Houdini (Patreon)

Houdini

The Dreaming’s sessions with Nick Launay are exemplary of the album’s intriguingly episodic production history. The Bush/Hugh Padgham tracks explore relationships between headspace and environment and how unreleasing trauma and mental illness can be cathartic. Following Padgham’s departure, Bush’s collaboration with the precocious Nick Launay shift’s The Dreaming’s focus. Bush and Launay’s songs are teeming with trauma and catharsis from a humanist, almost materialist angle. Frequently they anatomize historical subjects, particularly with an eye for subaltern or marginalized narratives. “[It was] very dark and about pain and negativity and the way people treat each other badly,” Bush told Canadian broadcaster Daniel Richer in 1985, asserting “perhaps the biggest influence on the last album was the fact that I was producing it and so I could actually do what I really wanted to for the first time.”

To address “Houdini,” we must start with The Dreaming’s sleeve art. It’s one of the only Bush sleeves where the image is supplied by the song. Its aspect, another creation of fraternal mainstay John Carder Bush, is a sepia photograph in medium closeup depicting a slightly agrestal Bush with her head tilted to the right, with her mouth open wide revealing a key on her tongue, which she passes to a faceless Del Palmer. This image is derived from the lyrics of “Houdini,” which impart the fictionalized yet broadly historical experience of Bess Houdini, widow of premier escapologist Harry Houdini, ventures to contact her late husband through necromantic means (“I wait at the table/hold hands with weeping strangers/wait for you/to join the group”). This is certainly A Scenario for Kate Bush to launch her LP’s image with. The referred-to lyric is “with a kiss I’d pass the key/and feel your tongue, teasing and receiving,” which may be the first time I’ve heard someone muse about Frenching a deceased spouse. It’s a bald-faced and ostentatiously move that flags how uninterested in notions of “normality” Bush is. 

This furthermore indicates the subversive narratology Bush is pursuing. It’s quite boldly literal in the Carder Bush photo, where Del Palmer’s face is turned away from the frame. There’s an occlusion of “great man” narratives to “Houdini.” It’s named after one of the 20th century’s great performers, but it’s largely defined by his absence. As a result, the story has to be about the widowed Bess and her grief. Impressively, “Houdini” avoids elegy for the accomplishments of a Great Man, opting instead for the love Bess Houdini bore for her husband and the ecstatically weird lengths she went to demonstrate that. 

The song is far from a stringent one. “Houdini” is fueled by anguished conniptions rather than melodic coherence. The verse initially sounds like “The Infant Kiss” or some other perfectly normal song with its piano balladry in Eb minor with a progression that finishes on a major tonic chord. It commences as a séance with mourners preparing to reach into the ether (“the tambourine jingle-jangles/the medium roams and rambles”). The refrain is the apex of Bush shrieks, culminating in a gravely, agonized “WITH YOUR LIFE/THE ONLY THING IN MY MIND/WE PULL YOU FROM THE WATER!” The result is hardly melodic — it’s willfully ugly, produced by Bush eating lots of chocolate and drinking milk to sabotage her own voice. Whether or not the experiment works, it doesn’t seem like Bush cares — she wants this to sound raw and ugly.

We’ve talked about The Dreaming’s equation of the mind and spirituality quite often, so running into a rationalist-leaning figure like Houdini is quite something. A man who sought to discredit mediums during his lifetime, Harry made a pact with Bess to attempt contact after his death with a passcode only they knew, which would prove the medium who discovered was legitimate. In the song, this even seems to work — “this is not trick of his/this is your magic.” Houdini specialized in illusions, but if said illusions worked, that seems about equivalent to his magic being real. Curiouser is how the song legitimizes the séance, as it seems to transcend spacetime as it takes Bess back to her past assisting her husband’s dangerous performances. “You hit the water” comes across as temporal fuckery of the kind found in Bush’s favorite movie, Don’t Look Now. Linearity this ain’t. Functionality is irrelevant to Bush. Often she tries for beauty, but just this once Kate Bush fiercely clutches onto the awfulness of emotional reality. 

Backing tracks recorded at Townhouse Studios May – Jun ’81. Overdubs at Odyssey Aug – Dec ’81, Jan – Mar ’82. Mixed Mar – May ’82. Released on The Dreaming 13 September 1982. Issued as B-side to “Night of the Swallow” in Ireland, 21 November 1983. Personnel: Bush — vocals, piano, Fairlight, production. Weber — bass. Elliott — drums. Powell, Lawson — strings (writing and arrangement). Farrell — spoken word. Palmer — spoken word. Launay — engineer (backing tracks). Hardiman — engineer (overdubs).