There is a moment near the end of “The Ninth Wave” — Kate Bush’s side-long song cycle that fills the second half of this record — where she is alone in the ocean at night, and the music becomes indistinguishable from drowning. It is one of the most frightening things ever committed to tape in a pop studio, and she produced every second of it herself.
That fact still astonishes me. 1985. A woman self-producing a major pop record of this ambition and structural complexity was essentially unheard of. Bush had fought for and built her own 48-track studio — Windmill Lane’s EMI facility in London, where she worked with engineer Brian Tench — and then spent a year constructing Hounds of Love with the kind of obsessive patience that only absolute control makes possible. No one was going to tell her to cut the spoken-word helicopter sequence from “And Dream of Sheep.” No one was going to rush the Fairlight CMI programming on “Running Up That Hill.”
Side One
The first side — the commercially sequenced face, the radio face — is so confident it borders on arrogant. “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” opens with that locked-groove Linn drum pattern and a bass line that feels hydraulic, and within eight bars you understand that something genuinely new is happening. Del Palmer, her longtime partner, played bass throughout and co-engineered significant portions of the sessions. Stuart Elliott, the drummer she’d trusted since The Kick Inside, anchors the rhythmic architecture without ever crowding her vocal.
“Hounds of Love” itself is underrated beside its opening track, which is a shame — the verses have this galloping, barely-controlled energy, and the way she pulls back into the chorus feels like catching yourself mid-fall. “The Big Sky” closes side one at a rolling gallop, big and generous, almost the relief before the plunge.
The Ninth Wave
Side two is something else entirely. It is a suite — a drowning woman clinging to a life preserver through the night, drifting between consciousness and nightmare — and it was conceived as a unified piece to be experienced from start to finish, preferably in the dark, which I will now instruct you to do.
“And Dream of Sheep” is almost unbearably gentle. Bush recorded her own vocal in a life preserver in the studio to understand the physical sensation of the character’s confinement. Whether this is apocryphal or documented I cannot now remember, but I believe it because the performance has a real bodily quality — a stillness that isn’t peace. By the time “Waking the Witch” ruptures the silence with distorted voices and a helicopter and a judge’s verdict, you have forgotten you are listening to an album.
The Fairlight CMI, that early Australian digital sampler, is all over the record but used with unusual restraint. Bush used it to build textures that felt organic — breath sounds, found percussion — rather than the clinical sheen it produced in lesser hands.
“The Morning Fog” ends the suite, and the record, with something close to grace. She names her mother, her father, her brother. The instrumentation thins to almost nothing. It is not a resolution exactly. It is a person deciding to live.
I put this on a few nights ago for the first time in probably fifteen years. My turntable sounded better than it used to, or I was quieter than I used to be. Either way, side two demolished me in the same way it did in 1986, which means whatever she built in there is not diminishing. That is the only standard that matters.