1985-"Hounds of Love"

Kate Bush – Hounds of Love | Golden Vault #100
Words: sarah harford

Article Published: December 10, 2019

Welcome to the latest edition of ‘Golden Vault’, where we delve into the annals of music to bring you a classic album. You’ll know some like the back of your hand and nothing of others. We hope to get you reacquainted with old friends and create new favourites. The album to be taken out of the Golden Vault for reappraisal this week is 'Hounds of Love' by Kate Bush.

It’s 1985. Bruce Springsteen and Madonna are topping the charts, and Live Aid is making headlines around the world. But Kate Bush has barely been heard from in three years.

After her fourth album, 1982’s ‘The Dreaming’, was faced with poor commercial success and mixed critical reception, Bush stepped back from the spotlight. There may have been fears that she was simply a flash in the pop pan that had since burned out, never to be heard from again. But in September of ‘85 she returned with a bang, delivering what would probably be her finest album – ‘Hounds of Love’. The wait, is seems, was worth it.

Any album that starts with Running Up That Hill certainly can’t be ignored. It’s a pop masterpiece that packs a punch, while dealing with ideas of gender equality and a search for understanding between the sexes. Desperate and pleading, Bush asks: “Is there so much hate for the ones we love, tell me we both matter, don’t we?” With something so painful and beautiful, set against a powerful synth soundtrack, it provides a hint at what’s to come.

Bush’s vocals have always been the most remarkable element of her music – the magic glue holding the mystical compositions together. And the same can be said throughout ‘Hounds of Love’, but with a slight difference. Largely gone are the cloud-hitting high notes and rollercoaster lines of Wuthering Heights and Babooshka, replaced instead with a more mature, fuller sound that is still wondrously ethereal and instantly recognisable, but deeper, darker and more interesting.

It’s a voice that commands on title track Hounds of Love, reaching from deep inside amid swirling panic and tension, while it shines above the joyous cacophony of The Big Sky. On Cloudbusting, perhaps one of Bush’s best songs ever, her marching battle cries are fused with flowing, poignant optimism. “I just know that something good is gonna happen,” she croons at the crescendo, as melancholy mixes with anticipation.

But this is an album of two halves – or two sides, as it were back in the day. While side one is packed to the brim with hit after hit, including tracks that would go down as some of Bush’s greatest, side two tells a completely different story altogether. Flip over the vinyl and you’ll suddenly be faced with ‘The Ninth Wave’ – a mesmerising, meandering song cycle filled with stories of women and water and witches. At times brilliant, at times bizarre, but always very Bush.

From the dark tension of Under Ice to the strange, thrilling drama of Waking the Witch, there’s an eclectic mix of experimental ideas at play here. With musique concrète sampling and manipulation, in particular, it’s almost reminiscent of late 1960s Beatles. Add in the fact that it is half-toying with becoming a concept album, and ‘Hounds of Love’ could be described as a sumptuous synth-folk ‘Sgt Pepper’.

Bush – just like the Beatles at a similar point in their careers two decades earlier – was no longer concerned about shows and touring, meaning that focus could be placed firmly on an album created in a studio, without worrying about how the aural intricacy could replicated in a live performance. Indeed, much of ‘Hounds of Love’ was crafted in a studio in Bush’s back garden, giving her time and space to play. Some work was also done in Dublin, with Irish music heavyweights such as Donal Lunny, John Sheahan and Liam O'Flynn, which explains the slightly manic, Irish trad-inflected Jig of Life.

If the two sides of ‘Hounds of Love’ seem confusingly disparate, they are eventually tied together by the phenomenal penultimate track Hello Earth. Here, Bush blends the musical power of some of side one’s great tracks – almost cinematic in tone and texture as it envelops the listener in this sonic world – with the strange storytelling and compositional creativity that firmly places it within the narrative of side two. It’s a surging, dramatic, six-minute mini opera – and even finds a way to make the uileann pipes not sound painfully out of place.

The drama is wrapped neatly in a bow with the last track, the relatively gentle and uplifting The Morning Fog, a parting gift to the listener who has made it through the whirlwind ride of ‘Hounds of Love’. The album received strong critical and public reception at the time, with NME saying: “Our Kate’s a genius, the rarest solo artist this country’s ever produced.”

This has not waned over time and the music has aged incredibly well. Its influence is clear on everyone from Björk to St Vincent, to the point where nearly any female artist that dares to do something interesting with their music will inevitably be described at Kate Bush-eqsue. It’s certainly not a bad legacy to have. However, with something so sophisticated and bold, and still fully formed in her own wild vision, ‘Hounds of Love’ created something that was difficult for others – and even Bush herself – to surpass.

I’m Listening to Progressive Rock: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love

By: Langdon Hickman



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It’s not enough to just tell the story of obvious figures like King Crimson and Yes and Steven Wilson. These are important figures, yes, foundational stones upon which the rest of the tale is constructed, but there is more to progressive rock. We paint the image of the genre space sometimes as unnecessarily narrow. The reasons for this are fairly understandable; prog underwent an apocalyptic contraction in the late ’70s with the rise of punk, suddenly finding its social esteem and aesthetic image carved away nearly to nothing, and so efforts to preserve it would take place. And it’s right that they did! Without the much more limiting definition of what constituted the high apex of progressive rock stylistics, we might not have gotten later groups like Spock’s Beard or Dream Theater, let alone the more widely flowering resurgence of progressive music we’ve seen over the past two decades.

But this limited scope of prog—which privileges extended suite-like song structures and a very particular set of tonalities with guitars, synths, and chord modulations—often leaves out entire worlds of progressive music that deserves to live in the same conversations, even if they don’t hold precisely the same shape. What’s worse is when we begin to detect in the comparison of what bands are allowed into these discussions versus which are left out notes of bigoted ideas that seem to be rooted more in the patriarchal, white notions that gird rockist ideologies regarding music. Groups like Supertramp and Saga and even Todd Rundgren are often looped into discussions of prog, and rightfully so, but the likewise mind-bending explorations of groups like Funkadelic, mid-’70s Stevie Wonder and the more stridently avant-garde record Here, My Dear by Marvin Gaye are left out. Certainly there is a noticeable gap between these artists and the more generally rock timbres of some of the larger prog bands, but this only makes sense when limiting the discussion to a purely rock context, one devoid of pop and soul and psychedelia that even a great number of the biggest groups of the style never shied away from themselves.

There is clearly a racialized component to resistance in acknowledging the progressive spirit at play in certain works of R&B and soul, one not necessarily paralleled in jazz, which groups like Return to Forever and Mahavishnu Orchestra (let alone their mothership, the great Miles Davis) brought into discussions of progressive music over the decades. Parallel to this racism, which in fairness is not often deliberately held by specific people but instead is upheld passively through institutions of criticism and culture, is a misogynistic one, one that views pop as inherently “anti-prog” and thus things tinged with the presence of pop as somehow antithetical to the spirit of progressive music. This mindset bit the biggest prog bands in the ass in the ’80s, when groups like Yes and Genesis turned their works to more approachable structures while still producing plenty of odd time signatures in songs like “Changes” and extended multi-part suites in songs like “Domino,” only for longtime fans to turn their noses up and declare these works betrayals to the spirit of the enterprise. This fact becomes more confounding when squared against the fact that pop had always been in the genetics of these groups, from the first two Yes albums’ deep deployment of psychedelic pop sensibilities and the early Bee Gees vibes of Genesis’ debut, let alone the persistent presence of pop singles in the early records of those same groups. But more pernicious than the confounding idea that progressive music only counted if the progressive ideals were at a maximum and never tainted by the presence of other genres was the way that this functionally locked out a great deal of tremendous progressive music from being broadly considered within the prog rock canon, chief among them the profound and perfect work of art pop’s queen, Kate Bush.

In fairness, before diving more deeply, it’s worth noting that dismissal of pop music isn’t inherently misogynistic. To say that would be to say effectively that pop music is inherently feminine and by implication that rock music is inherently masculine, that there are objectively “girls’ toys” and “boys’ toys” in the world of art. This is tedious enough when we see it deployed in film criticism, people insisting that slow art cinema and action movies alike are “boy films” and romantic comedies and sentimentalist period pieces are “girl films” based on flimsy and abstract modal arguments. There is something worthwhile, at its root, of examining how modes of art uphold or reflect different lenses with which to view the world and modes with which to engage with it, and from there to witness that patriarchal notions intertwine with the mechanics and prose of art making and often stain the art itself. And there is something of merit, too, to the commonly held perception of rock as masculine and “boys’ stuff” and pop as feminine and “girls’ stuff”, even if this gender essentializing only seems to exist in perceptions of art and not the materiality of it.

Keeping those things in mind, the complexity of diagnosing misogynistic and patriarchal attitudes as they appear in production and consumption of art, of where and why we draw the lines we do and how sometimes the process of drawing those lines is admittedly more complex than just knee-jerk bigoted notions about the world we tend to internalize from living in a world already stained by them, it is hard to conceive of why Peter Gabriel’s solo work sits intermingled with the world of prog and Kate Bush’s doesn’t. There is Peter Gabriel’s direct tie to prog via his career with Genesis up till The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, one of the (rightly) most celebrated runs in the genre. But a fair response for defenders of Bush’s work being brought into this pool is how she was discovered by David Gilmour, no less a figure of prog royalty. (Sort of; she was actually discovered by Ricky Hopper, a Bush family friend, but his key action was passing her tapes on to his friend, Mr. Gilmour.) There are those who dismiss Gabriel’s solo work as belonging to the world of progressive music too, of course, but between the all-star prog supporting cast of the records and deep and pervasive art rock influence across all of his solo albums let alone their deep future influence on progressive music of the ’90s forward, that stance is a functional non-starter. And if we’ve already largely broken down the barriers between art rock and progressive rock, viewing both as inherently coming from the same base spirit and often being perfectly interchangeable with one another, what remains to keep art pop out of the equation?

