There is no album in the rock era quite this alone — not difficult in the art-school sense, not experimental in the way that signals you to be impressed, just genuinely, stubbornly strange in a way that still has no name.
Kate Bush made The Dreaming in complete control and nearly total isolation. She had fired her father’s management structure, locked herself into Townhouse Studios and then AIR Studios in London, and spent somewhere close to eighteen months wrestling the thing into existence. She was the first woman to self-produce a UK number-one album. That came later, with Hounds of Love. The Dreaming went to number three and baffled almost everyone, which is closer to the point.
The Room It Was Made In
The sessions were obsessive in the way that only a second studio matters — the first was getting the machinery to work, the second was getting the machinery to disappear. Bush brought in Stuart Elliott on drums, her long-time collaborator who understood that what she needed from the kit was often closer to a sound effect than a groove. She brought in Rolf Harris, of all people, to play didgeridoo on the title track. She brought in pianist and arranger Del Palmer, who was also her partner, threading his way through sessions that sometimes had no fixed end time.
The Fairlight CMI was everywhere. Bush was one of the earliest adopters in the UK, and she used it not as a novelty but as a compositional instrument — stretching, layering, and distorting sampled sounds until they became something the ear can’t quite categorize. The dog barking on “Get Out of My House.” The machinery noises on “Pull Out the Pin.” The voices that shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing on “Sat in Your Lap.”
Engineers Nick Launay and Paul Hardiman each left their fingerprints on different sessions. Launay in particular, who had just worked with Public Image Ltd and was deep in post-punk production thinking, encouraged a kind of sonic violence that most producers would have smoothed away. The drums are mixed close and hard. The reverb is used like a room collapsing, not a room expanding.
What It Actually Sounds Like
The easiest thing to say is that The Dreaming is Kate Bush’s most experimental album. The more useful thing to say is that it’s her angriest. The gentleness people associate with her — the fairy-tale diction, the high whispery register — is still present, but it’s been put under enormous pressure. The vocals on “Leave It Open” feel physically strained, like she’s singing through a wall. “There Goes a Tenner” is a comedic gangster fantasy that somehow sounds menacing. The title track — which concerns the treatment of Aboriginal Australians — is bewildering and furious all at once, the didgeridoo not deployed as world music decoration but as a kind of accusation.
I have never been able to sit comfortably through this album. I mean that as the highest possible compliment.
The sequences on side two, especially the run from “Pull Out the Pin” through “Night of the Swallow” into “All the Love,” do something that I still can’t fully explain — they build an emotional architecture that only makes sense in that specific order, at that specific time of night. “All the Love” uses pre-recorded audience applause as a texture of loneliness. It works. It shouldn’t, but it works.
This is not the Kate Bush album for someone who wants to start with Kate Bush. But it is the one that tells you who she actually is when she isn’t concerned with being loved.
Put it on loud. Wait for the moment in “Get Out of My House” when the voice breaks into something that sounds genuinely feral. That’s the center of the whole thing, right there.