Side one was relatively conventional: a set of five songs that ostensibly stood alone but were in reality held together by thin conceptual thread. It was clearly divided into two distinct halves – one for each side of the original vinyl album. And Hounds Of Love was hugely ambitious on every level.įor starters, the album’s structure was far from conventional. Here, she was free to indulge her ambitions to their fullest. Crucially, it allowed her to get away with things that a record company would have blocked in the past – or at least attempted to block. “It’s terrible… I sometimes think I might as well just be a brain and a big pair of ears on legs, stuck in front of a mixing desk.”īut being in total control had more upsides to it than it did downsides. “Work obsesses me and everyone around is dragged into it,” she later said. More than once Bush described what she was doing, and how she was doing it, as “mad”. The writing and recording process was long and often tortuous. The freedom of not having to answer to anyone was both a blessing and a curse. “And I was feeling really happy and positive, and considering mankind to be much better than on the last album.” “I was surrounded by elemental forces,” she said. The surroundings, and the absence of pressure, began to feed into the music she was creating. They began constructing a 48-track home studio in a barn, and it was there, in the summer of 1983, that they began working on what would become Hounds Of Love. “Taking so long a break made me realise what was important – which was my work, much more than being famous.”īush and bassist (and then-boyfriend) Del Palmer retreated to the farm they shared in East Wickham, on the south east fringes of London. “There was some re-evaluation, yes,” she said in 1985. She was free to step back and fade into the background. Having foresworn life on the road following her sole 1979 tour, there were no commitments hanging over her head. Worse, the pressures of recording it had reportedly pushed the singer to the brink of nervous exhaustion. But the record had been a commercial failure, selling only 60,000 copies in the UK. Her previous album, 1982’s experimental and occasionally baffling The Dreaming, had seen her take full creative control of her music. Ironically, it was that desire to hold the music business at arm’s length that indirectly prompted Bush’s self-enforced three-year break.

Hounds of love kate bush album cover