These heoretical arguments could spin in circles endlessly if you wanted them to. The root of them, however, is the what unifies the later period of Marillion’s work with the vast domains of prog, that sees Radiohead enjoined in the discussion, that views the IDM of Aphex Twin folded in to the discussion, that being that progressive music is more a spiritual motive than something as reductive as saying it is music that sounds like In the Court of the Crimson King. Even King Crimson themselves seemed to tire of that tedious and narrow definition, pushing themselves constantly to rapidly evolve and shed the dead skin of their older sonic ideas after only a few albums. While we retroactively have many instances of progressive rock we can identify occurring before the seminal release of King Crimson’s debut, there are still few better figures than Robert Fripp when it comes to determining that truer internal spirit that guides prog, that tremulous quivering uneasiness that jitters otherwise regular musicians into provoking the forms they work within to mutant to wilder and more ambitious forms.

After all, the intent of progressive rock is precisely the same intent as art rock and art pop; not merely to make long songs and have odd time signatures, but instead to challenge the form of popular music, to take the known and puff it full of ambition until it feels somehow firmly different. This difference sometimes challenges the staid and static image of “prog rock” as well, asking us to iterate on that form in a manner that is commensurate not just with the aesthetic shape of prog but also the spirit of the thing, much as Robert Fripp has done all those many times. Just as Fripp shed orchestral rock for jazz-metal and then jazz-metal for nervy, paranoid, deeply New Yorkian New Wave, so too must our perception of progressive music judder and shake and expand beyond the beloved forms we know. This is the third great strand of the story of progressive rock as I see it; not just the foundational classics of the genre and not just the contemporary stalwarts keeping that shape alive, but also those groups that are often left out of the equation but nonetheless carry that Frippian evolutionary progressive spirit in their work and so too belong to be discussed as peers at the table.

***

My first experience with Kate Bush was in high school, that magical language acquisition period of musical taste, the moment when the shackles of the tastes of our parents and cousins and older siblings begin to fall away like scales from our eyes freeing us to roam the vaster worlds music has to offer. I had thankfully discovered a number of things already by that point, from IDM to death metal, but was only just starting to seriously explore the vast worlds of jazz and prog and folk music. I was, like many teens beginning to cut their teeth on such things, obsessed dually with the canon and defying it, of tracking down those seminal albums I heard so much about so often from so many people as much as digging into the piles of genres, artists and records that others had declared worthless to see if there was something worth salvaging there.

The paradox of this experience is I was utterly non-unique but at the same time I felt like a brave explorer, making with gumption and spirit what I lacked in experience, hoping that there was some in-born kernel of wisdom that would awaken and show itself through my youthful judgments of the art of the world. I would go back and forth then as I do now whether I did this because I had nothing better to do, being no good at sports and too awkward to successfully socialize; this strikes me now, more days than not, as being too harsh on my younger self and too denigrating to the real love and passion I felt in art. The abuses and difficulties of my childhood aren’t worth going over again here, but in these explorations of the world of art I felt a real and profound sense of peace, of usefulness, a sense that those voices in my head and in the world that I had nothing to offer were at last wrong even if I did not have a demonstrable example of it yet. That part gets skimmed over sometimes by people looking in from the outside; they see the puerile dick-measuring of tastemaking and obscuro interests, a real phenomenon for sure, but seem to miss the sincere childlike love underpinning this for many of us. The problem seems to be more that we don’t quite know how to express ourselves in our youth, in our twenties, sometimes even later, the shame and embarrassment of sincerity getting covered with a cloak of sneering hipsterism and gatekeeping, a radical defense/devourment of the classics, setting up idols and smashing them in seemingly random order. But thankfully, mercifully, time mellows these impulses, and the sincerity of love and art begins to seep out first in drops then in rivers.

By my mid to late teens, I had thankfully eased off of my vocal hatred of pop music. As a kid, of course, I’d loved the stuff; I cut my teeth on Motown records and Michael Jackson, with a hefty dose of the ’50s rock ‘n’ roll that was the music of my parents’ early childhood, and with babysitters into Madonna and Cyndi Lauper and the like it was hard not to get swept up in things. There were, of course, my teenage rockist years, where I swore off the rap records I’d grown up with (despite having been alive and aware during the rise of Wu-Tang and Tupac and Biggie and Snoop Dogg and more!) just as much as I swore off the supposed thinness of pop music for more ambitious music. But if you’re honest about an artform, life has a way of breaking down those artificial barriers, and after catching the then-new video for Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” and subsequently digging out my ancient CD copies of Madonna’s first few records, I had to admit that I was just plain wrong on. Plus, referencing once more the teenage music fan’s penchant for hipsterism, digging straight up pop music was at the time a good way to twist the knife in the supposedly hip teenage fans of groups like The Strokes and The Unicorns and the like that suffused my high school, this being the early- to mid-2000s, the undoubted golden age of that particular type of indie rock. They hated that I was an unabashed fan of prog rock and death metal, something I reveled in, and this gesture back to the music of normal people that nonetheless was absolutely great was another petty pleasure, certainly a sweet icing on the cake if ever there was one.

I arrived at Kate Bush, ironically, not through pop (necessarily) but through Peter Gabriel. I was an enormous Genesis fan already, albeit one that still had the hangup that the band effectively died when Steve Hackett left, a sentiment that would soften over time. I of course knew the iconic scene in Say Anything, had enough babysitters that were kids and teens in the ’80s to have heard “In Your Eyes” blaring out of tinny car stereos as I was shepherded to and from houses and hangouts, but I didn’t really dive into his solo stuff until after getting into Genesis. I caught a stray YouTube video of “Solsbury Hill” which, despite my assumptions about what his solo material would sound like based on “In Your Eyes,” was remarkably closer to Genesis to my ears. I played the song on a loop like a miniature religion; the next time I was in my local Best Buy (at the time the largest record selection in town), I picked up his then-new concert DVD Growing Up Live, obsessed with concert films ever since watching that once-in-a-millennium masterpiece of Pink Floyd: Live At Pompeii. An indication of my social skills at the time: I forced not one but two friends to come over to watch Growing Up Live in the darkness and silence of my brother’s old bedroom that I’d since converted into a private computer/gaming room for myself, asking them to leave shortly after it was done.

There was a woman who kept showing up, album after album, song after song. I assumed it was the same woman on the Secret World Live concert and who showed up quite frequently across the Us record; but there was something off, some slight timbral difference, the little quirks and fluctuations that are the fingerprint of a singer and part of what making replacing iconic voices so very difficult. The second woman seemed either to be purposefully replicating this mysterious first or perhaps selected because she naturally sat in a similar space. But they weren’t the same. I’ve always been the kind of at-times tedious nerd about these kinds of things, looking up information on who engineered and produced records and what the session players were and what instruments were deployed on various records ever since I was a boy. In retrospect, this should have been indicative to my parents to get me tested for the autism that would later be confirmed in adulthood, but as a kid it was just an annoying quirk, boring friends and family to tears with endless minutiae about records they didn’t even otherwise care about. In this instance, that quirk paid off; I discovered that, yes, the two women were different, the second was an accomplished and clearly talented vocalist in her own right, but that mysterious first voice that entwined so powerfully, like a divine oracle, with Peter’s voice was someone named Kate Bush.

The voice was vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t place where. I’ve been in and around music types my whole life, but the amount I was giving focused attention would come and go in waves. That I might have heard a name and filed it away without knowing much else didn’t surprise me, but it did enthrall me, indicative in some way that this was a name worth remembering and relaying by others. So I pulled up a video, the first one that came up. “Wuthering Heights.”

I hated it.

I couldn’t get over her vocals. This struck me even then as hypocritical, since I adored Yes at the time and Jon Anderson’s vocals are, um, a bit eccentric themselves. But I couldn’t deny what I was feeling. I played the song a second time, a third time. People in the comments were calling it a masterpiece. All I could hear was this caterwaul; maybe I didn’t get it. Maybe I wasn’t legit. Maybe my love of music was all a sham. All the childish confused overreactions you could imagine.

But then I found myself humming it in the shower, stray lines forming in my head and uttered in a half-groan. I didn’t realize what it was until I got out of the shower; I shuddered and carried on with my day. Then I’d catch myself doing the same in school, at work in the movie theater that was my first real job, while playing video games with friends. I’d shown them the song as a joke, look at how awful this singer is, so they knew the song and couldn’t tell if I was just fucking with them or not. But just as I couldn’t deny hating it at first, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore; “Wuthering Heights” was sinking in, intoxicating me, revealing like a blossoming flower the curve and contour of its petals and strange mystical power, as ethereal and ghastly as the titular figure of song. I tracked down a copy of the novel and devoured it in two days; it remains my favorite work by any of the three Bronte sisters. I began parsing Kate Bush the way I had many others, learning she was discovered by David Gilmour, that she had an appreciation of the prog greats alongside the greats of orchestral music and pop music (which explained to me her phantasmagorical power). I also discovered that, while “Wuthering Heights” was beloved, it wasn’t her peak; that was Hounds of Love.

