The Dreaming

by

Kate Bush

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Never For Ever was proving ground for Kate Bush's experimental weirdness. Her 1982 followup, The Dreaming, taken after the aboriginal concept of a link to God or heaven, takes that direction to the core and is Kate's most innovative and weirdest (in a great sense) album ever. Weird vocal stylings, clever instrumentation and lyrics characterize this album. The engaging single "Sat In Your Lap" is about someone who's too lazy to work, favoring the ivory tower of the intellectual, but has the misconception that "knowledge something that is sat in your lap." In the end, she sings "I hold a cup of wisdom, But there is nothing within. My cup, she never overfloweth, And 'tis I that moan- and groaneth."

"There Goes A Tenner" is about a heist that goes awry, with Kate affecting a slight cockney accent in parts and featuring a music hall-like piano. Throughout there are some male vocal interjections, such as the police and that classic line "What's all this, then?" Funniest lyric: "I hope you remember/To treat the gelignite tenderly for me."

"Pull Out The Pin" seems to be about a Vietnamese lying in ambush for an American soldier, ready to pull out the pin and toss the grenade at him. In the chorus, Kate's voice rises to a frenzied pitch when she sings "I love life." The sobriety of the song is underlined: "Just one thing in it/me or him."

I don't know what the heck gaffa is, as in "Suspended In Gaffa" and its skipping music-hall piano and a quick one-two-three string waltz, but the girl in there is clearly a timid soul, scared of change, unwilling to be a Pandora.

Kate "lets the weirdness in" in "Leave It Open." Her vocals are in many styles, distorted lower register, echoing high-pitched girlish, stretched tape vocals, and wailing. As for the weirdness, the male refrain keeps repeating, "Harm in us, but the power to arm."

The droning weird title track is about life in the bush, no, not Kate, but in the Australian desert, where the habits of white man play havoc with nature, be it hitting kangaroos in the land rover or exploiting aborigine land for mineral wealth. "The civilised keep alive/The territorial war./See the light ram through the gaps in the land./Erase the race that claim the place/And say we dig for ore, Or dangle devils in a bottle/And push them from the pull of the bush" demonstrates that "civilizing mission"

"Night of the Swallow" is about helping an escaped criminal by a hired plane, the swallow representing freedom. There's some Uileann pipes that give this a Celtic tinge during the refrain.

The lonely, one-sided, and reincarnated soul in "All The Love" wants people to love her, but is oblivious to the other people, represented by a young boy singing "We needed you to love us too. We wait for your move." Also present is the observation that dying brings out the grief and love and how she's turned on by the attention. The sighs and multiple phone message machines at the end is an interesting touch.

The soft piano ballad "Houdini" and some of the lyrics incorporate the album cover, where Houdini gets the key that'll unbind him from the water tank trick by kissing his assistant, who has the key in her mouth. Her bellowing voice comes in here: "With your spit still on my lip, you hit the water" and there are moments when she wishes he'd drown. When I heard the line "Rosabel believe" I thought it was "Roosevelt bleed" and I thought "What the...?" There is a nice lyrical string section that plays after the bellowing bits.

"Get Out Of My House" is a really bizarre one, told from the point of view of a woman with a house analogy incorporated, telling a man to, well... There are some erotic overtones "no stranger's feet will enter me/I wash the panes/I clean the stains" And in line with cleaning of the house, it seems to imply that men make a mess of her life, but there are multiple meanings, as the house also represents her neurotic mental psyche, as it's full of her madness, mistakes, and fight. She screams out the title, and even bellows like a mule (!!!) to demonstrate her stubbornness in not letting anyone in.

One of the weirdest but most wonderful from Kate Bush. Even though she seemed to go mainstream in her followup, she continued the innovation of the Dreaming in the concept album portion.

THE DREAMING lives up to its name: it is, without a doubt, Kate's most ambitious and phantasmagorical song-cycle to date. In addition to the ingeniously quirky musical layerings, the album features some of Kate's most penetrating and brilliant lyrics. Here, her increasingly subtle, sophisticated, and intuitive facility with ellipses, fractured syntax, ambiguous points of view, and various other devices, breaks down conventional narrative forms to effect the visionary, mind-expanding, time-bursting style of Joyce, Woolf, and Borges.

Kate also must have spent a lot of her time at the cinema when she wasn't messing about in the studio since most of the songs and their peculiar themes seem inspired by movies.

In THERE GOES A TENNER, Kate plays the Anna Karina role in Godard's BAND OF OUTSIDERS. She and her existential bank-robbing compadres get all of their attitudes second-hand from old Hollywood gangster flicks:

"Both my partners/ ACT like ACTORS:/ you are Bogart/ he is George Raft/ that leaves Cagney and me/ (what about Edward G...?)"

PULL OUT THE PIN is APOCALYPSE NOW in reverse: a tale told through the keen, sharp, serpentine eyes of a Viet Cong assassin who stealthily snakes his way through the bush to plant a grenade where it counts and thus meet with a final moment of truth. And indeed, this Charlie definitely knows how to get his man -- given the quarry's alien naivete and the surreal encroachment of postindustrial amenities upon the hostile primeval jungle:

"You learn to ride the Earth/ when you're living on your belly/ And the enemy are city births/ Who need radar?/ We use scent./ They stink of the west/ stink of sweat/ stink of cologne and baccy/ And their Yankee Hash...

"With my silver Buddha/ and my silver bullet...

"There's just one thing/ ...it's me or him.../ AND I LOVE LIFE/ so I pull out the pin."

The title song, THE DREAMING, is clearly the album's centerpiece. This atavistic potlatch-***-danse-macabre appears a musical version of WALKABOUT or THE LAST WAVE. The searchlights of a dented van pierce the ancient night, near the motorway that cuts through the desert outback where, to unwary drivers, "many an Aborigine's mistaken for a tree." This may well be the closest Kate has come to a flat-out political statement (punctuated by a truly epic screeching-tires-and-CRASH! percussion effect).

And here we segue into NIGHT OF THE SWALLOW, which has Kate stealing away on borrowed wings "with a hired plane" to Malta...rising higher and higher on the ecstatic din of Irish fiddles meshed with Uillean pipes.

The next one, ALL THE LOVE, begins with a casually fatalistic quatrain worthy of Emily Dickinson: "The first time I died/ Was in the arms of good friends of mine./ They kiss me with tears./ They hadn't been near me for years." Ahh...the exquisite ache of loneliness and regret eternal.

The penultimate HOUDINI contains one of Kate's most provocative conceits. After freshening up with a seance, the escape artist extraordinaire prepares to immerse himself in the water tank bound and chained. His ever-adoring assistant (oh, you'll never guess who) gives him a good-luck open-mouthed kiss and passes him the secret key, with his patient tongue "teasing and receiving." The tantalizing suggestion of the cover photograph pretty much completes the picture.

On the earlier LEAVE IT OPEN, our heroine resolved to keep her mind exposed and her ego in her gut...on GET OUT OF MY HOUSE she keeps the rest of her body off limits with the help of a smarmy French concierge. This last one may have come to her after a second viewing of ROSEMARY'S BABY. And I must say, Kate does this type of neurotic Victorian Gothic madwoman-in-the-attic number a damn sight better than any of her whiny, mewling, insufferable Lillith-Fairy progeny (I won't name names since we all know). Let's just leave it at that...leave it OPEN.

Come back, Kate!