Remember me
In the August episode of the pod, Luke Turner and John Doran discuss an utterly sublime meeting of pop and art
This month we’re talking about one of the greatest albums ever made – and not just in our opinion either. Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love was both a critical and commercial hit on release in 1985, and its stature has only grown since. The Quietus’ editors John Doran and Luke Turner discuss what has occasionally been skipped over in discussion of the album, its interesting spin on gender fluidity, and a deep intellectual curiosity which spans everything from war films to Tennyson, from a love of Killing Joke to Carl Jung and MR James to Wilhelm Reich, whose life inspired the video for ‘Cloudbusting’. They talk about the wild inventiveness and creativity of the record, made in Bush’ own studio out in the countryside, and marked her definitive breaking away from music industry expectations in a defiant state of independence. The world that Kate Bush existed in – with Billie Holiday and Peter O’Toole popping around for tea at her parents’ house, a terrifying painting on the wall – was unique, but not the affectation that some thigh rubbing music journalists of the time perceived it to be. Instead, Hounds Of Love is a deeply philosophical meditation on childhood, personal transfiguration, the eroticism of the English countryside, the dissolving boundaries between people in a moment of extreme crisis, an exploration of the complex situation of humanity within nature and, on a simpler level that would explain the mass appeal, the fear of love. Hounds Of Love has gone on to have an incredible legacy, from the live musical theatre staging witnessed by John back in 2014, to her reaching a new generation via streaming and Stranger Things.
Thanks to Alannah Chance for producing the podcast. If you want to listen, you can become a Quietus subscriber here – and remember, you can do so with a month’s FREE access to this and all our other subs perks.
…