I worked at a movie theater at the time a short drive from my house. I’d inherited, in a way, an old Mercedes from the 1980s, a workhorse of a car picked up used for cheap that, incidentally, had no working air conditioning but did have a nice stereo we’d installed as the one inexpensive upgrade for quality-of-life purposes. My friends all hated Kate Bush, at least at the time, and while my parents were broadly accepting of my exploration of progressive rock, especially compared to my equal love at the time of extreme metal and industrial/electronic music, I was worried that Bush’s unique timbres would be a bridge too far. The result was an unintended magic: Hounds of Love lived eternally in my car, tucked safe in the little interior storage compartment of the door, swapped freely with records by Atheist and Pig Destroyer and Gentle Giant, a solitary experiential cocoon of startling humid Virginia summer heat and the freedom of my first car a fertile soil for musical seeds to grow. I could close my eyes at the red lights and be swept into the icy haze Kate Bush would conjure, sheer fabrics and freezing rain, a lone figure gazing down from British cliffs to foundering vessels in the consuming sea. It was a symphony to me, private and singular, contained entirely in those brief passages between my home and work or vice-versa.

What may be shocking to some is that these associations I have regarding her album are ones of love and beauty, not the brute survivalism of Grace for Drowning or the pure imaginative capacity of In the Court of the Crimson King. I was at time trapped between the two poles of the suffering of youth and the coming suffering of young adulthood, something I was vaguely aware of; I’d had enough older friends, read enough novels and seen enough shows, to know that your twenties are always a trial, suffering produced by the paradox of freedom and inexperience. But for that brief window, I was brave, I was safe, I was confident. I was in love; the relationship wouldn’t last, obviously, but I was two years into a four-year relationship, one that helped begin to break the callus of scar tissue built up around my heart that made me act cruel as a defense mechanism, echoing the shame and pain I felt I had been dealt. Hounds of Love, the white of the cover mirrored by the white of my first car, was a field of flowers in a hybrid of hi-definition and watercolor.

***

I would acquire her other albums, and from them construct a treasured sequence of songs. But, while there were favorites among her catalog such as The Dreaming and The Sensual World, none ever surpassed Hounds of Love for me.

A great deal of this is due to the structure of the record. Not unlike Rush or any number of other great progressive artists before her, she would deploy the two lobes of the vinyl as a means of producing two inter-related but functionally separate song suites, allowing each to pursue its own thematic and musical ends before entwining them with some binding name and image.



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It’s not enough to just tell the story of obvious figures like King Crimson and Yes and Steven Wilson. These are important figures, yes, foundational stones upon which the rest of the tale is constructed, but there is more to progressive rock. We paint the image of the genre space sometimes as unnecessarily narrow. The reasons for this are fairly understandable; prog underwent an apocalyptic contraction in the late ’70s with the rise of punk, suddenly finding its social esteem and aesthetic image carved away nearly to nothing, and so efforts to preserve it would take place. And it’s right that they did! Without the much more limiting definition of what constituted the high apex of progressive rock stylistics, we might not have gotten later groups like Spock’s Beard or Dream Theater, let alone the more widely flowering resurgence of progressive music we’ve seen over the past two decades.

But this limited scope of prog—which privileges extended suite-like song structures and a very particular set of tonalities with guitars, synths, and chord modulations—often leaves out entire worlds of progressive music that deserves to live in the same conversations, even if they don’t hold precisely the same shape. What’s worse is when we begin to detect in the comparison of what bands are allowed into these discussions versus which are left out notes of bigoted ideas that seem to be rooted more in the patriarchal, white notions that gird rockist ideologies regarding music. Groups like Supertramp and Saga and even Todd Rundgren are often looped into discussions of prog, and rightfully so, but the likewise mind-bending explorations of groups like Funkadelic, mid-’70s Stevie Wonder and the more stridently avant-garde record Here, My Dear by Marvin Gaye are left out. Certainly there is a noticeable gap between these artists and the more generally rock timbres of some of the larger prog bands, but this only makes sense when limiting the discussion to a purely rock context, one devoid of pop and soul and psychedelia that even a great number of the biggest groups of the style never shied away from themselves.

There is clearly a racialized component to resistance in acknowledging the progressive spirit at play in certain works of R&B and soul, one not necessarily paralleled in jazz, which groups like Return to Forever and Mahavishnu Orchestra (let alone their mothership, the great Miles Davis) brought into discussions of progressive music over the decades. Parallel to this racism, which in fairness is not often deliberately held by specific people but instead is upheld passively through institutions of criticism and culture, is a misogynistic one, one that views pop as inherently “anti-prog” and thus things tinged with the presence of pop as somehow antithetical to the spirit of progressive music. This mindset bit the biggest prog bands in the ass in the ’80s, when groups like Yes and Genesis turned their works to more approachable structures while still producing plenty of odd time signatures in songs like “Changes” and extended multi-part suites in songs like “Domino,” only for longtime fans to turn their noses up and declare these works betrayals to the spirit of the enterprise. This fact becomes more confounding when squared against the fact that pop had always been in the genetics of these groups, from the first two Yes albums’ deep deployment of psychedelic pop sensibilities and the early Bee Gees vibes of Genesis’ debut, let alone the persistent presence of pop singles in the early records of those same groups. But more pernicious than the confounding idea that progressive music only counted if the progressive ideals were at a maximum and never tainted by the presence of other genres was the way that this functionally locked out a great deal of tremendous progressive music from being broadly considered within the prog rock canon, chief among them the profound and perfect work of art pop’s queen, Kate Bush.

In fairness, before diving more deeply, it’s worth noting that dismissal of pop music isn’t inherently misogynistic. To say that would be to say effectively that pop music is inherently feminine and by implication that rock music is inherently masculine, that there are objectively “girls’ toys” and “boys’ toys” in the world of art. This is tedious enough when we see it deployed in film criticism, people insisting that slow art cinema and action movies alike are “boy films” and romantic comedies and sentimentalist period pieces are “girl films” based on flimsy and abstract modal arguments. There is something worthwhile, at its root, of examining how modes of art uphold or reflect different lenses with which to view the world and modes with which to engage with it, and from there to witness that patriarchal notions intertwine with the mechanics and prose of art making and often stain the art itself. And there is something of merit, too, to the commonly held perception of rock as masculine and “boys’ stuff” and pop as feminine and “girls’ stuff”, even if this gender essentializing only seems to exist in perceptions of art and not the materiality of it.

Keeping those things in mind, the complexity of diagnosing misogynistic and patriarchal attitudes as they appear in production and consumption of art, of where and why we draw the lines we do and how sometimes the process of drawing those lines is admittedly more complex than just knee-jerk bigoted notions about the world we tend to internalize from living in a world already stained by them, it is hard to conceive of why Peter Gabriel’s solo work sits intermingled with the world of prog and Kate Bush’s doesn’t. There is Peter Gabriel’s direct tie to prog via his career with Genesis up till The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, one of the (rightly) most celebrated runs in the genre. But a fair response for defenders of Bush’s work being brought into this pool is how she was discovered by David Gilmour, no less a figure of prog royalty. (Sort of; she was actually discovered by Ricky Hopper, a Bush family friend, but his key action was passing her tapes on to his friend, Mr. Gilmour.) There are those who dismiss Gabriel’s solo work as belonging to the world of progressive music too, of course, but between the all-star prog supporting cast of the records and deep and pervasive art rock influence across all of his solo albums let alone their deep future influence on progressive music of the ’90s forward, that stance is a functional non-starter. And if we’ve already largely broken down the barriers between art rock and progressive rock, viewing both as inherently coming from the same base spirit and often being perfectly interchangeable with one another, what remains to keep art pop out of the equation?

These heoretical arguments could spin in circles endlessly if you wanted them to. The root of them, however, is the what unifies the later period of Marillion’s work with the vast domains of prog, that sees Radiohead enjoined in the discussion, that views the IDM of Aphex Twin folded in to the discussion, that being that progressive music is more a spiritual motive than something as reductive as saying it is music that sounds like In the Court of the Crimson King. Even King Crimson themselves seemed to tire of that tedious and narrow definition, pushing themselves constantly to rapidly evolve and shed the dead skin of their older sonic ideas after only a few albums. While we retroactively have many instances of progressive rock we can identify occurring before the seminal release of King Crimson’s debut, there are still few better figures than Robert Fripp when it comes to determining that truer internal spirit that guides prog, that tremulous quivering uneasiness that jitters otherwise regular musicians into provoking the forms they work within to mutant to wilder and more ambitious forms.

After all, the intent of progressive rock is precisely the same intent as art rock and art pop; not merely to make long songs and have odd time signatures, but instead to challenge the form of popular music, to take the known and puff it full of ambition until it feels somehow firmly different. This difference sometimes challenges the staid and static image of “prog rock” as well, asking us to iterate on that form in a manner that is commensurate not just with the aesthetic shape of prog but also the spirit of the thing, much as Robert Fripp has done all those many times. Just as Fripp shed orchestral rock for jazz-metal and then jazz-metal for nervy, paranoid, deeply New Yorkian New Wave, so too must our perception of progressive music judder and shake and expand beyond the beloved forms we know. This is the third great strand of the story of progressive rock as I see it; not just the foundational classics of the genre and not just the contemporary stalwarts keeping that shape alive, but also those groups that are often left out of the equation but nonetheless carry that Frippian evolutionary progressive spirit in their work and so too belong to be discussed as peers at the table.

***

My first experience with Kate Bush was in high school, that magical language acquisition period of musical taste, the moment when the shackles of the tastes of our parents and cousins and older siblings begin to fall away like scales from our eyes freeing us to roam the vaster worlds music has to offer. I had thankfully discovered a number of things already by that point, from IDM to death metal, but was only just starting to seriously explore the vast worlds of jazz and prog and folk music. I was, like many teens beginning to cut their teeth on such things, obsessed dually with the canon and defying it, of tracking down those seminal albums I heard so much about so often from so many people as much as digging into the piles of genres, artists and records that others had declared worthless to see if there was something worth salvaging there.

