Kate had been writing songs for years, having grown up in a music-loving household in Kent, and had recorded a bunch of them on demo tapes. One of these tapes found its way into the hands of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour who immediately recognised the song-writing talent and other-worldly vocals. He encouraged Floyd’s label EMI to sign her up, which they duly did. She was sixteen and still at school so she continued her studies, honed her craft, learned interpretive dance under choreographer Lindsay Kemp, and in the interests of good research read Wuthering Heights (she had written the song before actually reading the book, having caught the back end of a BBC TV adaptation of it). And the rest, as they say, is history – she went on to record nine studio albums all of which reached the UK Top 10, and recently enjoyed something of a renaissance following the use of her song Running up that Hill in the Netflix blockbuster series Stranger Things.
Cloudbusting remains my favourite Kate Bush song. If the record-buying public thought that the subject matter of Wuthering Heights was somewhat quirky, it hadn’t seen nothing yet. The song took inspiration from the 1973 memoirs of Peter Reich (Book of Dreams), written about his close relationship with his father the psychiatrist and inventor Wilhelm Reich, at their farm named “Orgonon”, in Maine. Wilhelm Reich had been experimenting with a cosmic energy which he termed orgone, and had built devices called orgone accumulators which he claimed could cure cancers and promote health. Later he would build a rain-making machine called a cloudbuster and father and son would spend hours on their farm pointing it at the sky and trying to make rain. Like all promoters of fringe ideas (ask Nikola Tesla), Reich eventually fell foul of the authorities, was imprisoned, and had his inventions and ideas suppressed.
Kate’s musical interpretation of the story is outstanding. It is at once mesmeric with its mantra-like backing vocals and hypnotic cello strokes, and a masterclass in story-telling with its setting of the scene from the very first line “I dream of Orgonon”. That line, with that word, had such an intriguing feel to it, long before I discovered its true back story. The video accompanying the single, is genius: a masterstroke casting of Donald Sutherland as the father, and Kate herself with a pixie cut to stand in for the son. The “cloudbuster” itself, designed by the same people who designed the “xenomorph” for Ridley Scott’s Alien, is a wonderful steam-punk invention. After Reich’s arrest, we see Kate/Peter taking over the reins and achieving success with his father’s inventions – I don’t know how true this is, but at least Kate was gratified that the real Peter Reich hailed the video and said it captured the situation and the emotion perfectly. Watch and enjoy here…
