To mark 40 years of Hounds of Love we’re putting together a time capsule each day for the month of September – a daily miscellany of the people, events and objects that relate to this momentous work, whether back in 1985 or right up to the present day…
Hounds of Love – Person of the day
In June last year, we were very sad to hear the news that the great Canadian actor, Donald Sutherland, had died at the age of 88 after a long illness. He was the star of well over 100 films including Don’t Look Now, Kelly’s Heroes, M.A.S.H and The Hunger Games, but Kate Bush fans will of course always remember Donald for his appearance in the Cloudbusting video in 1985, playing the role of Wilhelm Reich.
Donald spoke about making the video with Dazed in 2015: “Barry Richardson, who was the hairdresser on Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, asked me if I’d do a music video with Kate Bush. I told him no and we went on to other conversations. A couple of days later there was a knock on my door. I lived in the Savoy Hotel (in London). On the river. Suite 312. I loved it there. So cosseted. So private. Only the floor butler rang the door. I opened it. There was no one there. I heard a voice saying hello and I looked down. Standing down there was a very small Kate Bush. Barry had told her where I lived. What can you do? She wanted to explain what her video was about. I let her in. She sat down, said some stuff.
All I heard was ‘Wilhelm Reich’. I’d taken an underground copy of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism with me when I went to film (Bernardo) Bertolucci’s Novecento in Parma. Reich’s work informed the psychological foundations of Attila Mellanchini, the character Bernardo had cast me to play. Everything about Reich echoed through me. He was there then and now he was here. Sitting across from me in the person of the very eloquent Kate Bush. Synchronicity. Perfect. She talked some more. I said OK and we made ‘Cloudbusting’. She’s wonderful, Kate Bush. Wonderful. I love that I did it. (What do I remember) about doing it? I remember being in the car and the hill and them taking me, taking Reich, away and looking back through the back window of the car and seeing her, seeing Reich’s son Peter, standing there.“
In 1985 interviews (and ever since) Kate expressed her delight and good fortune at having secured Donald to play the part in her film: “When we were thinking about someone to play the part of the father, we just sort of instantly came up with Donald Sutherland, and everyone laughed, because it’s like, you know, he’s one of the greatest actors in the world, really, and we jokingly thought “yeah, yeah wouldn’t it be great.” So we did actually approach his agent, who immediately said no, he couldn’t because he’s just too busy. But a friend of ours knew a friend of his, who asked him, and he gave us three days of his time in between shooting two other films. And I still can’t believe he did it.
It was a wonderful thing for him to do, give us that time. Made it a very, very special thing for me…I still can’t get over the fact that he did it! It was great! It means a lot to people that someone who is supposedly so famous and inaccessible makes the effort to make themselves accessible for such a little project. I was extremely moved by the fact that he did it; it meant a tremendous amount to me. And to work with him – Jesus, I thought I would never have the luck. I was his co-star! Ridiculous!…He puts out such an energy of sensitivity to the situation that I just had to re-act to him. He was – As far as I was concerned, whenever we were shooting, he *was* my dad. He’s wonderful.”
Hounds of Love – Happening of the day
A delightfully unique performance of the song Cloudbusting from Kate happened in December 1985 on the Fantastico programme on the Italian TV channel RAI. She would also perform Running Up That Hill on the same broadcast. Prior to Before The Dawn, Cloudbusting was only ever performed by Kate in the flesh a couple of times, and it’s a blessing that Youtube is here to let us see it as it happened. Seemingly recorded in London and sent over on tape for the show, it underscores the joy and exuberance in the track, with Kate smiling throughout, a precursor for how she would deliver the song on stage on 2014.
Joined by nine friends on stage, firstly Paddy Bush and then Del Palmer who stands right beside Kate, they all have opened umbrellas as they sing along with her. It was also the first time since her 1979 shows that Kate was joined in a performance by other females. And, you just know that if time had allowed, Kate would have had a rain machine in there! An utterly lovely performance.
Hounds of Love – Artefact of the day
(Brought to you in association with katebushcollectibles.com)
Well, after featuring the performance above, today’s artefact just had to be this Cloudbusting umbrella, which unlike many of the items we have been featuring, is actually easy to get hold of as it’s for sale on Kate’s official site! The brolly is something she describes on her Hounds of Love site page as being “for those cloudbusting kind of days … ”
It features a spiral design with the following lyrics from the song: “Every time it rains, you’re here in my head, like the sun coming out, I just know that something good is gonna happen, I don’t know when, but just saying it could even make it happen” When this item first went on sale in November 2023 it sold out instantly, Kate’s team underestimating the demand. It has been restocked several times since.
Hounds of Love – Trivia of the day!
In 2014, for the stunning filmed sequences of Kate in the life jacket projected on screen at Before The Dawn, several days filming in a huge water tank and a large team of film professionals and divers at Pinewood studios were called for (Kate contracted mild hypothermia too!). However back in 1985, a more intimate arrangement was decided upon.
The photo session was of course conducted by Kate’s brother John Carder Bush. In his (essential!) 2015 book, Kate: Inside the Rainbow, John describes the set up for the shoot: “I had sent off for an Australian garden pool, a primitive circle of corrugated metal with clips to hold the plastic pool in place. With the flowers and weeds arranged, we were back in the pre-Raphaelite world of Cathy. I was on a scaffold hanging over the pool, and again, this was right: the warm water that was poured in from the kitchen tap looked black and menacing.”
John also wrote about this shoot in 1985 for the Kate Bush Club newsletter: “This was in many ways much simpler to organise, but a lot harder to take. Because it relates very specifically in image to The Ninth Wave, Kate had to be in water. To be comfortable in the right clothes–in this case a Victorian nightgown–the water had to be warm. To get the feeling of night, sea, the proximity of a large ship, etc., studio lighting was essential. We found some big tanks used in the film business, but they weren’t right visually–and they would pose the problem of filling them with a couple of hundred gallons of warm water and then getting rid of it.
We eventually located a large but shallow paddling-pool, and adapted this so as to minimise the quantity of water we would have to deal with while allowing enough to suggest deep sea and cold night around Kate. Because of the large amount of electricity being used in the lights, leaks of water or big splashes could have been dangerous, and someone was standing by the mains throughout the session. I threw some pond weed into the now steaming water and added the flowers to hint at the debris from a shipwreck. The logistics involved in setting up and blending with Kate’s work in the studio had left no time for rehearsals, so Kate went straight in and I hovered around, first on a ladder, then on the ground, looking for the right angle. And it’s in these cases that polaroid is so useful: I was able to take polaroids and show them to Kate, and in this way we decided that I had to get in the water too in order to get the best angle.
It was while I was printing up the best shots that I noticed that the viewer’s perception of the scene changed dramatically when I altered the natural horizon by printing the photo slightly out of true. So actually, in the original negative, she is obviously lying on her back in water, but in the final print she appears to be standing or floating or running or flying. Also, this change of perspective made the “sea” into a very surreal backcloth, so that you wonder is she part of it, is she in it or what?”
Extra trivia: Apart from the original album back cover shoot and the Before the Dawn filming, there was a third occasion that Kate posed in a water tank in a life jacket – her photo session with Trevor Leighton for the Before the Dawn announcement, poster and publicity in March 2014.
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