Kate Bush
Hounds of Love

I need to start writing before it begins. This is the huge, huge album. My sanity and a sticking-post for the end of 2001 and much of thereafter. Two halves – Hounds of Love and The Ninth Wave. Elements of both appearing forever. Calvary. The video, the dance (Debbie and I performed on a tube speeding away from London and Rosie’s funeral). Tell me we both matter, don’t we? I heard this first as “the most 80s song ever” as described by Veronica. Adam has shown me a 12-inch Spanish version of the single. The dogs on the cover are called Bonnie and Clyde – none of this scratches the skin of it, the purple, grey, white, drowning in a sea of copied faces all marching towards an exit – you won’t be unhappy. Walking to see Dan when he lived on the other side of Edinburgh, I would put this on my Walkman, the album lasted long enough to take me to Stockbridge. This would get me to the traffic island where Jen told me she had to get to the other side before the green man started flashing or her family would die – I would make a deal with God. The screams, the twisting voices beneath – if only I could. I listened to this album with my head in the fireplace again and again and again. This album, more than anything else apart from the stuff I was writing at the time (and I heard how a woman could conjure up the land if she needed to) is the orange streetlights and chain-smoking of Edinburgh.

The excitement, the fog around ones ankles is the start of Hounds of Love – the video, a desperate handcuffed chase into and out of a sombre New Years Eve party. The strings, Eleanor-Rigby like, provide the regularity the nearly-melodic drums fail to give, they stumble and the strings lift. The fear and the long-coming rest. The canal behind Gilmore Place, the brewery smelling of vinegar and gravy in the morning. The Big Sky – being amazed at the handclaps and talking about how they were recorded, maybe in teams. Noah, Ireland. Perhaps now in the evening walk I’d be at the Lyceum, the big hotel with the fountain in front of it where I worked for an afternoon before escaping with full and empty lungs. You never understood me.

This album shows more than any other I can think of that the whole is more than the parts – for me the quality dips with this and the next song. This would have been side 1, Act 1 before the bigger, weightier themes of the Ninth Wave appear, the big death and resurrection game suggested in her Ophelia pose. A party – the end of the world. Astronauts and Elephants.

Mother stands for comfort – the broken glass again that vexed me so in Babooshka. The meandering bass line again. An inconclusive point, line and story. It never rained in my head when I heard this, just a feeling of curtains being drawn temporarily, going through a tunnel and looking at one’s watch. The pun at the end “Mother will stay Mum” did nothing for me then and does nothing now. The warped recorders at the end charmed me, but the beginning of Cloud busting is like the morning.

The strings, have always in that style been bread and water to me. Martial and glass-like. The regularity attracts me – I know that something good is going to happen, I don’t know when. I understand the clockwork and in the video was impressed by the exact footfall of the bad government men in black. The voices of the chorus appear, shrieking, controlled. The sound of the train at the end is only a culmination of the slow and steady warm-up of wheels that begun at the beginning and have been quietly producing steam and air to open the windows with. Here I am at the castle on the corner.

And then the Ninth Wave is about to begin – it tells a story that we debated about, waves of water, images of ice and drowning, stranded at sea. Related to Arthurian legends, a Tennyson quote about The Holy Grail. Death and Rebirth, Finnegan, begin again. And then Kirsten brought up the idea of sound waves – an oscilloscope.

No matter, for now, Dream of Sheep begins it. I learned this on the guitar and played it to Veronica in the kitchen. Floating in a bathtub on the sea (think of Buster Keaton sill resolutely turning on the tap). I hear voices of a lost helicopter searching for her through dreams and fears. With one sweep of the piano, you can feel the sea swelling below. Wish I had my radio – I’d tune into some friendly voices. I can’t be left to my imagination, I knew this at the time my imagination was liable to put me out with the rubbish and leave me to be ground to salt in the morning.