The paradox of this experience is I was utterly non-unique but at the same time I felt like a brave explorer, making with gumption and spirit what I lacked in experience, hoping that there was some in-born kernel of wisdom that would awaken and show itself through my youthful judgments of the art of the world. I would go back and forth then as I do now whether I did this because I had nothing better to do, being no good at sports and too awkward to successfully socialize; this strikes me now, more days than not, as being too harsh on my younger self and too denigrating to the real love and passion I felt in art. The abuses and difficulties of my childhood aren’t worth going over again here, but in these explorations of the world of art I felt a real and profound sense of peace, of usefulness, a sense that those voices in my head and in the world that I had nothing to offer were at last wrong even if I did not have a demonstrable example of it yet. That part gets skimmed over sometimes by people looking in from the outside; they see the puerile dick-measuring of tastemaking and obscuro interests, a real phenomenon for sure, but seem to miss the sincere childlike love underpinning this for many of us. The problem seems to be more that we don’t quite know how to express ourselves in our youth, in our twenties, sometimes even later, the shame and embarrassment of sincerity getting covered with a cloak of sneering hipsterism and gatekeeping, a radical defense/devourment of the classics, setting up idols and smashing them in seemingly random order. But thankfully, mercifully, time mellows these impulses, and the sincerity of love and art begins to seep out first in drops then in rivers.

By my mid to late teens, I had thankfully eased off of my vocal hatred of pop music. As a kid, of course, I’d loved the stuff; I cut my teeth on Motown records and Michael Jackson, with a hefty dose of the ’50s rock ‘n’ roll that was the music of my parents’ early childhood, and with babysitters into Madonna and Cyndi Lauper and the like it was hard not to get swept up in things. There were, of course, my teenage rockist years, where I swore off the rap records I’d grown up with (despite having been alive and aware during the rise of Wu-Tang and Tupac and Biggie and Snoop Dogg and more!) just as much as I swore off the supposed thinness of pop music for more ambitious music. But if you’re honest about an artform, life has a way of breaking down those artificial barriers, and after catching the then-new video for Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” and subsequently digging out my ancient CD copies of Madonna’s first few records, I had to admit that I was just plain wrong on. Plus, referencing once more the teenage music fan’s penchant for hipsterism, digging straight up pop music was at the time a good way to twist the knife in the supposedly hip teenage fans of groups like The Strokes and The Unicorns and the like that suffused my high school, this being the early- to mid-2000s, the undoubted golden age of that particular type of indie rock. They hated that I was an unabashed fan of prog rock and death metal, something I reveled in, and this gesture back to the music of normal people that nonetheless was absolutely great was another petty pleasure, certainly a sweet icing on the cake if ever there was one.

I arrived at Kate Bush, ironically, not through pop (necessarily) but through Peter Gabriel. I was an enormous Genesis fan already, albeit one that still had the hangup that the band effectively died when Steve Hackett left, a sentiment that would soften over time. I of course knew the iconic scene in Say Anything, had enough babysitters that were kids and teens in the ’80s to have heard “In Your Eyes” blaring out of tinny car stereos as I was shepherded to and from houses and hangouts, but I didn’t really dive into his solo stuff until after getting into Genesis. I caught a stray YouTube video of “Solsbury Hill” which, despite my assumptions about what his solo material would sound like based on “In Your Eyes,” was remarkably closer to Genesis to my ears. I played the song on a loop like a miniature religion; the next time I was in my local Best Buy (at the time the largest record selection in town), I picked up his then-new concert DVD Growing Up Live, obsessed with concert films ever since watching that once-in-a-millennium masterpiece of Pink Floyd: Live At Pompeii. An indication of my social skills at the time: I forced not one but two friends to come over to watch Growing Up Live in the darkness and silence of my brother’s old bedroom that I’d since converted into a private computer/gaming room for myself, asking them to leave shortly after it was done.

There was a woman who kept showing up, album after album, song after song. I assumed it was the same woman on the Secret World Live concert and who showed up quite frequently across the Us record; but there was something off, some slight timbral difference, the little quirks and fluctuations that are the fingerprint of a singer and part of what making replacing iconic voices so very difficult. The second woman seemed either to be purposefully replicating this mysterious first or perhaps selected because she naturally sat in a similar space. But they weren’t the same. I’ve always been the kind of at-times tedious nerd about these kinds of things, looking up information on who engineered and produced records and what the session players were and what instruments were deployed on various records ever since I was a boy. In retrospect, this should have been indicative to my parents to get me tested for the autism that would later be confirmed in adulthood, but as a kid it was just an annoying quirk, boring friends and family to tears with endless minutiae about records they didn’t even otherwise care about. In this instance, that quirk paid off; I discovered that, yes, the two women were different, the second was an accomplished and clearly talented vocalist in her own right, but that mysterious first voice that entwined so powerfully, like a divine oracle, with Peter’s voice was someone named Kate Bush.

The voice was vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t place where. I’ve been in and around music types my whole life, but the amount I was giving focused attention would come and go in waves. That I might have heard a name and filed it away without knowing much else didn’t surprise me, but it did enthrall me, indicative in some way that this was a name worth remembering and relaying by others. So I pulled up a video, the first one that came up. “Wuthering Heights.”

I hated it.

I couldn’t get over her vocals. This struck me even then as hypocritical, since I adored Yes at the time and Jon Anderson’s vocals are, um, a bit eccentric themselves. But I couldn’t deny what I was feeling. I played the song a second time, a third time. People in the comments were calling it a masterpiece. All I could hear was this caterwaul; maybe I didn’t get it. Maybe I wasn’t legit. Maybe my love of music was all a sham. All the childish confused overreactions you could imagine.

But then I found myself humming it in the shower, stray lines forming in my head and uttered in a half-groan. I didn’t realize what it was until I got out of the shower; I shuddered and carried on with my day. Then I’d catch myself doing the same in school, at work in the movie theater that was my first real job, while playing video games with friends. I’d shown them the song as a joke, look at how awful this singer is, so they knew the song and couldn’t tell if I was just fucking with them or not. But just as I couldn’t deny hating it at first, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore; “Wuthering Heights” was sinking in, intoxicating me, revealing like a blossoming flower the curve and contour of its petals and strange mystical power, as ethereal and ghastly as the titular figure of song. I tracked down a copy of the novel and devoured it in two days; it remains my favorite work by any of the three Bronte sisters. I began parsing Kate Bush the way I had many others, learning she was discovered by David Gilmour, that she had an appreciation of the prog greats alongside the greats of orchestral music and pop music (which explained to me her phantasmagorical power). I also discovered that, while “Wuthering Heights” was beloved, it wasn’t her peak; that was Hounds of Love.

I worked at a movie theater at the time a short drive from my house. I’d inherited, in a way, an old Mercedes from the 1980s, a workhorse of a car picked up used for cheap that, incidentally, had no working air conditioning but did have a nice stereo we’d installed as the one inexpensive upgrade for quality-of-life purposes. My friends all hated Kate Bush, at least at the time, and while my parents were broadly accepting of my exploration of progressive rock, especially compared to my equal love at the time of extreme metal and industrial/electronic music, I was worried that Bush’s unique timbres would be a bridge too far. The result was an unintended magic: Hounds of Love lived eternally in my car, tucked safe in the little interior storage compartment of the door, swapped freely with records by Atheist and Pig Destroyer and Gentle Giant, a solitary experiential cocoon of startling humid Virginia summer heat and the freedom of my first car a fertile soil for musical seeds to grow. I could close my eyes at the red lights and be swept into the icy haze Kate Bush would conjure, sheer fabrics and freezing rain, a lone figure gazing down from British cliffs to foundering vessels in the consuming sea. It was a symphony to me, private and singular, contained entirely in those brief passages between my home and work or vice-versa.

What may be shocking to some is that these associations I have regarding her album are ones of love and beauty, not the brute survivalism of Grace for Drowning or the pure imaginative capacity of In the Court of the Crimson King. I was at time trapped between the two poles of the suffering of youth and the coming suffering of young adulthood, something I was vaguely aware of; I’d had enough older friends, read enough novels and seen enough shows, to know that your twenties are always a trial, suffering produced by the paradox of freedom and inexperience. But for that brief window, I was brave, I was safe, I was confident. I was in love; the relationship wouldn’t last, obviously, but I was two years into a four-year relationship, one that helped begin to break the callus of scar tissue built up around my heart that made me act cruel as a defense mechanism, echoing the shame and pain I felt I had been dealt. Hounds of Love, the white of the cover mirrored by the white of my first car, was a field of flowers in a hybrid of hi-definition and watercolor.

***

I would acquire her other albums, and from them construct a treasured sequence of songs. But, while there were favorites among her catalog such as The Dreaming and The Sensual World, none ever surpassed Hounds of Love for me.

A great deal of this is due to the structure of the record. Not unlike Rush or any number of other great progressive artists before her, she would deploy the two lobes of the vinyl as a means of producing two inter-related but functionally separate song suites, allowing each to pursue its own thematic and musical ends before entwining them with some binding name and image.

In this case, the first half (the half titled Hounds of Love, incidentally!) were resplendent, perfect art rock, symphonies in miniature. These types of tightly bound but still boundless progressive epics-in-minutes was something that more well-known prog bands had been struggling with for some time with mixed success. Lead song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” may be overplayed for some who lived through the initial commercial sonic boom of this record, but for those of us spared that (rightful) dominance of the airwaves, it contains this endlessly sensuous allure. There is an implication of deep theology, of nuns and monks in monasteries as a parallel for the long suffering of youth trapped in the high-walled apartments of empire; that it turns out the song is about sex, that the deal in question is swapping consciousnesses of male and female bodies in heterosexual sex, feels a fulfillment of this conceit, not a betrayal. There’s great value to songs that treat all the angles of sex, from pure pleasure to sorrow to giggling joy, but to have this painfully intimate spiritual rendering feels profoundly necessary. There are airs of peak Genesis and of Peter Gabriel, but striated with some unnameable novel thing, like if progressive rock had never existed before and simply burst fresh and complete into being right here, right now.

