The Annotated Dreaming (Patreon)

As I’m gearing up to start writing about The Dreaming, I’ve figured I should give y’all a taste of this next chapter of Dreams of Orgonon, as much to sate your appetites while I previsualize the chapter. So here we are: a breakdown of how Dreams of Orgonon Chapter 4 will look.

· Sat In Your Lap

· Leave It Open

· Get Out of My House

The Dreaming has been the blog’s easiest chapter to chronologically organize so far. With the previous albums, I’ve sometimes had a solid idea of when some songs were recorded, but I’ve often had to resort to guess work or imposing a narrative structure on it for the sake of dramatic continuity. However, The Dreaming’s recording sessions have been well documented for the public thanks to Graeme Thomson’s chapter on the album in Under the Ivy, which tells us when, where, and with whom songs were recorded. The Dreaming was recorded in stages, with Bush entering one studio to work with an engineer until they were no longer available, and then relocating to another studio with a different engineer. 

The first block of sessions took place at Townhouse Studios in Shepherd’s Bush in May 1981. These were helmed by Bush and engineer Hugh Padgham (collaborator of Phil Collins and XTC, among others), and produced backing tracks for “Sat In Your Lap,” “Leave It Open,” and “Get Out of My House.” Some of The Dreaming’s major themes are already in place on these songs: madness as feminist liberation, systemic suppression, and the vulnerability of the body. The Dreaming goes through many stages after this, but the consistency of its theming is one of its most fascinating strengths.

· Suspended in Gaffa

· Lord of the Reedy River

· Houdini

· The Dreaming

When Padgham left, engineer Nick Launay took over the sessions, which lasted through June. Launay and Bush had a steadier working relationship, largely due to their mutual eagerness to sonically experiment and closeness in age (Launay was 20, Bush 22). The Dreaming’s “world music” presence becomes more pronounced in this half of the Townhouse sessions. Repressed colonize populations start to take over the album, becoming the true face of its focus on trauma. The results are troubling, to say the least. I have mixed feelings about The Dreaming — it’s a stupendous achievement that Kate Bush’s career would be poorer without, and it contains some of her best songs. Yet its racial politics are deeply troubling — “The Dreaming” and “Pull Out the Pin” are far more racist than they get criticized for. Bush’s anti-racism and anti-colonialism manifests in… racist and colonialist tropes. And I have a hard time getting around that. 

· Pull Out the Pin

· Night of the Swallow

July ’81 with Haydn Bendall at Abbey Road. Production gets increasingly complex, as “Night of the Swallow” gets recorded in multiple studios at once while getting a full Irish band arrangement in Dublin. 

· All the Love 

· There Goes a Tenner

The last batch of tracks, and overdubs, are created at Odyssey Studios with Paul Hardiman for the rest of the year.

· Flowers

· Ne t’enfuis pas

Separate projects altogether.