“It’s in the trees! It’s coming!”
The sample that opens the Kate Bush song Hounds of Love comes from the 1957 British horror film Night of the Demon and are mouthed by the actor Reginald Beckwith. He plays a medium channelling a character played by Maurice Denham, who provides the voice. The movie storyline was adapted from the M.R. James story Casting the Runes (1911), and concerns an American psychologist who travels to England to investigate a satanic cult suspected in more than one death. It is widely regarded as a creepy movie with a very intense and eerie atmosphere.
The obvious question is how much this film influenced the rest of the song when Kate Bush wrote it. The answer is pretty much “very little” from a direct story perspective, but she was clearly inspired by the concept of being hunted and specifically took note of the phrase she used as the song’s spoken intro. This phrase is also referred to in the first chorus.
Oh, here I go
It’s coming for me through the trees
Oh help me someone, help me please
Kate Bush was making very cinematic music at this point (with her music videos following suit, some of them looking like mini-movies), full of imaginative and conceptual storytelling made to fire up the imagination.
The spoken intro adds a lot to that and is a great fit. It is wonderfully dramatic and fits the theme of the song beautifully in terms of those ‘hounds of love’ chasing after the protagonist. More than just serving as spice, they set the stage for what follows. You would be forgiven for thinking they indicate a stronger link between the movie and the song, but that is not the case.
The song is actually about being afraid to fall in love. In the song this feeling is compared to being chased by a pack of hounds.
When I was a child running in the night,
Afraid of what might be
Hiding in the dark, hiding in the street,
And of what was following me
Bush said to NME: “The hounds of love are an image really, someone who’s afraid of being captured by love; and the imagery is love taking the form of hounds that are hunting them, so they run away because they’re afraid of being caught by the hounds and ripped to shreds.”
The song contains very dramatic imagery for love itself. It is seen as something to be feared. You should run away from it, lest it catch you and rip you up.
Eventually, though, an acknowledgement creeps in that perhaps the hounds are friendly and one should not fear love.
I’ve always been a coward
And never know what’s good for me
At the end, the reversal is complete.
Do you know what I really need?
I need love love love love love, yeah!
In the official Kate Bush Newsletter in 1985, Bush explained the concept deeper: “It is really about someone who is afraid of being caught by the hounds that are chasing him. I wonder if everyone is perhaps ruled by fear, and afraid of getting into relationships on some level or another. They can involve pain, confusion and responsibilities, and I think a lot of people are particularly scared of responsibility. Maybe the being involved isn’t as horrific as your imagination can build it up to being – perhaps these baying hounds are really friendly.”
Some of the lyrics are particularly intriguing:
Take my shoes off
And throw them in the lake,
And I’ll be
Two steps on the water.
This could be referring to the act of throwing off the scent for the hounds by running through water, but the next few lines are harder to interpret in that context. As it turns out, those are the most important ones for the song’s writer.
In an interview with Doug Alan in November 1985, Bush emphasised the importance of two steps rather than just a potentially tentative one. “Two steps is a progression. One step could possibly mean you go forward and then you come back again. I think ‘two steps’ suggests that you intend to go forward. It could have been three steps – it could have been ten, but ‘two steps’ sounds better, I thought, when I wrote the song.”
The album was recorded in a windowless studio that Bush had constructed in a converted barn near her parents’ house in semi-rural East Wickham, south east of London. This no doubt influenced the sound. In an interview with Q magazine, Bush said: “People commented on how the album seems very elemental. And I can’t help but put quite a lot of that down to the fact that I moved out into the country. The visual stimulus coming in was that of fields and trees, and seeing the elements doing their stuff.”
Hounds of Love was the second album solely produced by Bush (the first being her previous release, The Dreaming). She was 100% in control, to the point where she simply handed in the album to the record company when she was done. Nobody interfered, no outsiders were allowed, and nobody got to hear a note until the time was right.
The creative control extended to the cover art. The shot of Kate Bush reclining on the Hounds of Love album cover was taken by her brother, John Carder Bush (who included plenty of funny outtakes from the sessions in his photo book ‘Kate – Inside the Rainbow’ released in 2015).
The ‘hounds of love’ on the album cover were her own two dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, and it took all day to get them to settle down. When the final picture was taken, one of the pooches actually fell asleep on her. On the album sleeve notes Kate gives “A big woof to Bonnie & Clyde.”
Hounds of Love ended up giving its title to the album, which was released on 16 September 1985. The title track itself was released as the third single from the album on 24 February 1986, reaching #18 in the UK singles chart, getting its best position in Ireland at #12.
The music video (directed by Bush herself) was inspired by the Alfred Hitchcock film ‘The 39 Steps,’ and even features a Hitchcock lookalike. I could try to analyse it, but you are probably better off taking a look at it yourself!
There are three different versions of the song: the album version which is identical to most single versions, the US single mix which is particularly interesting as it includes an additional chorus just after the second chorus, and an extended remix entitled “Alternative Hounds of Love.”
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