Side One, Continued...
THIS IS POP?
Here I go: Bush with Gow Hunter on the set of her self-directed video for Hounds Of Love.
John Carder Bush
Hounds Of Love
M.R. James’s Casting The Runes reworked as a love story? Only Kate, says ANDREW MALE.
Lyrically, it begins as a short stor y, told in the first person, about a child convinced she is being hunted by dogs who, like an image from a medieval bestiar y, embody the imagined pain and responsibility of romantic love. Musically, it is a rhythmic, pagan invocation of those hounds, the studio as its site of conjuration.
That summoning begins with an appropriate snatch of dialogue – “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” from Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 horror film, Night Of The Demon, based on M.R. James’s 1911 tale of demonic possession, Casting The Runes. It is the voice of a dead professor (Maurice Denham) speaking through a medium (Reginald Beckwith), warning that the satanic curses of necroman-cer Julian Karswell are too powerful to resist. The recontextualisation is powerful when you imagine how Bush arrived at this connection: seeing love as a runic malediction that cannot be outrun. The pulsing rhythms of Fairlight and LinnDr um, coupled with the breathless, scything chase of Jonathan Williams’ cello, and the girl-group do-do-do’s (that might just as easily be canine howls) only serve to enhance this mood of hypnotic incantation and relentless animal pursuit.