Army Dreamers (Patreon)

Army Dreamers Music video German performance ("Mrs. Mopp") Dutch performance Friday Night, Saturday Morning

Never for Ever’s world of senseless homicide, epistolary self-cuckoldry, and generational trauma fixates on an ethos of traumatic familial ruptures. Yet rather than performing a critique of why societal structures have the effects they do, or even in the vain of folk songs like “Army Dreamers,” Never for Ever is nearly a soap opera in its fixation on the everyday tragedies of people whose lives are destroyed by the inventions of the late 20th century. The album’s haunting exaugural tracks help Bush rehearse for The Dreaming; they amalgamate classical instruments and synthesizer innovations to in the service of uncanny meditations on trauma and violence. If Lionheart was Bush’s inward retreat I response to the world’s frightening instability, Never for Ever refocuses that instability with a lens on people’s traumatic experiences.

Bush has dabbled in folk music before, through engagements with parabolic theming, classical acoustic instrumentation, and straight-up rewrites of folk ballads. “Army Dreamers” is more than an engagement with folk music: it’s a Kate Bush folk song, with a smattering of the distaff tragedy of a bereaved mother (“I’ve a bunch of purple flowers/to decorate to mammy’s hero”), whose enlisted son has perished while serving abroad (“four men in uniform/to carry home my little soldier), and antiquated instrumentation, while Bush proffers a hushed vocal with a mock Irish accent. The song’s is produced with the Fairlight CMI, Bush’s new infatuation, sampling a gun cocked by Jay Bush (starting with a sinister click-click). In short order, the cocking of the gun coalesces into an uneasy marriage with Paddy Bush’s mandolin, which begets a dirgeful, four-note figure (A-F-A-C). Accompanying Paddy in the track’s roster of folk instruments is Stuart Elliott with a bodhrán, further emphasizing the debt of “Army Dreamers” to Irish folk music.

Bush’s relationship with her Irish heritage is an incidental part of her music. The daughter of an Irish nurse, she’s long tarried in Great Britain’s folk music, with much quality time with her brothers spent listening to them playing folk songs. Perhaps counterintuitively, her family pastimes turned into a career: as an adult, Catherine Bush still creates folk music with Paddy and Jay. The tradition of folk songs has stayed with her — The Kick Inside closes with an ode to an incestuous Child ballad, and Never for Ever has already featured Bush’s attempt at folk rock in “Violin.” But both of those songs were run through a pop music filter — “The Kick Inside” is an orchestral mini-symphony, and “Violin” is basically just a rock song with a violin in the mix. “Army Dreamers” deploys the technology of popular music, particularly with its Fairlit gun hook, but it’s a more straightforward folk song than anything else Bush has recorded to date. The mandolin and bodhrán bring “Army Dreamers” an acoustic thickness, splinted together by a lugubrious waltz and fatigued backing vocals. Its subject matter is rather folky as well: a mother grieving her beloved soldier is a classical image of modern balladry, as is the proletarian culture and lack of opportunities faced by the mother and her son (“he should have been a rock star/but he never had the money for a guitar,” “he should have been a politician/but he never had a proper education”). Bush’s corpus was born of privilege, but it has room for the dispossessed as well. 

Never for Ever is populated by mothers and wives. Five of its eleven songs explicitly focus on maternal and uxorial figures, and that’s if we don’t count the more broadly familial “All We Ever Look For.” Bush’s wives and mothers tend towards fatigue over their familial roles, experiencing emotions that contradict their outward actions or social operations. Bush’s mothers are an intrinsic good whose absence or loss is a tragedy, and whose losses are a social catastrophe. Key to the mother’s characterization in “Army Dreamers” is absence. She bemoans not merely her lost son, but his lost opportunities and the things she couldn’t provide for him. “What a waste of army dreamers,” muses Bush, in a ritual mourning of military casualties, which treats them as a cessation of dreams. 

The extraordinary aspect of this is the way “Army Dreamers” treats the mother as an individual while still being integral to family success. Stripped of her duties to her son (no other family members are mentioned), she is left to grieve on her own. This suggests that while war is horror and vile, the people who are left behind have their own experiences of it. Women are usually seen as broken when their soldiers fail to come home — this isn’t quite what Bush does. In Bush’s case, she’s as much of a person as ever, so she does what people do: she grieves.  

There’s a touch of sentimentalism to this, if at least a grounded and humanitarian one. Violent deaths are often devastating because they cut short the lives of unsuspecting civilians who’ve been planning to go live their lives as usual the next day. Bush’s anti-militarism is hardly strident or inimical, but “Army Dreamers” has an edge to it, blaming the services of “B.F.P.O” for overseas tragedies (although interestingly, her son’s death appears to be an accident — there’s little fanfare of death, no suggestion of the glory of battle). The horror of the death is largely its silence — all the things that couldn’t happen, no matter how much saying them would make them so.  

The politics of the situation are left understated, as is typical for Bush, and yet with a light inimical rage, as if Bush is finally turning to the British establishment and shouting “look at what you’ve done!” While “Army Dreamers” is far from an indictment of the military-industrial complex (indeed, it has more to do with the British Army’s consumption of Irish civilians than anything else), its highlighting of war as futile is striking. “Give the kid the pick of pips/and give him all your stripes and ribbons/now he’s sitting in his hole/he might as well have buttons and bows” is a line of understated condemnation that spits on military emblems (pips are a British Army insignia) and collapses trenches and graves. “B. F. P. O.,,” intone Bush’s backing vocalists again and again. In interviews, Bush backpedals from any perceived antiwar sentiments in her work, but what’s present is present.

There’s nothing so broad as a blanket condemnation of militarism in “Army Dreamers” though — domestic politics are still politics, but Bush is still far from radical. Little is said about the Irish being ground down by British imperialism beyond the sketch of a single victim. And yet even that much feels more righteously angry than anything Bush has offered up in some time. When mothers are on the line, the world has failed. But it’s going to take until the song after this one to figure out the exact nature of our fuck-ups.