Plucked from relative obscurity by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, Bush released her suitably proggy breakthrough smash Wuthering Heights and resulting LP The Kick Inside in 1978. When Kate Bush first materialised out of the ether in the latter half of the 70s the popular music world was more than a little perplexed. Running up That Hill (A Deal With God) 2. All at the right time.Producer Kate Bush – Produced at Wickham Farm Home Studio – The album that had called out to me through it’s art was finally drawing me in. Have you ever heard that quote from Prince where he talks about making music to affect people inside their bodies? He’s one artist that never failed to do that for me. I can’t even put the ethereal mindshift into words. I just know that something good is going to happen I don’t know when Then, somewhere down the road, I happened across “Cloudbusting”. What if I didn’t like the rest of the album anywhere near as much? That had happened before with some albums after being obsessed with one song. There was a different type of expectation now. And the first time I heard “Running Up That Hill”.īut it would be a while longer before I heard “Hounds of Love” in it’s entirety.
The first time I heard Nirvana’s “Nevermind”. The first time I heard Prince’s “Sign O’’ The Times”. And for me, many of them revolve around hearing certain songs or albums. There are certain moments in your life you never forget. “Every time it rains, you’re here in my head” If anything, she’s too cool for all of us. The truth is that I could never have been too cool for Kate. Was I too cool to listen to Kate, as a rap-rocking teenager in the age of Korn and Rage Against The Machine? Or was it that I thought it might be too highbrow for me to understand or relate to? What did the title “Hounds Of Love” even mean? Still - I couldn’t shake the warm aura that seemed to emanate from the album cover. I knew that Tupac adored her - amidst the mining of his vault and the posthumous shaping of his legacy had been many notes and poems, and something referencing her “Wuthering Heights” as one of his favorite songs of all time.Īnd yet - I was afraid. (This was somewhere in the middle of the wilderness years between 1993’s “ The Red Shoes” and 2005’s “ Aerial”). I knew that at this point, she hadn’t released an album in a few years. I knew that she was spoken of in hushed tones of reverence and awe. “Come on darling, let me steal this moment from you now” It called out to me with quiet reflection. It looked like a classic literary work of fiction amidst a sea of pop-culture books.
Like a lovingly made, hand-painted watercolour amidst a sea of big-budget movie posters for the latest Hollywood action movie sequels. It seemed like a renaissance painting amidst a sea of IKEA canvases. “Hounds of Love” sitting on a shelf in HMV didn’t even seem to make sense. There may have been dozens of shirtless rappers with bandanas, but there was only one Tupac. There may have been dozens of Nirvana-clones, but there was only one Kurt Cobain. It’s aesthetic stood it’s ground, and called out to the discerning music fan amidst a sea of sharp, ridged edges, neon colours, boy bands, rappers and rockers with their largely cliched album covers (cliched for a reason - the entire idea, as always, that “Artist A did something popular, here’s a hundred other records that mimic it”). So, it’s under these circumstances that I was highly visually aware of “Hounds of Love” years before I actually heard it.
HMV, at one time a mainstay of the UK high street. Certain artists were lucky to catch a zeitgeist at the expense of deeper exploration of art. Without dating myself too specifically, let’s just say that a lot of the “nu-metal” era didn’t stand the test of time despite what seemed like every single kid I knew buying certain albums. And that was usually allocated to either the artists we already knew that we loved - like Michael Jackson and Prince - or the social stigma of needing to have whatever was cool at the time. Because, frankly, we were lucky as kids to get the money to purchase an album a month.
Often, if something caught your eye, you’d just have to imagine what it sounded like. We didn’t have cool record stores like the ones described in “High Fidelity” where I grew up. The suggestion that the store workers put something else in was met with blank stares. If you were lucky, a store might have a listening unit, but it wasn’t common, or it was pre-loaded with whatever was popular at the time. I personally lost count of the hours and days I spent standing in record stores, whether chains like HMV or independents, simply sifting through albums with no way to listen to them. They say you should never judge a book by it’s cover.īut in the days before music was available digitally on tap, at the touch of a button, that was often all we could do.