Living at the time in Eltham, south-east London, Bush felt an “air of doom” hanging over the city, and during the final Dreaming sessions with engineer Paul Hardiman the mood duly darkened. I don’t think she had any realisation of how complex her songs were – to her they were very simple.” The way she would communicate was very much like an excited kid: ‘How do we make those characters and the feelings they have into music? Can we do this, can we do that?’ It was absolutely great, but it got very confusing at times. “It really was like the kids are in control,” he says. He was only 20, and Bush was still just 22. It pissed me off, actually.”īut Nick Launay, fresh from recording PiL’s Flowers Of Romance, proved a better fit. As far as I was concerned, when we were doing those sessions it sounded shit. “She didn’t really have any idea of the sonics and didn’t understand why, if you put 150 layers of things all together, you couldn’t hear all of them. “I couldn’t bear it after a bit, actually,” he says. Hugh Padgham, the producer credited with creating the gated drum sound, engineered the album’s early stages. She mic’ed up 12-foot long strips of corrugated iron to evoke the sound of cannons, or fed guitars through banks of harmonisers and reverb plates, sending the notes leaping up in octaves. She abandoned the standard band-in-a-room approach and instead embarked on something more layered and opaque. On The Dreaming Bush envisaged combining these twin elements, applying a wide, wild palette of sounds to a foundation of hard rhythm. It was a glimpse of the future, one of the first stirrings of the nascent digital age. While dropping into sessions for Peter Gabriel’s third album to sing on “Games Without Frontiers”, Bush had been inspired by the record’s gated drum sound pioneered at Townhouse Studios at the same time she’d become infatuated with the Fairlight CMI, a synthesiser that enabled musicians to sample sounds and play them back, either direct from the keyboard or by programming a sequence of notes.
#THE HOUNDS OF LOVE SERIES#
By the time of The Dreaming she was ready to produce herself, using a series of engineers on hand to help shape her ideas. One of EMI’s most profitable and prestigious acts, Bush accrued greater power each step of the way. It not only made Bush the first British female solo artist ever to have a No 1 album in the UK charts, but it also gave her another memorable hit single in “Babooshka”. The follow-up, Lionheart, had been a rushed and somewhat unresolved act of consolidation, but the sonically inventive Never For Ever, released in 1980, marked another huge leap forwards. She was, at that time, Britain’s most popular female artist – her first album, 1978’s The Kick Inside, had sold over a million copies on the back of her No 1 debut single, “Wuthering Heights”. In May, 1981 Bush entered London’s Townhouse Studios to start work on her fourth album, The Dreaming. People shouldn’t be fooled by the mystical hippy stuff, this girl is very, very tough.” Story by: Graeme Thomson To celebrate, here’s our cover story from the archives (June 2010, Take 157), in which Uncut takes a phantasmagorical trip into suburbia to learn the untold story of Kate Bush’s masterpiece, Hounds Of Love. Tonight, August 26, Kate Bush returns to the stage for her first live shows in 35 years.
0 kommentar(er)
