Bush spent the next couple of years capitalising on the success of the singles from Never For Ever and consolidated her position as an autonomous artist and her insistence that her record label leave her alone paid off (it's an amazing thing about her that from a very young age she seems to have been able to get people to allow her total creative freedom while never coming across as anything other than utterly charming). The next record, the first she effectively wrote and produced completely single-handed, was 1982's The Dreaming. She describes it herself as her "I've gone mad" album and it is a strange and disconcerting record, but it's an absolutely brilliant one. I can't think of anyone else who, having had significant success, responded by making a record as personal and as unapologetically challenging as this. In amongst all the braying donkey noises, didgeridoos, skittering drums, bizarrely fractured melodies, shrieks and moans and Percy Edwards doing his birdsong impressions are some single-mindedly fantastic songs. In fact there isn't a bad song here. It's a staggeringly creative record, and although it's a stubbornly idiosyncratic album, if you can allow yourself to accept its wilfulness, it's a magical listen. As context, it's no surprise that Bjork has cited it as a major influence.
Three years later we have the crowning glory of her extraordinary creative career, Hounds of Love (1985). This is one of my favourite albums, an easy top five entry, and it's a record which, despite being a reminder of the time it was released, is creatively speaking, completely timeless. The depth of intellectual and structural engagement in this record is genuinely awe-inspiring, and even when the songs seem little more than basic pop songs ('Cloudbusting' for instance), closer examination reveals incredible detail and precision. Lyrically I think Hounds of Love is an important departure because it blends the usual esoteric cultural influence that always appears in her work with a much deeper personal engagement than ever before. 'Running Up That Hill' for instance, although slightly marred by its familiarity, has an absolutely desperate yearning in it which is heartbreaking. The first side of self-contained chart friendly (but still astonishingly creative) pop songs is fabulous, but it's the second side (sub-titled The Ninth Wave) which always leaves me breathless. As a kind of concept piece about a woman drowning at sea it's literally and metaphorically dense, both musically and lyrically and I can't think of any other record in the "pop music" world which has such genuine poetry in both its concept and its execution. In some ways The Ninth Wave makes me almost prepared to accept that modern music can be an art form. (The 'Hounds of Love' 7" has a spooky B-side in a cover of the folk standard 'The Handsome Cabin Boy', and the reissue of the album includes a few other B-sides including the beautiful 'Under the Ivy' and 'Burning Bridge').
After the success of Hounds of Love, EMI released a singles compilation in 1986 called The Whole Story. This contained a couple of songs with re-recorded vocals, but the only new song on it was the non-album single 'Experiment IV' which is a decent song with a peculiar sci-fi theme.
The next album was preceded by the single 'The Sensual World' (1989), which is a beautiful song, and it had a decent but strangely straight B-side, 'Walk Down the Middle'. The album, The Sensual World (1989) is for many people quite a step down from the heights of Hounds of Love, but I don't agree. I think that The Sensual World is an absolutely stunning album, with a truly profound emotional core. It's a deeply moving record, full of incredibly poignant touches and it's a record that seems to meld the deeply personal with the external culture with even greater success than Hounds of Love. There are a couple of songs that don't quite work on The Sensual World ('Heads We're Dancing' and 'Rocket's Tail') but they only don't quite work by a tiny margin and only by virtue of over-reaching. The other eight songs are quite wonderful and each one measures out equal amounts of the emotionally touching and the intellectually rigourous. Kate seems to have felt that there were problems with the production and re-recorded a few of the songs for her Director's Cut album (which we'll come to later), but while it's absolutely fair comment with respect to next album The Red Shoes, which sounds horrible, I think she's misjudged the sound of The Sensual World, I don't think it suffers from dated production at all and I can't imagine it sounding any better than it does.
All went quiet for another four years and then in 1993 Kate released The Red Shoes. Everything about The Red Shoes should be better than it actually is. Most of the songs are absolutely gorgeous, but the production lays a nasty, pristine sheen over everything and neutralises the emotional impact that the songs should have. It's a real shame because there are some truly stunning songs ('And So Is Love', 'Song of Solomon' and particularly 'Top of the City' and 'Moments of Pleasure'). In fact 'Moment of Pleasure' comes out relatively unscathed solely because it is such a wonderful song. There are obvious signs that things wouldn't work here, the most blatent of which is the frankly disastrous range of guest appearances, from an inane Eric Clapton and Gary Brooker, to an appalling Prince (who co-produced far and away the worst song on the album, 'Why Should I Love You', which also most criminally of all features vocals by Lenny Henry of all people). Nonetheless, if you can get round the production issues and the occasional stinker (the aforementioned 'Why Should I Love You', 'Constellation of the Heart'), the album is still for the most part a wonderful collection of songs and retains the elemental creative imagination and fundamental charm of all Kate's best work. And then she vanished for 12 years.
When she reappeared in 2005 it was with the double album Aerial, which, like Hounds of Love, was conceived as two distinct parts. Again, the first part is composed of distinct songs with no particular relationship to each other, the second a kind of song cycle on a specific theme. After the dense overproduction of The Red Shoes, Aerial is markedly stripped back, often featuring no more than Kate's voice and her piano. This album is the point at which the approach to song structure and theme are closest to another of pop's wilful pioneers, Scott Walker. Songs are allowed to develop almost organically over relatively lengthy periods of time and it takes a bit of patience on the part of the listener and the whole thing is extremely musically restrained. Lyrically it's all a bit stream-of-consciousness ('Mrs Bartolozzi' has some interesting digressions regarding a washing machine for instance) which can take a bit of getting used to. The second side is more of the same, but works as a unified whole and is more demonstrably a tribute to the natural world and the nature of beauty, both physical and emotional. The whole record seems to have resulted from her reaction to having become a mother at a relatively late age (not old by any means, but not young) and it's a clearly reflective piece of work. How you relate to it depends on your willingness to give it a lot of attention, but if you do I think the rewards are really extraordinary, particularly the second part.
A couple more tomorrow, the revisions of Director's Cut and last year's wonderful 50 Words for Snow.
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