The title track meanwhile extracts from the endless cinematic lushness of the opener a neoclassical atmosphere, which then gets rendered through a post-modernist lens, timpanis turned into sample-blended drum hits married to sawing cello and synth string patches. There is a theatricality in Bush’s vocals that feels once more deeply indebted to the pomp theatrics of early Gabriel-era Genesis; you can practically hear the on-a-dime voice changes of songs like “Supper’s Ready” or long stretches of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway in her trembling. “The Big Sky” meanwhile feels like a hybrid of the dressed-up psych pop of early Yes, taking Donovan songs and busting them up with rumbling Rickenbacker bass and inventive arrangements, with the contemporary post-prog new wave of Duran Duran. The song even includes the same kind of compressed-and-distorted heavy metal guitar sounds and approaches that Trevor Rabin would deploy in the context of Yes starting in the ’80s up until the mid-’90s. “Mother Stands For Comfort” is a curious blend of lite fusion balladry in the bass, classical balladry in the piano, prog rock theatrics in the synth arrangements all against a perpetual avant-garde lite industrial percussive palette, all huddled like monks against the cantare of Bush’s soft, wounded voice. These elements are tensely and precariously balanced, none overtaking any other, in a manner that feels constantly refreshing. Right as you think you can settle into listening to the track as mere background noise, having successfully mentally slotted it into one of many archetypal forms, one of the sonic elements juts forward just a bit, the arrangement giving it a brief break or some pleasing sharpness, and suddenly you have to reconsider things. The only real break from this constant slow deliberate turning comes in the finale, which tapers off into uncertain synth patches before departing, like a phantom.

Though each of these songs are brilliant masterclasses that would hold fast the heart of any listener of any other album, side-closer “Cloudbusting” is the masterpiece of side one. Once more, things feel somewhat indebted to Genesis; I can’t help but hear faint resemblances, at least in terms of emotional timbre and mode, to songs like “Burning Rope,” “Afterglow” and “The Carpet Crawlers.” While those songs are good, excellent even, “Cloudbusting” is something beyond, one of the greatest pieces of music I’ve ever heard in my life, even now. This was the track that, on first listen of the album, I stopped and rewound over and over again, driving endlessly in aimless circles, spellbound. It grabs on to that standard genreform of the emotionalist ballad that starts with a spare arrangement, new elements added gradually and with great care, unfolding almost like a post-rock song with its deepening complexity. Its key difference isn’t in some startling new twist on the formula, some novel injection, but instead perfection. I’m generally a fairly emotional listener to music, admittedly, but there seems to be an endless well of power in this song, where everything from the notes chosen, the gentle butterfly fluttering of stacked background vocals, the budding drama of the arrangement, to the absolutely perfect timbre of every voice and every instrument and every vocal inflection. There is, admittedly, a personal connection here. I lost my father about a decade ago, early in my twenties. That kind of thing is hard always, but is especially hard in the midst of the turmoil of those times, which for me were marked with the blackness of suicidality and substance abuse and isolation and a deepening descent in schizotypal and manic-depressive fits. This entire album became a solace for me then, a beam of love in darkness, but every time I get to the gentle refrain of “Every time it rains / you’re here in my head,” all I can think about is my father, and how I miss him, and I become an ugly wreck, every time, even almost a decade later. Not out of pain, but out of love.

***

If it were only for the immaculate first side of this record, which so perfectly recontextualizes the at-the-time fading light of progressive rock into the worlds of symphonic and art pop burgeoning in the wake of the revolutions post-punk and New Wave music, Hounds of Love would rightly be regarded as a masterpiece. After all, masterpieces are frustratingly a great deal more common than we are led to believe, an almost uncountable number of compelling-to-great records coming out every single year since more or less the dawn of recorded music. What propels Hounds of Love into the hallowed halls of perfection, what makes it so commonly ranked among the very greatest musical works of all time, is its second side, comprised of a single extended song suite titled “The Ninth Wave.”

The title already stokes an amount of interest. The name is plucked from Celtic mythology via Tennyson, the great Romantic poet, who deployed it in his poem “The Coming of Arthur,” the first of a a cycle of 12 narrative poems concerning the life of Arthur titled Idylls of the King. She uses a quote in the liner notes, listed between the title of the suite and the beginnings of its first movement, which in its original source refers to a ship shaped like a dragon breathing fire descends from the mighty heavens to the perhaps mightier seas, bearing on it the infant Arthur to the feet of Merlin. The “ninth wave” in particular here is the presumed barrier between the earthly realms and the heavens of Hy-Brasil, a kind of phantasmal and otherworldly island somewhere to the west of Ireland said to be viewed sometimes through veils of mist, not unlike Avalon, an island of great importance in Arthurian legend. The ninth wave refers more specifically to a real phenomenon related to the physics of liquids and how they form waves, tight whirling spirals gaining more and more energy, casting what appear to be smaller and smaller waves before a single enormous wave roars out from the deep almost from nowhere at all, an enormous wall of water erupting seemingly from nothing. This was regarded as perhaps a barrier as metaphysical as physical, as spiritual as material, separating our earth from other worlds, a sentiment Tolkien would later borrow in part for the divisions of Middle Earth.

These tense tangle of names, from Tennyson to Arthur to the Celts to Tolkien, all outline an unnameable but ever-present literary Britishness, something of a perpetual project not just of Kate Bush in specific but of the more pastoral English progressive rock in general. There is an underlying nationalist politics here, of course, one which can tilt very far to the right if you aren’t careful, but is just as likely to err toward the Celts and the Britons and the nature of Britain as an island of perpetual intermingling rather than a fixed and static ethnostate that right-wing forces sometimes, often, present it to be. Just as, in the case of Bush’s “The Ninth Wave,” this tangle of references becomes more an experiential and literary bedrock upon which a new project is constructed, less the stones of its making and more the soil that nourishes its roots as it reaches out to other regions. Her “Ninth Wave” doesn’t deploy those referenced figures directly save for the title and the concept of that girding wave which separates earth from the otherworld, here rendered as the threat of drowning following a shipwreck but, like all great prog, begs us not to consider the story as pure literalism but also as an allegorical symbolic piece of theater. The references serve more to gesture to the tenors of mythology and poeticism, especially as rendered by the Romantics, a set of poets who also happened to have been broadly favored by the big prog rock artists Britain produced in the early ’70s.

“The Ninth Wave” is often treated in critical spaces as a single composition second and a set of songs first, which is improper. It seems most are tricked by the tracking, separating out the movements as separate pieces rather than a single, uniform, unskippable piece of music. But this seems to have been done more as a response to a growing concern in critical and commercial spaces in the late ’70s about the epics that had begun to consume the worlds of rock, folk, jazz, and even R&B and pop rather than a pure effort to portray it as fully disconnected pieces. Kate Bush in her brief interviews regarding the record has described it as functionally a soundtrack to a film never made, something she would explore later with her project The Line, the Cross and the Curve comprising a song suite plucked from her then-new record The Red Shoes, developing the material for that film project largely from the first side of that album. This can be correlated mostly to the narrative requirements and how they differed for each project. The Line film, with its varied scenes ornamenting the central narrative tension of the magical realist conceit of cursed ballet shoes, functions more like a novel, with discrete and self-contained scenes or chapters that built holographically into a new three-dimensional whole when viewed as a piece rather than as separate installments. “The Ninth Wave,” meanwhile, is closer to a novella, a single extended scene that undergoes fantastical permutation but still functionally adheres to traditional theatrical conceits of unity of place and figure. Viewing the pieces of The Red Shoes first side as separate on their own but unified only within the context of their film works because they were constructed to be emotionally self-contained figures; the pieces of “The Ninth Wave,” while compelling and powerful in their own right, become structurally confusing if isolated and stranded from one another, with pieces like “Waking the Witch” and “Jig of Life” feeling odd as standalone pieces.

The approach on “The Ninth Wave” in terms of musical singularity and through-composition may admittedly differ from such prog epics as “Close to the Edge” which, despite its 20-ish minutes of length, functions in a fairly typical A-A’-B-A” format structurally, but its more self-contained movements still have a direct antecedent in the world of prog. Thick as a Brick, for instance, despite being a 40-plus minute single composition over two sides of vinyl, structurally has rather disconnected movements, unifying them more in terms of instrumental palette and techniques deployed rather than necessarily discrete musical or lyrical reference, save for key structuring moments in the middle and end of the piece. The clearest example, however, is “Supper’s Ready,” a bonafide prog classic and hallmark of the genre which, like “The Ninth Wave,” fills its side, especially if you view the brief acoustic instrumental “Horizons” as more or a prelude than a standalone piece. The music of the movements of “Supper’s Ready” are largely disconnected from one another, having little in the way of callbacks and much in the way of pure variety, but are instead unified by their direct storytelling efforts, each movement bent to consideration of narrative needs rather than purely musical ones (though admittedly with a narrative that is quite, um, unique, and especially atypical of standard storytelling).

One can find this approach to epics scattered all about the history of prog, from Spock’s Beard to the Flower Kings to the classic epics of Rush and even replicated within Genesis’ history on The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway and the disconnected side-long epic of Duke that was instead spread out over the whole of the record to obscure its presence. The connection of the first side of Hounds of Love to prog more generally functions on a song-by-song sonic basis, with clear connection and sonic influence being drawn from those theatrical and moody setpieces deployed in a rock and pop context, but “The Ninth Wave” in particular with its jarring mood shifts and emotional developments around the mythologically- and poetically-driven story of a person battling through the oneiric/thanatopic realms of sleep on the edge of death in the cold waters of England’s seas absolutely screams prog rock.