Under Ice gave me the fear one time, I remembered a scene from a horror movie (The Omen?) where some-one indeed fell through ice, I think now of governmental information films that currently obsess me. She paints the picture with hesitant clarity. There is no need to describe how the air smells, just that she leaves behind her little lines in the ice, splitting sounds spitting snow. She changes from the subject to object – she is no longer describing her course but her moving under the ice – we missed the moment she fell.

The voices – not a song but my most beloved Kate Bush song, the voices all telling her to wake that I heard best and frightened myself the first time along Princes Street listening to this on headphones and the voices swimming at 360 degrees around me – shards and snatches of all the rest of the Ninth Wave coming together and meeting in a sleepy soup. As we got to know the album better and better we could isolate and identify each strand, each little light, each stroke towards sunlight – you still in bed? We are all water and the holy land of water – remove the water, carry the water…the sudden change of “Help me baby, talk to me, please baby help me!”, the epileptic struggles of a voice caught behind glass, ice, sleep, and the devil voice alternately calling her “whore” and “blackbird” – the bells are playing and not in celebration. Waking the witch – bless me father for I have sinned, her breath goes in, she has been punched, help this blackbird, there’s a stone around my neck. A near-death, is this in her mind? Wings and water. Curses and crowds, the helicopter appears, get out of the waves, get out of the water – what business did you have being there anyway? Get out.

Dripping, sodden, she returns and is invisible, you suppose she must be dead. I should have been home hours ago – you hear of her life outside the calamity. I’m not here. Her boyfriend? Mother? Friend? Some-one is waiting for her, but the trapped and silent figure she has become, perhaps not recognised for what she was or should have been is only “watching you without me” – the measure of love being loss, again. I’m not here. The radio searches for her. Spirits appear, singing backwards, the voice breathlessly, please help me, listen to me, talk to me baby, please baby help me – how are my arms? Am I talking loud enough? I developed a stutter the summer of 2001 and quietened myself down to hide it from those who would know.

The Jig of Life – I heard it first as medieval rather than a straight Celtic example. The Irish arrangement by Bill Whelan, who later did Riverdance so I guess that’s pretty authentic. I wanted to find the mathematics behind it, the reducing numbers in the circular pattern, how many times round did the riff play in the major before those clashes? Come on, let me live – Chris said maybe it’s not “arrangement” in the classical sense and that’s what gives it the power, but there are arrangements everywhere, the whole Fibonacci thing taught us this; there is maths in the curl of leaves, in the fact that trees continue to exist and I know it’s here in this song too – every time I try and count the drum beats that pull my shoulders up to my ears in an ecstasy, my feet work in counterpoint, wherever I’m sitting, however I’m standing and analysis breaks down – holding all the love that waits for you here. We are of water and the holy land of water.

Voices reappear. Have they been looking for her? Hello Earth, Earth as a baby, I think of the Bundle from The War Plays – shall we give the world a nice clean face? I can blot you out of sight, a one-handed eclipse. I could be driving home with you asleep on the seat. At this point I would nearly be at Dan’s house but would detour so I could get to the end of the album by the beginning of the Water of Leith. We have heard voices of deep men, far below the surface. Can’t do anything, just watch them swing with the wind out to sea. All you sailors (get out of the waves, get out of the water) All life-savers…all you cruisers…all you fishermen, head for home. Go to sleep little earth, I was there at the birth, out of the cloud-burst, ahead of the tempest…All you cruisers – that hits me the hardest. Edinburgh – the water’s edge, those schizophrenic and jagged skyscapes of the castle, Arthur’s seat, the sea. The dark, the cold. All I could think about. Winding – a slow descent into the blue with one hand still held open as the keys changed, go to sleep little earth, unknown words in a dark place.

Once upon a time I walked along Princes Street listening to the last track on this album, having survived the fear of drowning. A bagpipe player coincided exactly with everything else I was hearing and I danced on the street – little light, I love you better now. I’m falling like a stone.