The Soundworld
MORE BARN!
Experimental pop that sounds as natural as air, or trees. That was the sonic stamp of Hounds Of Love, writes MAT SNOW.
Bush that button: Kate at the Fairlight in her home studio: (right top)
Hounds Of Love engineer Brian Tench; (below) bassist Martin ‘Youth’
Glover feels at home.
John Carder Bush, Getty, courtesy Brad Trent
“
I
’VE WORKED IN ALL THESE FAMOUS STUDIOS – Montserrat, New York…” recording engineer Bri-an Tench summarises his CV. “But it still has a special place in my head and my heart; it was just fantastic.”
“It” is the formerly mice-infested barn-cum-dis-used dairy at East Wickham Farm, near Welling, where south-east London shades into rural Kent. Her pre-fame KT Bush Band had rehearsed and demo’ed here, and here Bush returned to build her means of production as part of a grand rethink following 1982’s emotionally, physically and financially draining The Dreaming. She needed to create on her own turf and on her own meter, not the £90 an hour she would run up at Abbey Road with anxious EMI execs popping by to see how it was all going.
Inspired by her friend Peter Gabriel’s new home studio near Bath, she spent as much as she could afford on a recording space of her own tailored to the music she wanted to make. A blessed relief after the windowless basement studios she’d worked in previously, high windows under the eaves let in natural light, and stone-flagged floors – the very fabric of the building – felt warm and natural; doves and pigeons outside added their own cooing voices.