Its lack of inclusion in these discussions happened for such a long stretch and by so many figures largely for two reasons. First is a generalized disinterest in certain fans’ minds of pop music, something derived from rockist attitudes and a generalized bitterness after losing the cultural wars to punk in a certain way. Second is a general disdain for prog and what it came to represent to people, even as they indulged joyfully in its fruits. Take, for instance, the long cultural battle to get Radiohead to admit that they’re a prog band, Marillion’s famous brief spurning of the term or Steven Wilson’s long resistance to seeing his music labelled as such. Hell, Slint’s masterpiece Spiderland was once described as sounding like Red-era King Crimson, but meant as a slag and not a compliment, despite that particular King Crimson record also being a masterpiece. So it’s no wonder that certain fans of Bush’s work would seek to protect her music from those associations, even as she consistently worked with and cited records and groups from that world alongside her other influences.

She would even strike back against the dismissal of “The Ninth Wave” as a single longform composition with her record Aerial. On its release, it was a double disc album with each disc bearing its own subtitle, just like Hounds of Love, here with the titles “A Sea of Honey” and “A Sky of Honey”. Just like Hounds of Love, the second disc was a single long-form composition broken up into multiple tracks for ease of listening but intended always as a single piece of music. This comparative form makes sense; this was, after all, her first record in over a decade, and what better way to return than by emulating the structure of her most beloved masterpiece record? On later editions, the second disc was even indexed as a single piece, now called “An Endless Sky of Honey”, a 40+ minute long epic, though this was later reverted to its original indexing for the 2018 remaster.

The final piece of this puzzle came during her brief run of concerts in the mid 2010s under the title Before The Dawn. These concerts were multi-act theatrical affairs, drawing on and expanding the blend of theatrical rock and pop concert idiom developed initially by psychedelic and prog bands before being adopted and explored by mainstream pop figures such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, and more. In these performances, the second act was “The Ninth Wave” in its totality, with lightly expanded theatrical elements to account for staging and to more properly convey literal components of the narrative of a person floating in cold water awaiting rescue, while the third act was “A Sky of Honey” in its totality with more surreal and naturalist symbolic imagery. These are, notably, the only official live performances of material from either suite, indicating at least the artist’s view of them is that they are individual interlocking but ultimately inseparable bits.

***

The relevance of this abundance of information is a single message in two directions. Kate Bush is, full-stop, a progressive music artist, and furthermore is a progressive music artist above any other genre consideration. This is an important thing to stomach for people both within the world of prog who may view her as outside but also just as important for even fans of hers that view her as apart from the worlds of Gentle Giant and Dream Theater and Magma. She dresses her music with more discrete melody, certainly, and focuses much more on certain perfections of pop songwriting, but between the avant-gardeist song collage elements of “Waking the Witch,” the mythologically-tied Irishness to mirror the Hy-Brasil guarding magic of the ninth wave itself in “Jig of Life” to even the sonic recapitulation of key melodies from “A Deal With God” in the movement “Hello Earth,” Bush’s “The Ninth Wave” alone shows more than enough of the experimentalist and boundary-pushing tendencies necessary to be viewed as progressive music. That she does so with commanding melodies and harmonies and absolutely perfect tone choices and compositional pacing is a boon, not a detriment, and to say otherwise is to imply that we or others define prog by being, to be blunt, bad at song, which is emphatically untrue. Tony Banks, perhaps the greatest prog keyboardist of all time, holds that position precisely because of his ear for endlessly beautiful melodies and chordal accompaniments and perfect tonal/timbral choices; that Kate Bush comfortably lives in precisely that same air is only a credit and never, ever a detriment.

Hounds of Love lives above the clouds of we mere mortals, breathing the same rarefied air as other all-time greats as Bob Marley’s Exodus, Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and Beethoven’s ninth. But, beyond that, it is also one of the greatest progressive rock albums ever recorded. It’s broad acceptance and success beyond the shores of prog shouldn’t be seen as a betrayal of its own proggy nature but, instead, closer to Pink Floyd’s massive appeal and acclaim or even, perhaps, as similar to Kanye West’s brief life as a prog star following My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (even though we all know how that story would end). The fact that Kate Bush in general and Hounds of Love in particular meant so much to so many, even in the years were prog was a four-letter word as far as rock criticism and acceptance were concerned, is evidence that these sounds and ideas always had power and always were loved. The only thing that changed was our response to a label, not to the fundamental function that label represented.

But, more simply: Hounds of Love is a perfect album.

"The Coming of Arthur" from Idylls Of The King
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)



1 Leodogran , the King of Cameliard,
2 Had one fair daughter, and none other child;
3 And she was fairest of all flesh on earth,
4 Guinevere, and in her his one delight.

5 For many a petty king ere Arthur came
6 Ruled in this isle, and ever waging war
7 Each upon other, wasted all the land;
8 And still from time to time the heathen host
9 Swarm'd overseas, and harried what was left.
10 And so there grew great tracts of wilderness,
11 Wherein the beast was ever more and more,
12 But man was less and less, till Arthur came.
13 For first Aurelius lived and fought and died,
14 And after him King Uther fought and died,
15 But either fail'd to make the kingdom one.
16 And after these King Arthur for a space,
17 And thro' the puissance of his Table Round,
18 Drew all their petty princedoms under him,
19 Their king and head, and made a realm, and reign'd.

20 And thus the land of Cameliard was waste,
21 Thick with wet woods, and many a beast therein,
22 And none or few to scare or chase the beast;
23 So that wild dog, and wolf and boar and bear
24 Came night and day, and rooted in the fields,
25 And wallow'd in the gardens of the King.
26 And ever and anon the wolf would steal
27 The children and devour, but now and then,
28 Her own brood lost or dead, lent her fierce teat
29 To human sucklings; and the children, housed
30 In her foul den, there at their meat would growl,
31 And mock their foster-mother on four feet,
32 Till, straighten'd, they grew up to wolf-like men,
33 Worse than the wolves. And King Leodogran
34 Groan'd for the Roman legions here again,
35 And Cæsar's eagle: then his brother king,
36 Urien, assail'd him: last a heathen horde,
37 Reddening the sun with smoke and earth with blood,
38 And on the spike that split the mother's heart
39 Spitting the child, brake on him, till, amazed,
40 He knew not whither he should turn for aid.

41 But---for he heard of Arthur newly crown'd,
42 Tho' not without an uproar made by those
43 Who cried, 'He is not Uther's son'---the King
44 Sent to him, saying, 'Arise, and help us thou!
45 For here between the man and beast we die.'

46 And Arthur yet had done no deed of arms,
47 But heard the call, and came: and Guinevere
48 Stood by the castle walls to watch him pass;
49 But since he neither wore on helm or shield
50 The golden symbol of his kinglihood,
51 But rode a simple knight among his knights,
52 And many of these in richer arms than he,
53 She saw him not, or mark'd not, if she saw,
54 One among many, tho' his face was bare.
55 But Arthur, looking downward as he past,
56 Felt the light of her eyes into his life
57 Smite on the sudden, yet rode on, and pitch'd
58 His tents beside the forest. Then he drave
59 The heathen; after, slew the beast, and fell'd
60 The forest, letting in the sun, and made
61 Broad pathways for the hunter and the knight
62 And so return'd.

62 For while he linger'd there,
63 A doubt that ever smoulder'd in the hearts
64 Of those great Lords and Barons of his realm
65 Flash'd forth and into war: for most of these,
66 Colleaguing with a score of petty kings,
67 Made head against him, crying, 'Who is he
68 That he should rule us? who hath proven him
69 King Uther's son? for lo! we look at him,
70 And find nor face nor bearing, limbs nor voice,
71 Are like to those of Uther whom we knew.
72 This is the son of Gorloïs, not the King;
73 This is the son of Anton, not the King.'

74 And Arthur, passing thence to battle, felt
75 Travail, and throes and agonies of the life,
76 Desiring to be join'd with Guinevere;
77 And thinking as he rode, 'Her father said
78 That there between the man and beast they die.
79 Shall I not lift her from this land of beasts
80 Up to my throne, and side by side with me?
81 What happiness to reign a lonely king,
82 Vext---O ye stars that shudder over me,
83 O earth that soundest hollow under me,
84 Vext with waste dreams? for saving I be join'd
85 To her that is the fairest under heaven,
86 I seem as nothing in the mighty world,
87 And cannot will my will, nor work my work
88 Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm
89 Victor and lord. But were I join'd with her,
90 Then might we live together as one life,
91 And reigning with one will in everything
92 Have power on this dark land to lighten it,
93 And power on this dead world to make it live.'

