FEATURE:
Kate Bush: Something Like a Song
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pierre Terrasson
Get Out of My House (The Dreaming)
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THE last time I featured…
this song fully was in 2022. I wanted to come back to The Dreaming for This Kate Bush: Something Like a Song. Get Out of My House is the final song from Kate Bush’s fourth studio album. I have spent a bit of time with this album the past few weeks or so. I have discussed The Dreaming and its use of percussion. I have also talked about its first single, Sat in Your Lap. Although my favourite song from the album – and my favourited Kate Bush song – is Houidini (the penultimate song), I think that the album finale is as intense and hypnotic as Kate Bush ever got. In a way, it was a precursor to the scale and ambition of Hounds of Love (her fifth album arrived in September 1985). However, Get Out of My House was Kate Bush in intense and paranoid mode. Inspired by Stephen King’s The Shining, it is a song that is rarely played on the radio. I am going to bring in some information I have used in previous features about Get Out of My House. However, I think it is worthwhile bringing this information back in to illustrate a wonderful song. Here are some interviews where Kate Bush discussed Get Out of My House:
“The song is called ‘Get Out Of My House’, and it’s all about the human as a house. The idea is that as more experiences actually get to you, you start learning how to defend yourself from them. The human can be seen as a house where you start putting up shutters at the windows and locking the doors – not letting in certain things. I think a lot of people are like this – they don’t hear what they don’t want to hear, don’t see what they don’t want to see. It is like a house, where the windows are the eyes and the ears, and you don’t let people in. That’s sad because as they grow older people should open up more. But they do the opposite because, I suppose, they do get bruised and cluttered. Which brings me back to myself; yes, I have had to decide what I will let in and what I’ll have to exclude.
Rosie Boycott, ‘The Discreet Charm Of Kate Bush’. Company (UK), 1982
It’s meant to be a bit scary. It’s just the idea of someone being in this place and there’s something else there… You don’t know what it is. The track kept changing in the studio. This is something that’s never happened before on an album. That one was maybe half the length it is now. The guitarist got this really nice riff going, and I got this idea of two voices – a person in the house, trying to get away from this thing, but it’s still there. So in order to get away, they change their form – first into a bird trying to fly away from it. The thing can change as well, sothatchanges into this wind, and starts blowing all icy. The idea is to turn around and face it. You’ve got this image of something turning round and going “Aah!”‘ just to try and scare it away.
This is one of these songs that was never performed live or had a music video made. There are all these what-ifs when it comes to visuals and performances. It would have been amazing if we saw Bush bring this to the stage. However, the album version sounds incredible. So charged and exhilarating! Before rounding things off, I am bringing in a feature from Dreams of Orgonon. It is a fascinating article that you should read in full. I have highlighted a few passages that are especially insightful and illuminating:
“The Dreaming sees Kate Bush turning towards an epistemological centering of subconscious and repressed emotions. It calls to the listener, inviting them to unleash their trauma, rage, and fear in torrents of vital and horrible catharsis. Bush reveals that the adolescent optimism of her previous albums, while real and legitimate, masked deep-rooted emotions beyond neophyte positivity and bravado. While those other albums (particularly the doleful Lionheart and sometimes Delphic Never for Ever) contain great darkness themselves, The Dreaming sees Bush unleashing the id, allowing the powerful emotiveness of her work to reveal its full breadth and ability to be furious, wretchedly disconsolate, and full of hurt. As Deborah Withers describes it, the album is about “the deconstruction of certainties.” It may not be Bush’s magnum opus, but it is possibly her artistic apotheosis, a traumatic wound to culture and popular music that the world never recovers from.
The set of songs curated by Bush with engineer Hugh Padgham (which we’re completing with this blog entry) centralizes this embrace of the subconscious and the id. As new songs and engineers enter the picture, The Dreaming’s core ideas metastasize into disparate and musical thematic territories. But the Padgham session is arguably the “pure” version of The Dreaming, in its nascent stage of unleashing one’s id. The mélange of sounds and traumas contained in these first three songs is emblematic of the entire album. Before the global politics and lush excesses of instrumentation found on later tracks emerge, there’s the dark heart of The Dreaming in the Padgham-engineered tracks. Much of this consists of Bush forging her way through the early 1980s. Padgham coined the gated drum sound which emblematized 1980s pop music, and these early songs contain a self-abnegation, uncertainty, and reverberating over-mixing that can be found throughout the decade. As the age of neoliberalism collates into an obelisk of nuance-less accumulation, the broader culture is throw into an afflicting gale, less sure of itself than ever.
Uncertainty pervades “Get Out of My House,” The Dreaming’s brutal culmination. Catalyzed by its beleaguering yet urgent drumbeat and a lacerating lead guitar part from Alan Murphy, it is confrontational and purgative in its spectacular vocal menagerie, all in dialogue (often call-and-response) with one another yet seemingly not of an accord, as the bombastic and tremulous delivery of “when you left, the door was…” is answered by the siren-like, low-mixed B.V.’s crying “SLAMMING!” Adhering mostly to 4/4, “Get Out of My House” revolves through dizzying sequences of repetitive chord changes, with its first verse in G# melodic minor, confined to a progression of i-IV (G# minor – C#), moving to the natural minor in Verse Two with a progression of i-iv (G# minor – C # minor), signaling a domination of brutal repetition and minor keys without catharsis. With one of Bush’s most agonized vocals carrying the refrain (a genuinely harrowing and throaty “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!”), the song emits agony, trauma, and expulsion.
