical impulses of progressive rock. Is Joni Mitchell prog? Is Vashti Bunyan? Laurie Anderson? I dunno. But I'm declaring right now that Kate Bush is[12]. Maybe I can get the Stranger Things crowd onboard with me.

See you in 1986!

1] With the money from her signing bonus, Kate Bush paid for classes that allowed her to become trained in interpretive dance and miming, which gives you a pretty good idea of what a top-shelf weirdo she is. Just such pure, beautiful eccentricity.

2] Kate Bush and Emily Brontë share a birthday (July 30), it turns out.

3] There are a few exceptions (most notably Rick Wakeman), and of course everybody had their own solo records.

4] The quote included in the liner notes is this:
    "Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
    Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
    And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
    Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame"[5]

5] The notes misattribute the quote to the poem "The Holy Grail," but it's actually from "The Coming of Arthur." Not that it really matters, but I can't in good conscience be an English teacher and not be a pedant about something like that.

6] Relatively

7] Speaking of Asia, Geoff Downes appears on one track of Bush's previous album, The Dreaming.

8] Though even here, Kate Bush is pushing forward with her hands-on approach to everything in her music: "Wuthering Heights" made Kate Bush the first female artist to have a #1 song in the UK that she wrote herself.

9] There's probably an argument that, with the gender-bending trends of '70s British rock, there's a stronger presence of gender-nonconforming or even nonbinary performers (or at least ones who present as-such onstage) than female performers, but I kinda don't know if I want to open that can of worms.

10] Which uses a sample from Pink Floyd's The Wall, by the way. It's far and away the most out-there track on the album, though not because of the sample (which is brief).

11] White, usually British, usually straight men at that, but again, I don't know if I have the bandwidth to open that can of worms on this post.

12] Arguably more so in her 21st-century output, where albums like 50 Words for Snow let her music fully spread out into much longer, more spacious compositions.