94 Thereafter---as he speaks who tells the tale---
95 When Arthur reach'd a field-of-battle bright
96 With pitch'd pavilions of his foe, the world
97 Was all so clear about him, that he saw
98 The smallest rock far on the faintest hill,
99 And even in high day the morning star.
100 So when the King had set his banner broad,
101 At once from either side, with trumpet-blast,
102 And shouts, and clarions shrilling unto blood,
103 The long-lanced battle let their horses run.
104 And now the Barons and the kings prevail'd,
105 And now the King, as here and there that war
106 Went swaying; but the Powers who walk the world
107 Made lightnings and great thunders over him,
108 And dazed all eyes, till Arthur by main might,
109 And mightier of his hands with every blow,
110 And leading all his knighthood threw the kings
111 Carados, Urien, Cradlemont of Wales,
112 Claudias, and Clariance of Northumberland,
113 The King Brandagoras of Latangor,
114 With Anguisant of Erin, Morganore,
115 And Lot of Orkney. Then, before a voice
116 As dreadful as the shout of one who sees
117 To one who sins, and deems himself alone
118 And all the world asleep, they swerved and brake
119 Flying, and Arthur call'd to stay the brands
120 That hack'd among the flyers, 'Ho! they yield!'
121 So like a painted battle the war stood
122 Silenced, the living quiet as the dead,
123 And in the heart of Arthur joy was lord.
124 He laugh'd upon his warrior whom he loved
125 And honour'd most. 'Thou dost not doubt me King,
126 So well thine arm hath wrought for me to-day.'
127 'Sir and my liege,' he cried, 'the fire of God
128 Descends upon thee in the battle-field:
129 I know thee for my King!' Whereat the two,
130 For each had warded either in the fight,
131 Sware on the field of death a deathless love.
132 And Arthur said, 'Man's word is God in man:
133 Let chance what will, I trust thee to the death.'

134 Then quickly from the foughten field he sent
135 Ulfius, and Brastias, and Bedivere,
136 His new-made knights, to King Leodogran,
137 Saying, 'If I in aught have served thee well,
138 Give me thy daughter Guinevere to wife.'

139 Whom when he heard, Leodogran in heart
140 Debating---'How should I that am a king,
141 However much he holp me at my need,
142 Give my one daughter saving to a king,
143 And a king's son?'---lifted his voice, and call'd
144 A hoary man, his chamberlain, to whom
145 He trusted all things, and of him required
146 His counsel: 'Knowest thou aught of Arthur's birth?'

147 Then spake the hoary chamberlain and said,
148 'Sir King, there be but two old men that know:
149 And each is twice as old as I; and one
150 Is Merlin, the wise man that ever served
151 King Uther thro' his magic art; and one
152 Is Merlin's master (so they call him) Bleys,
153 Who taught him magic; but the scholar ran
154 Before the master, and so far, that Bleys
155 Laid magic by, and sat him down, and wrote
156 All things and whatsoever Merlin did
157 In one great annal-book, where after-years
158 Will learn the secret of our Arthur's birth.'

159 To whom the King Leodogran replied,
160 'O friend, had I been holpen half as well
161 By this King Arthur as by thee to-day,
162 Then beast and man had had their share of me:
163 But summon here before us yet once more
164 Ulfius, and Brastias, and Bedivere.'

165 Then, when they came before him, the King said,
166 'I have seen the cuckoo chased by lesser fowl,
167 And reason in the chase: but wherefore now
168 Do these your lords stir up the heat of war,
169 Some calling Arthur born of Gorloïs,
170 Others of Anton? Tell me, ye yourselves,
171 Hold ye this Arthur for King Uther's son?

172 And Ulfius and Brastias answer'd, 'Ay.'
173 Then Bedivere, the first of all his knights
174 Knighted by Arthur at his crowning, spake---
175 For bold in heart and act and word was he,
176 Whenever slander breathed against the King---

177 'Sir, there be many rumours on this head:
178 For there be those who hate him in their hearts,
179 Call him baseborn, and since his ways are sweet,
180 And theirs are bestial, hold him less than man:
181 And there be those who deem him more than man,
182 And dream he dropt from heaven: but my belief
183 In all this matter---so ye care to learn---
184 Sir, for ye know that in King Uther's time
185 The prince and warrior Gorloïs, he that held
186 Tintagil castle by the Cornish sea,
187 Was wedded with a winsome wife, Ygerne:
188 And daughters had she borne him,---one whereof,
189 Lot's wife, the Queen of Orkney, Bellicent,
190 Hath ever like a loyal sister cleaved
191 To Arthur,---but a son she had not borne.
192 And Uther cast upon her eyes of love:
193 But she, a stainless wife to Gorloïs,
194 So loathed the bright dishonour of his love,
195 That Gorloïs and King Uther went to war:
196 And overthrown was Gorloïs and slain.
197 Then Uther in his wrath and heat besieged
198 Ygerne within Tintagil, where her men,
199 Seeing the mighty swarm about their walls,
200 Left her and fled, and Uther enter'd in,
201 And there was none to call to but himself.
202 So, compass'd by the power of the King,
203 Enforced she was to wed him in her tears,
204 And with a shameful swiftness: afterward,
205 Not many moons, King Uther died himself,
206 Moaning and wailing for an heir to rule
207 After him, lest the realm should go to wrack.
208 And that same night, the night of the new year,
209 By reason of the bitterness and grief
210 That vext his mother, all before his time
211 Was Arthur born, and all as soon as born
212 Deliver'd at a secret postern-gate
213 To Merlin, to be holden far apart
214 Until his hour should come; because the lords
215 Of that fierce day were as the lords of this,
216 Wild beasts, and surely would have torn the child
217 Piecemeal among them, had they known; for each
218 But sought to rule for his own self and hand,
219 And many hated Uther for the sake
220 Of Gorloïs. Wherefore Merlin took the child,
221 And gave him to Sir Anton, an old knight
222 And ancient friend of Uther; and his wife
223 Nursed the young prince, and rear'd him with her own;
224 And no man knew. And ever since the lords
225 Have foughten like wild beasts among themselves,
226 So that the realm has gone to wrack: but now,
227 This year, when Merlin (for his hour had come)
228 Brought Arthur forth, and set him in the hall,
229 Proclaiming, "Here is Uther's heir, your king,"
230 A hundred voices cried, "Away with him!
231 No king of ours! a son of Gorloïs he,
232 Or else the child of Anton, and no king,
233 Or else baseborn." Yet Merlin thro' his craft,
234 And while the people clamour'd for a king,
235 Had Arthur crown'd; but after, the great lords
236 Banded, and so brake out in open war.'

237 Then while the King debated with himself
238 If Arthur were the child of shamefulness,
239 Or born the son of Gorloïs, after death,
240 Or Uther's son, and born before his time,
241 Or whether there were truth in anything
242 Said by these three, there came to Cameliard,
243 With Gawain and young Modred, her two sons,
244 Lot's wife, the Queen of Orkney, Bellicent;
245 Whom as he could, not as he would, the King
246 Made feast for, saying, as they sat at meat,

247 'A doubtful throne is ice on summer seas.
248 Ye come from Arthur's court. Victor his men
249 Report him! Yea, but ye---think ye this king---
250 So many those that hate him, and so strong,
251 So few his knights, however brave they be---
252 Hath body enow to hold his foemen down?'

253 'O King,' she cried, 'and I will tell thee: few,
254 Few, but all brave, all of one mind with him;
255 For I was near him when the savage yells
256 Of Uther's peerage died, and Arthur sat
257 Crown'd on the daïs, and his warriors cried,
258 "Be thou the king, and we will work thy will
259 Who love thee." Then the King in low deep tones,
260 And simple words of great authority,
261 Bound them by so strait vows to his own self,
262 That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some
263 Were pale as at the passing of a ghost,
264 Some flush'd, and others dazed, as one who wakes
265 Half-blinded at the coming of a light.

266 'But when he spake and cheer'd his Table Round
267 With large, divine, and comfortable words,
268 Beyond my tongue to tell thee---I beheld
269 From eye to eye thro' all their Order flash
270 A momentary likeness of the King:
271 And ere it left their faces, thro' the cross
272 And those around it and the Crucified,
273 Down from the casement over Arthur, smote
274 Flame-colour, vert and azure, in three rays,
275 One falling upon each of three fair queens,
276 Who stood in silence near his throne, the friends
277 Of Arthur, gazing on him, tall, with bright
278 Sweet faces, who will help him at his need.

279 'And there I saw mage Merlin, whose vast wit
280 And hundred winters are but as the hands
281 Of loyal vassals toiling for their liege.

282 'And near him stood the Lady of the Lake,
283 Who knows a subtler magic than his own---
284 Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful.
285 She gave the King his huge cross-hilted sword,
286 Whereby to drive the heathen out: a mist
287 Of incense curl'd about her, and her face
288 Wellnigh was hidden in the minster gloom;
289 But there was heard among the holy hymns
290 A voice as of the waters, for she dwells
291 Down in a deep; calm, whatsoever storms
292 May shake the world, and when the surface rolls,
293 Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord.

294 'There likewise I beheld Excalibur
295 Before him at his crowning borne, the sword
296 That rose from out the bosom of the lake,
297 And Arthur row'd across and took it---rich
298 With jewels, elfin Urim, on the hilt,
299 Bewildering heart and eye---the blade so bright
300 That men are blinded by it---on one side,
301 Graven in the oldest tongue of all this world,
302 "Take me," but turn the blade and ye shall see,
303 And written in the speech ye speak yourself,
304 "Cast me away!" And sad was Arthur's face
305 Taking it, but old Merlin counsell'd him,
306 "Take thou and strike! the time to cast away
307 Is yet far-off." So this great brand the king
308 Took, and by this will beat his foemen down.'

309 Thereat Leodogran rejoiced, but thought
310 To sift his doubtings to the last, and ask'd,
311 Fixing full eyes of question on her face,
312 'The swallow and the swift are near akin,
313 But thou art closer to this noble prince,
314 Being his own dear sister;' and she said,
315 'Daughter of Gorloïs and Ygerne am I;'
316 'And therefore Arthur's sister?' ask'd the King
317 She answer'd, 'These be secret things,' and sign'd
318 To those two sons to pass, and let them be.
319 And Gawain went, and breaking into song
320 Sprang out, and follow'd by his flying hair
321 Ran like a colt, and leapt at all he saw:
322 But Modred laid his ear beside the doors,
323 And there half-heard; the same that afterward
324 Struck for the throne, and striking found his doom.