In a newsletter, Bush wrote of “Get Out of My House” that “the house which is really a human being, has been shut up — locked and bolted, to stop any outside forces from entering. The person has been hurt and has decided to keep everybody out.” There are many things going on with this quote, but there are two points I shall make about it that pertain directly to “Get Out of My House.” Firstly, there’s the metaphor of the house as human body, which has appeared in semiotics and literature for millennia. Various accounts of this motif exist, but to a degree, the reasons are obvious. Houses, like bodies, are places where things are stored — memories, minds, belongings. They’re where a person is supposed to safe. As Bush observes, bodies (largely through with the help of the mind) will sometimes shut out malign presences, detaching themselves from hostile environments. When the body is incapable of overcoming an obstacle, it expires and resigns from continued organic living. There are limits to the metaphor, to be sure — for example, historian Peter Brown observes that the Old Testament speaks of tents with favor for emblemizing “the limitless horizons of each created spirit, always ready to be struck and to be pitched ever further on,” while houses are “symbols of dread satiety.” Yet what body doesn’t spend a portion of its time surfeited and dwelling in one place due to physical exhaustion or psychological dissociation? When we’re under duress from an external force, do we not instinctively protect our bodies? Pushing back and securing ourselves is difficult, but often instinctual. Even if we don’t know that we’re fighting back, our bodies and minds often do. Our duty is merely to listen to what our bodies and minds tell us.
My second point is how tremendously “Get Out of My House” deploys the house-as-body motif to address abuse and sexual violence. The meekness expected from women singers is absent from the song — Bush’s attitude is expulsive and agonized. Enough, she says. This epidemic of violence has lived with me too long. The song’s repetition conveys personal history and traumatic residue in its refrains of “slamming!” and “lock it!” The houses stands in for the body to an obvious degree throughout, through suggestive lines such as “this house is as old as I am.” An intruder is barred. They’ve broken through the barrier before — this isn’t Bush’s initial conflict with them. But it is a last stand”.
Get Out of My House is one of the best-ever Kate Bush songs. Although it does not feature high in polls when it comes to the best Kate Bush tracks ever, it is one of those gems that highlighted how original an artist Kate Bush was. A song that she produced and very much took the lead on, her vocals are at their peak. The range of emotions that she deploys. There are so many highlights on Get Out of My House. Many people note when Kate Bush and Paul Hardiman exchange donkey braying. Inspired by a scene in Pinocchio when the eponymous character and Lampwick turn into donkeys. It is played for comedic effect to start before turning terrifying. In a classic Disney film (released in 1940), it is also one of the scariest. It can rank alongside the great Horror film scenes. It is not the first time Kate Bush took inspiration from Pinocchio. As Far Out Magazine wrote in 2023, there are other examples:
“More specifically, Bush took inspiration from Pinocchio several times in her artistry, a character who first appeared in Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio, but was later adapted to screen in Disney’s 1940 film, Pinocchio. The character’s first influence on Bush was aesthetic – the idea for the album artwork for her debut studio record, The Kick Inside in 1978, was borrowed from Disney’s Pinocchio.
Rejecting her label’s requests to accompany the album with a sexy cover, Bush had other ideas. As Jay Myrdal, the photographer for the artwork, recalls it in a fan booklet: “Kate arrived at the studio with her father and a car full of bits of wood and painted paper from which he constructed the kite as it appears in the photograph.”
While Myrdal used ropes and a metal bar to rig the “rather fragile” kite to the black wall in her studio, Bush was being covered in gold paint. The result was the album cover that fans of Bush will now know well, which sees her hanging from the kite in front of an image of an eye. According to Myrdal, this was entirely Kate’s idea, and she took inspiration from Pinocchio.
The photographer explained: “The image was entirely Kate’s idea and Steve Ridgeway, the art director and I simply did more or less as we were told. The idea had come from the Disney animated film Pinocchio and the scene when Jiminy Cricket floats past the whale’s eye using his umbrella like a parachute.”
Bush’s artistic debt to Pinocchio continued into her sophomore album, Lionheart, which featured a song called ‘In Search Of Peter Pan’. Alongside the beloved children’s character in its title, the song also made reference to Pinocchio in its final verse, which quotes ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’. The song featured in the 1940 film version of Pinocchio, performed by Cliff Edwards as Jiminy Cricket in the film’s opening credits and final moments.
After repeating the line, “Second star on the right, straight on ‘til morning”, borrowed from the directions to Neverland, Bush sings, “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, when you wish upon a star your dreams come true”. In true Kate Bush fashion, it’s equal parts eerie and beautiful”.
In future editions of Kate Bush: Something Like a Song, I am going to move to other albums. Closer to the fortieth anniversary of Hounds of Love on 16th September, I am going to feature a track from that album. I think I will come to Aerial for the next. A great song from that album. I am definitely going to come back to The Dreaming very soon. It has been great spending time with this incredibly atmospheric and eerie song. One that warrants more attention and discussion. In a song where there seem to be spirits and a malevolent presence in this house, I would urge everyone to hear the song and ignore the warnings. Rather than stay well away, play the song loud…
IF you dare step in!