How Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds Of Love’ became a timeless classic

Hounds Of Love remains the most critically and commercially successful album of Kate Bush’s career to date. It was released by EMI on 16 September 1985 and was the second album she had self-produced, the first recorded in her own studio. Structured to reflect the contrast between day and night, the more pop-oriented side A yielded four immaculate top 40 hit singles, ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)’, ‘Cloudbusting’, ‘Hounds of Love’ and ‘The Big Sky’, some of the best loved and most enduring compositions in the Bush catalogue. On side B, a hallucinatory seven-part song cycle called The Ninth Wave broke away from the pop conventions of the era, with strange and vivid production techniques that plunge the listener into the psychological centre of a near-death experience.

Today, Hounds Of Love is universally considered a classic album, one of the defining high watermarks for art-pop production in the 1980s. Working at an unhurried pace in the creative safe haven of her newly built home studio at East Wickham Farm in Kent, Bush refined her production skills, elevating the hyper-expressive approaches that she had been exploring on her fourth album, and solo production debut, The Dreaming (1982), towards a more poised and accessible, yet still experimental and complex, pop aesthetic. With Hounds Of Love, Bush mastered the art of her studio-based songcraft, finally achieving full control of her work. When it came out, she was only twenty-seven years old.

As years pass, the album continues to accrue cultural value. Music publications like Rolling Stone, Q, NME, Uncut and Mojo have voted Hounds Of Love among the greatest albums of all time. In their 2016 retrospective review, Pitchfork gave the album a perfect ten out of ten, with critic Barry Walters lauding it as ‘the Sgt. Pepper of the digital age’s dawn; a milestone in penetratingly fanciful pop’. In a 1985 interview with Musician, Bush said her newest album was ‘the one I’m most happy with’. Twenty years later, speaking to Tom Doyle for Mojo, she admitted that she still felt proud of how Hounds Of Love turned out, calling it, ‘probably my best album as a whole’.

It is significant that her 2014 London concert residency Before The Dawn, the artist’s late, and so far only, return to live performance following a gap of thirty-five years from her last shows in 1979, the Tour of Life, had a setlist that included all but two songs from Hounds Of Love (the exceptions being ‘The Big Sky’ and ‘Mother Stands for Comfort’). Nestled in the middle of a three-act structure, The Ninth Wave was presented in its entirety as an immersive, music-theatrical experience, fulfilling Bush’s long-held aspiration to develop the piece in a visual direction (‘for me, from the beginning, The Ninth Wave was a film. That’s how I thought of it.’) Those lucky ones in attendance at Before The Dawn could finally experience something of the artist’s personal vision for the work. Bush’s unexpected return to the stage saw fans from all corners of the globe making pilgrimages to the Hammersmith Odeon (known today as the Eventim Apollo, formerly the Hammersmith Apollo). It was the same venue where she performed the final Tour of Life show in 1979, which was, until that point, assumed to be the last show she would ever do. Tickets sold out in a matter of minutes, and as a result of the incredible amount of buzz the concerts generated, Bush saw eight of her albums enter the UK top 40 chart simultaneously, becoming the first woman to have ever done so. On this particular statistic, she reigns alongside rarefied male company: Elvis Presley (with twelve entries in 1977 following his death) and The Beatles (eleven entries off the back of their 2009 reissues).

As of late, Hounds Of Love has been experiencing a fascinating renaissance in popular culture. During the summer of 2022, ‘Running Up That Hill’ reappeared on the worldwide charts due to a sudden and dramatic surge in its popularity, sparked by a prominent sync placement in the fourth season of Netflix’s sci-fi fantasy series Stranger Things. ‘Running Up That Hill’ (or ‘RUTH’, as the artist herself later referred to it) became a global phenomenon. Within weeks of the first seven episodes being released on 27 May, it was clocking eight-million-plus streams per day. Across June and July, it was the most-played track in the world, twice topping the Billboard Global 200 and reaching number one spots in Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland, Belgium, Lithuania and Luxembourg. Even though it was a significant hit in the UK back in 1985 (reaching number three), the song eclipsed itself in 2022, staying put in the number one spot for three weeks. ‘Running Up That Hill’ was named the UK’s Song of the Summer by the Official Charts Company, and its latent success broke a number of Guinness World Records: the single that took the longest time to reach number one (thirty-six years and 310 days from date of release); at sixty-three, she became the oldest female artist to reach number one, snatching the title from Cher, who was fifty-two when ‘Believe’ hit the top spot in 1998. In a Christmas message posted to her website, Bush reflected on her ‘crazy, roller coaster year’, saying, ‘I still reel from the success of RUTH, being the No 1 track of this summer. What an honour! . . . It was such a great feeling to see so many of the younger generation enjoying the song. It seems that quite a lot of them thought I was a new artist! I love that!’