325 And then the Queen made answer, 'What know I?
326 For dark my mother was in eyes and hair,
327 And dark in hair and eyes am I; and dark
328 Was Gorloïs, yea and dark was Uther too,
329 Wellnigh to blackness; but this King is fair
330 Beyond the race of Britons and of men.
331 Moreover, always in my mind I hear
332 A cry from out the dawning of my life,
333 A mother weeping, and I hear her say,
334 "O that ye had some brother, pretty one,
335 To guard thee on the rough ways of the world."'

336 'Ay,' said the King, 'and hear ye such a cry?
337 But when did Arthur chance upon thee first?'

338 'O King!' she cried, 'and I will tell thee true:
339 He found me first when yet a little maid:
340 Beaten I had been for a little fault
341 Whereof I was not guilty; and out I ran
342 And flung myself down on a bank of heath,
343 And hated this fair world and all therein,
344 And wept, and wish'd that I were dead; and he---
345 I know not whether of himself he came,
346 Or brought by Merlin, who, they say, can walk
347 Unseen at pleasure---he was at my side,
348 And spake sweet words, and comforted my heart,
349 And dried my tears, being a child with me.
350 And many a time he came, and evermore
351 As I grew greater grew with me; and sad
352 At times he seem'd, and sad with him was I,
353 Stern too at times, and then I loved him not,
354 But sweet again, and then I loved him well.
355 And now of late I see him less and less,
356 But those first days had golden hours for me,
357 For then I surely thought he would be king.

358 'But let me tell thee now another tale:
359 For Bleys, our Merlin's master, as they say,
360 Died but of late, and sent his cry to me,
361 To hear him speak before he left his life.
362 Shrunk like a fairy changeling lay the mage;
363 And when I enter'd told me that himself
364 And Merlin ever served about the King,
365 Uther, before he died; and on the night
366 When Uther in Tintagil past away
367 Moaning and wailing for an heir, the two
368 Left the still King, and passing forth to breathe,
369 Then from the castle gateway by the chasm
370 Descending thro' the dismal night---a night
371 In which the bounds of heaven and earth were lost---
372 Beheld, so high upon the dreary deeps
373 It seem'd in heaven, a ship, the shape thereof
374 A dragon wing'd, and all from stem to stern
375 Bright with a shining people on the decks,
376 And gone as soon as seen. And then the two
377 Dropt to the cove, and watch'd the great sea fall,
378 Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
379 Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
380 And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
381 Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame:
382 And down the wave and in the flame was borne
383 A naked babe, and rode to Merlin's feet,
384 Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried "The King!
385 Here is an heir for Uther!" And the fringe
386 Of that great breaker, sweeping up the strand,
387 Lash'd at the wizard as he spake the word,
388 And all at once all round him rose in fire,
389 So that the child and he were clothed in fire.
390 And presently thereafter follow'd calm,
391 Free sky and stars: "And this same child," he said,
392 "Is he who reigns; nor could I part in peace
393 Till this were told." And saying this the seer
394 Went thro' the strait and dreadful pass of death,
395 Not ever to be question'd any more
396 Save on the further side; but when I met
397 Merlin, and ask'd him if these things were truth---
398 The shining dragon and the naked child
399 Descending in the glory of the seas---
400 He laugh'd as is his wont, and answer'd me
401 In riddling triplets of old time, and said:

402 '"Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow in the sky!
403 A young man will be wiser by and by;
404 An old man's wit may wander ere he die.

405 Rain, rain, and sun! a rainbow on the lea!
406 And truth is this to me, and that to thee;
407 And truth or clothed or naked let it be.

408 Rain, sun, and rain! and the free blossom blows:
409 Sun, rain, and sun! and where is he who knows?
410 From the great deep to the great deep he goes."

411 'So Merlin riddling anger'd me; but thou
412 Fear not to give this King thine only child,
413 Guinevere: so great bards of him will sing
414 Hereafter; and dark sayings from of old
415 Ranging and ringing thro' the minds of men,
416 And echo'd by old folk beside their fires
417 For comfort after their wage-work is done,
418 Speak of the King; and Merlin in our time
419 Hath spoken also, not in jest, and sworn
420 Tho' men may wound him that he will not die,
421 But pass, again to come; and then or now
422 Utterly smite the heathen underfoot,
423 Till these and all men hail him for their king.'

424 She spake and King Leodogran rejoiced,
425 But musing 'Shall I answer yea or nay?'
426 Doubted, and drowsed, nodded and slept, and saw,
427 Dreaming, a slope of land that ever grew,
428 Field after field, up to a height, the peak
429 Haze-hidden, and thereon a phantom king,
430 Now looming, and now lost; and on the slope
431 The sword rose, the hind fell, the herd was driven,
432 Fire glimpsed; and all the land from roof and rick,
433 In drifts of smoke before a rolling wind,
434 Stream'd to the peak, and mingled with the haze
435 And made it thicker; while the phantom king
436 Sent out at times a voice; and here or there
437 Stood one who pointed toward the voice, the rest
438 Slew on and burnt, crying, 'No king of ours,
439 No son of Uther, and no king of ours;'
440 Till with a wink his dream was changed, the haze
441 Descended, and the solid earth became
442 As nothing, but the King stood out in heaven,
443 Crown'd. And Leodogran awoke, and sent
444 Ulfius, and Brastias and Bedivere,
445 Back to the court of Arthur answering yea.

446 Then Arthur charged his warrior whom he loved
447 And honour'd most, Sir Lancelot, to ride forth
448 And bring the Queen;---and watch'd him from the gates:
449 And Lancelot past away among the flowers,
450 (For then was latter April) and return'd
451 Among the flowers, in May, with Guinevere.
452 To whom arrived, by Dubric the high saint,
453 Chief of the church in Britain, and before
454 The stateliest of her altar-shrines, the King
455 That morn was married, while in stainless white,
456 The fair beginners of a nobler time,
457 And glorying in their vows and him, his knights
458 Stood round him, and rejoicing in his joy.
459 Far shone the fields of May thro' open door,
460 The sacred altar blossom'd white with May,
461 The Sun of May descended on their King,
462 They gazed on all earth's beauty in their Queen,
463 Roll'd incense, and there past along the hymns
464 A voice as of the waters, while the two
465 Sware at the shrine of Christ a deathless love:
466 And Arthur said, 'Behold, thy doom is mine.
467 Let chance what will, I love thee to the death!'
468 To whom the Queen replied with drooping eyes,
469 'King and my lord, I love thee to the death!'
470 And holy Dubric spread his hands and spake,
471 'Reign ye, and live and love, and make the world
472 Other, and may thy Queen be one with thee,
473 And all this Order of thy Table Round
474 Fulfil the boundless purpose of their King!'
475 So Dubric said; but when they left the shrine
476 Great Lords from Rome before the portal stood,
477 In scornful stillness gazing as they past;
478 Then while they paced a city all on fire
479 With sun and cloth of gold, the trumpets blew,
480 And Arthur's knighthood sang before the King:---


481 'Blow trumpet, for the world is white with May;
482 Blow trumpet, the long night hath roll'd away!
483 Blow thro' the living world---"Let the King reign."

484 'Shall Rome or Heathen rule in Arthur's realm?
485 Flash brand and lance, fall battleaxe upon helm,
486 Fall bettleaxe, and flash brand! Let the King reign.

487 'Strike for the King and live! his knights have heard
488 That God hath told the King a secret word.
489 Fall battleaxe, and flash brand! Let the King reign.

490 'Blow trumpet! he will lift us from the dust.
491 Blow trumpet! live the strength and die the lust!
492 Clang battleaxe, and clash brand! Let the King reign.

493 'Strike for the King and die! and if thou diest,
494 The King is King, and ever wills the highest.
495 Clang battleaxe, and clash brand! Let the King reign.

496 'Blow, for our Sun is mighty in his May!
497 Blow, for our Sun is mightier day by day!
498 Clang battleaxe, and clash brand! Let the King reign.

499 'The King will follow Christ, and we the King
500 In whom high God hath breathed a secret thing.
501 Fall battleaxe, and flash brand! Let the King reign.'

502 So sang the knighthood, moving to their hall.
503 There at the banquet those great Lords from Rome,
504 The slowly-fading mistress of the world,
505 Strode in, and claim'd their tribute as of yore.
506 But Arthur spake, 'Behold, for these have sworn
507 To wage my wars, and worship me their King;
508 The old order changeth, yielding place to new;
509 And we that fight for our fair father Christ,
510 Seeing that ye be grown too weak and old
511 To drive the heathen from your Roman wall,
512 No tribute will we pay:' so those great lords
513 Drew back in wrath, and Arthur strove with Rome.

514 And Arthur and his knighthood for a space
515 Were all one will, and thro' that strength the King
516 Drew in the petty princedoms under him,
517 Fought, and in twelve great battles overcame
518 The heathen hordes, and made a realm and reign'd.

Maxence a écrit:C'est un auteur auto-édité. J'ignore ce qu'il vaut, mais je trouve l'idée vraiment intéressante... Qu'en pensez-vous ?

Maxence a écrit:Tu sais d'où viennent ces sources ?

Maxence a écrit: Vu la pauvreté des livres ou documentaires sur Kate Bush en France, il faudra bien que je me penche sur des éléments en anglais...

Maxence a écrit:et je recherche pas vraiment un livre qui retrace vaguement sa discographie ou qui nous parle de sa carrière en général, mais qui nous révèle des choses intéressantes, des petits secrets, des anecdotes, des témoignages...

Maxence a écrit:Je pense que l'ultime cadeau que je me ferais avec mon argent sera Under the Ivy, mais l'anglais me fait peur... Est-ce que c'est un anglais littéraire, ou ça peut rester compréhensible pour un élève de seconde ?