HOUNDS OF LOVE
RUNNING FREE
FROM BEING DESCRIBED BY NEIL TENNANT AS “VERY WEIRD” IN SMASH HITS, TO FASHIONING THE MOST UNIQUE OF CLASSIC POP MASTERPIECES JUST A FEW YEARS LATER, KATE BUSH WAS UNLIKE ANY OTHER ARTIST AT THE TIME – AND HOUNDS OF LOVE IS, FOR MANY, HER CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT
JEREMY ALLEN
The sleeve photo for Hounds Of Love was taken by Kate’s brother, John Carder Bush
That sound of breaking glass that you hear around the two-minute 20 mark of 1980’s Babooshka single is actually the sound of Kate Bush breaking the glass ceiling. Technically speaking, Bush was smashing up tumblers and crockery at Abbey Road Studios and using a Fairlight CMI synthesizer to sample them shattering on impact. Although not conventional practice outside of, say, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris – and certainly not at the world’s most iconic recording facility – it symbolised the moment Kate Bush began to assert control over her own music and, by extension, open the door to other women producers, who were hitherto very much in short supply in the pop game in the early 1980s.
If this was the start of the rest of her career as an autonomous artist, the journey that would culminate in the triumph of Hounds Of Love in 1985, then it wouldn’t be without its pitfalls along the way. Nevertheless, 1980’s Never For Ever, which spawned the hit single Babooshka and was co-produced with her engineer Jon Kelly, would mark the last time Kate Bush would need to be chaperoned.
Hounds Of Love,
featuring an exposition of intelligent, vibrant,
sui generis
pop on one side, and progressive avant-rock in a seven-song suite on the other, is a milestone of art pop; the
“Sgt. Pepper
of the digital age’s dawn” according to
Pitchfork,
who gave the LP a rare 10 rating when they reviewed it retrospectively in 2016. Moreover,
Hounds Of Love
is home to
Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),
a song that has come to straddle time in the most extraordinary way, becoming as important to Gen Z as it was to Gen X.
Kate Bush in 1985, the year she released the ground-breaking Hounds Of Love
© Getty