Fans the world over continue to luxuriate in this gloriously late-flowering, unusually fruitful ‘Kate Season’. In April 2023, there was a paperback reprint of her lyric collection How to Be Invisible (2018), with a random allocation of books containing messages from Bush handwritten in invisible ink (I refuse to test mine with a UV light, as I prefer to enjoy the infinite possibilities of my Schrödinger’s Kate collectible). In June came the news that ‘Running Up That Hill’ had racked up yet another record, becoming the first solo recording from the 1980s by a female artist to surpass one billion streams on Spotify. The placement of ‘Running Up That Hill’ in the fourth season of the retro-nostalgic fantasy hit Stranger Things was an inspired choice. The music supervisor for the series, Nora Felder, revealed in an interview with Forbes that she didn’t know that Bush was already a big fan of the show when she asked for permission to use the track. Bush later spoke about her affection for the series in a rare interview on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in 2022, saying, ‘We watched [Stranger Things] right from the word go, from the first series onwards . . . I thought, what a lovely way for the song to be used in such a positive way, as a kind of talisman almost, really, for Max.’ One of the main characters, Max Mayfield, played by Sadie Sink, is struggling with depression, grief and survivor’s guilt over the death of her brother. Withdrawn and sullen, she listens to Hounds Of Love on her cassette Walkman on repeat, shutting out the world around her. When Max becomes trapped in the horrifying mindscape of a serial killer, her friends help her to escape by playing her favourite song (‘Running Up That Hill’). Hearing it makes her remember the people in her life who love her, and in that crucial moment, she chooses to live. As the song reaches its ecstatic crescendo, Max makes her desperate run for freedom.

That moment was probably powerful enough by itself to boost the song’s popularity, but ‘Running Up That Hill’ is an almost constant presence throughout the season – not only recurring in Max’s storyline arc but also subtly sewn into the underscoring throughout. During the finale’s key moment of brave confrontation, it appears again, enhanced by an epic, orchestral treatment. It’s no wonder the song became an earworm for viewers. On the level of story and setting, the lyrics resonate meaningfully with the show’s overarching themes of difference, specialness and empathy. Young outsiders, thrown into a perilous environment (whether the social nightmare of high school or the hellish parallel dimension of the ‘Upside Down’), find that specialness is embodied in their difference, and bravery emerges from the trust and faith that they have in each other. Stranger Things can be enjoyed on multiple levels – as a note-perfect homage to horror in the style of A Nightmare on Elm Street, as a science-fiction adventure about a girl with psychic superpowers and her group of friends fighting evil in an alternate universe or simply as an allegory about the challenges of growing up: discovering who you are, who loves you and what you stand for.

That music can be a lifeline during dark times, a way to locate yourself when you feel lost, is a truth that many former weirdo outsider kids understand all too well. For some of us, it was Kate Bush’s music that provided a place of refuge and a means of imaginative escape. In Fred Vermorel’s biography, Bush is quoted as saying, ‘school was a very cruel environment and I was a loner. But I learnt to get hurt and I learned to cope with it.’ Part of that coping mechanism was to retreat to her piano and inwardly explore turbulent emotive landscapes with chords, melodies, lyrics, voices, images. In an interview on TV series Egos & Icons, broadcast by Canada’s MuchMusic channel in 1994, she referred to her music in terms of catharsis and friendship. ‘My music . . . it’s a very private thing. And it’s very much a release for me . . . it’s like a very close friend.’

The contemporary resurgence of ‘Running Up That Hill’ was surely a confluence of many factors and not purely reducible to the lyrical and musical qualities of the song itself, stunning as they are. Part of it was immaculate timing: 2022 was a difficult year, beginning as it did in the grip of the Covid variant Omicron, with people reeling from the fog and fatigue of lingering lockdowns, tentatively re-emerging into a terrifyingly altered world at war. In our collective experience of that fear and uncertainty, with the forced separations, traumas and losses of the pandemic’s stolen years, and in the face of a truly frightening ecological future, all the while we continue to be forced to navigate an increasingly toxic, socially and politically polarized reality, Bush’s song of radical empathy, trust and determination felt like a tonic. But the song was only one part of a larger work of art that many newcomers would soon discover. Hounds Of Love is a journey through the beautiful and difficult terrains of vast and complicated emotional landscapes. Within it are songs of stubborn desire, bravery and cowardice, magical thinking, guilt and innocence, cold love, childlike joy, darkness and whimsy, self-doubt, surviving something extremely difficult and emerging on the other side of it stronger, wiser, transformed. It’s a work of sweeping, thrilling ambition with a wealth of meticulous detail rendered in widescreen cinemascope – a work that was borne from a major work-life change that allowed the artist to write and record privately, in time with her own creative rhythms, returning to the same spaces where she sought emotional refuge in music as a child. Literate, musically elemental and atmospherically complex, the material strikes a balance between the accessible and strange, commercial and conceptual. Structures are confidently grounded in intensifying repetition and the whole is elegantly stitched together with subtle, recurring themes, familiar harmonic angles, imagistic echoes. The music and lyrics are supercharged by Bush’s virtuoso vocal production and stunning use of the Fairlight CMI sampling synthesizer, with which she creates immersive soundworlds and sumptuous arrangements that combine the precision of cutting-edge music tech with the warmth and energy of rock and folk instrumentation. Familiar images return: pleading ghosts, sea, sky, night, land and dreamscapes; references to romantic literature; horror movies; books; Arthurian and folkloric symbolism; and uncanny animalia. The blackbird appears, a potent symbol that becomes a repeating reference in Bush’s work from this point onwards. From the album art on the front and back covers, we recognize the correspondence between different points of view from above and below; with the stars in her hair and the sea around her legs, we see the female body in the water and of the air.

Hounds Of Love is a concept album that invites you to not only listen to it but also cross the boundaries of sensory experience into realms of imagination and possibility.

This is an edited extract from Leah Kardos’ 33/13 book on Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love(Bloomsbury Academic), published 14^th November 2024. Kardos is a senior lecturer in music at Kingston University London.