February 7, 2022 by A.S. Van Dorston

The student becomes the master. Precocious Peter Gabriel acolyte arrives with her first full blown self-produced tour de force, bringing out the madness on her most challenging album.

Not everyone was aware of it at the time, but by 1982, Kate Bush was at an ambitious artistic peak that would be massively influential to generations, from Björk and Tori Amos to Tricky, Fiona Apple, Joanna Newsom, Grimes, Julia Holter, Cate Le Bon, Katie Gately and many more. She was just 19 when she recorded her first album, The Kick Inside (1978) produced by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. She learned the studio process quickly, co-producing her third album, Never For Ever (1980), and becoming one of the women to handle production herself by her fourth album, The Dreaming at the ripe age of 23.

Her piano driven baroque and art pop quickly evolved into more ambitious, maximalist sounding prog pop that spanned two years worth of recording sessions. Just like her occasional collaborator and mentor Peter Gabriel, she was smitten with what the Fairlight could do with sampling, and intended to use Gabriel’s engineer Hugh Padgham for those booming gated reverb drum sounds. He only had time to work on backing tracks for “Sat In Your Lap”, “Leave It Open” and “Get Out of My House” before being pulled back into projects with Genesis (Abacab) and The Police (Ghost In The Machine). Nick Launay, who had worked with post-punkers like XTC, Public Image Ltd., The Birthday Party, The Slits and Gang Of Four, finished the engineering work. Not that one can detect any post-punk in her music, aside from her adventurous spirit and disregard for commercial concerns.

Mercifully for many, she shed her piercing, childlike falsetto for a lower, sometimes husky vocal range that was more seductive and powerful. Opener “Sat In Your Lap,” first released as a single back in June 1981, was inspired by a Stevie Wonder concert. It includes those booming drums with the gated reverb effect, just as Wonder employed cutting edge technology with the TONTO synthesizer on Music of My Mind (1972) ten years previously. It was also his first album with full artistic control.

The result is Bush fully unfettered for the first time, unleashing the demons in her head to unnerve her original fans, and impress a handful of new ones that would grow in coming years. Referencing Vietnam (“Pull Out the Pin” with her anguished cries of “I love life”), Stephen King’s The Shining (“Get Out of My House” — ending the album with unsettling “hee-haws”), and the plight of Australia’s Aborigines, the subject of the title track, her only video which got very little airplay on MTV, Bush is fearless in challenging her listeners. Despite the lack of commerciality, five singles were issued in total, including “There Goes a Tenner,” “Suspended in Gaffa” and “Night of the Swallow.” The first is pretty eccentric with a skittering rhythm and exaggerated Cockney accent, but the latter two are probably the most accessible on the album, with soaring melancholy melodies of “Gaffa” and lovely use of Irish folk music in the latter. Nevertheless, none charted, and Bush later admitted it was her angry, uncommercial “I’ve gone mad album.”

It took her next album, Hounds of Love (1985) to find her tribe who fully appreciate her in all her complexity. It featured more accessible but equally adventurous singles on the first half, and the second was The Ninth Wave, a conceptual suite about drifting out to sea and drowning. It must have been a treat for the millions of new fans to go back to the previous album, with the intriguing cover art of Bush about to pass Houdini a key through a kiss. With that kiss, The Dreaming unlocked a darkly rich and weird musical world for fans and future pop stars.