Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush by Tom Doyle

Author:Tom Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blink Publishing

Reflecting on the success of Hounds of Love, I asked Bush if she’d consciously tried to create pop singles – as unusual as they were – that would help her regain commercial ground?

‘There probably was a little bit of that,’ she admitted. ‘But I like both ends of the spectrum very much. I like doing tracks with just a piano or maybe an orchestra as well, but something very . . . semi-classical, I guess. And I really love doing the band stuff. And for me, if I didn’t do both, I would miss having the other. It’s a balance, I think. And I wanted to try to get a really good balance with that record.

‘But, yeah, I think there probably was an element to me thinking that the side [of the vinyl record] that had those single tracks, that it would make sense if they were more kind of . . . what’s the word? Not commercial. But more . . . I don’t know. I can’t find a word.’

Accessible? Hooky?

‘Yeah, I guess hooky. I don’t know. I didn’t want both sides to be conceptual. I wanted them to have a very different feeling. One side to be very kind of up and band-orientated and rhythmic and the other side to be more this slow, conceptual piece.’

For Bush, Hounds of Love remained the collection of songs of which she was most proud: ‘It was something a bit different. That’s probably my best album as a whole.’

What’s more, even if it was some of the most inventive and obtuse pop music to have ever graced a chart rundown, it produced four top-forty hits.

‘Were four of them hits?’ Bush wondered aloud. ‘I can only remember three.’

I listed them for her: ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)’ (number three), ‘Cloudbusting’ (number twenty), ‘Hounds of Love’ (number eighteen) and ‘The Big Sky’ (number thirty-seven).

‘Oh yeah,’ she brightly responded. ‘I don’t remember there being four. Oh, that’s not bad, is it?’

Most importantly, perhaps, the outstanding commercial performance of Hounds of Love closed the decisive battle in her long war with EMI for absolute creative control. Even years later, this victory clearly still tickled her.

‘When Hounds of Love came out and it was self-produced and it was an enormous hit, it was so fantastic,’ she beamed. ‘(Cups hand to hear) “Sorry, what’s that you said? Sorry? Didn’t want me to produce it?”

‘They left me alone from that point. It shut them up.’

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