Return to The Dreaming

I did a retrospective round of the entire Kate Bush studio album catalogue. For a fan, this is always like revisiting an old friend. You've heard the music so many times that you may actually spend a few years not listening to the material at all and then come back to it with open ears.

This time around, the strengths of The Dreaming came to the fore with force. Even the then genuinely groundbreaking  Never For Ever now feels a bit uneven and markedly transitional - Egypt and Violin  probably appear on very few "Kate's Best" lists. But The Dreaming, for all its eccentricities (the cinema-like soundscapes, the screeching vocals and such), is carried by a unifying, brave vision, wonderful musicianship and a sense of a leap of faith - faith being, perhaps not by accident, a dominant theme in many of the songs, along with alienation.

The raw, naked emotion Kate displays throughout the album is stunning, whether in aggressive mode (Get Out of My House), subdued desperation (All the Love) or a combination of the two (Night of the Swallow). There are very few albums in the history of popular music that so easily map the entire range of human emotion and use so many musical styles to create a coherent whole.

And for the first time, I identified Pull Out the Pin, a song that for years eluded me, as the center of the album, and perhaps Kate's entire output. The tableaux of a young soldier confronting his essential kill-or-die moment and all its implications illuminates life's unsolvable paradoxes is put out in a low-key performance that nicely hides the high existential drama of the moment. "With my silver Buddha and my silver bullet... Just one thing: it's me or him, and I love life (pull out the pin)..."

The Dreaming was something of a commercial failure at the time in 1982, another watertight proof that in the world of so-called pop music, qualities like innovation, originality and courage are rarely what it's all about, sadly enough.