To mark 4o 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
Misha Hervieu, then named Michael, is a dancer who appeared with Kate in the Running Up That Hill video – the stunning, sensual choreography (by Diane Gray) since enjoyed by hundreds of millions on Youtube. “The issue was, Kate is quite petite, and I’m quite tall, at five-foot 10. But we discovered the height difference allowed Kate to wrap around my body, like a snake. And I could lift her really high. (…) She keeps her private life very private, which I respected, but she allowed me in for the video.” In 1985, Hervieu was working full-time at West End circus spectacle, Barnum. Arriving for an audition at the London dance studio, Pineapple, she didn’t know it was for a Kate Bush song at first. “She was hiding a bit”, she recalled to MOJO. Kate and Misha were captured in a stunning series of photographs by Kate’s brother John Carder Bush.
Hounds of Love – happening of the day
The video for Kate’s Running Up That Hill has chalked up an incredible 338 million views on Youtube, a massive amount of those since the song was featured in Stranger Things in 2022. Kate spoke to Rockline about the video in 1985. “We’re wearing Hakama, which are the Japanese trousers. It was really fun working on that video, I’ve been working with Diane Gray, a dance teacher who I found at the top of ’83. And while I’d been making the album, I hadn’t really had any time to carry on the dance at all, for me it’s one thing at a time. And when we had to make that video, I basically went into full training again from a year of having done nothing. And we worked together, with Diane choreographing, and it was fantastic, it was just such a such good experience. And I think what we were trying to do was, we felt that all the videos that are around that there’s a lot of dance appearing in them, but it’s not really serious dance. And no-one has yet tried to film just a nice serious piece of dance, properly, and that’s what we were trying to achieve…“
And she spoke to MTV about those masks: “Well that was very much a coincidence, where the director was talking about these masks and I had a film on video that we’d taped that had a section where people were wearing these photographic masks. And we just felt that it was a really interesting idea, this crowd that would suddenly sort of rush in through the dance sequence. And the idea of the crowd being the force of either the man or the woman and so the faces change from the man to the woman. And then the idea of drowning in yourself. Just sort of those kind of plays on things” In the USA, Kate’s appearance on the BBC TV show Wogan was screened on several channels, the original being seen in some quarters as overly erotic!
Hounds of Love – artefact of the day
(Brought to you in association with katebushcollectibles.com)
In the mid-80s, music videos were distributed on video tape and this lovely but hard to find VHS cassette promo video for Running Up That Hill is a 1-track VHS PAL release in plastic case with custom picture insert.
Hounds of Love – trivia of the day!
The design of the Hounds of Love cover, that wide white border, was influenced by a record label that John Carder Bush and Kate were into called Wyndham Hill Records. They loved their design aesthetic.
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