From: rhill@netrun.cts.com (ronald hill) Newsgroups: rec.music.gaffa Subject: The Ninth Wave Quotes Date: 13 Nov 92 06:51:39 GMT Organization: NetRunner's Paradise BBS, San Diego CA x-gateway: rodan.UU.NET from love-hounds to rec.music.gaffa; Fri, 13 Nov 1992 12:10:27 EST Errors-To: Love-Hounds-request@uunet.uu.net Comments: Cloudbuster Someone asked for info on THe Ninth Wave. Here are a few of the quotes about it. More quotes are available in the electronic book Cloudbusting - Kate Bush in her own words. (The FAQ at the beggining o f the month explains how to get this). THE NINTH WAVE (2nd side of Hounds of Love) That takes us to the second side, which itself had two or three drafts. It was very different for me working conceptually across half an hour's worth of music, rather than five minutes optimum in a song, and it was very interesting but more demanding. The whole was changed by anything you did to one part of the concept. Once the piece was in context with what was happening before and after it, it would change its nature dramatically, and it was important that the whole side kept a sense of flow and yet kept the interest and kept building and ebbing in the right places. The side is about someone who is in the water alone for the night. (1985, KBC 18) I think, even though a lot of people say that the side is about someone drowning, it's more about someone who's not drowning. And how they're there for the night in the water being visited by their past, present, and future to keep them awake, to keep them going through until the morning until there's hope. [Big smile] (1985, MTV) * ...a journey for a woman asleep on the water: There are people trying to keep her awake and not let her fall asleep ["And Dream of Sheep"]. Then she falls asleep and has a dream -- but wakes up from the dream only to find herself underwater ['Under Ice']. And then she has hallucinations where people are saying 'Wake up, wake up, don't sleep anymore,' and trying to get her out of the water. Except a witch finder pushes her right under because he assumes she's a witch ['Waking the Witch']. Soon she travels home and sees her loved ones but they can't see her ['Watching You Without Me'] and hopefully it all leads to the hope and salvation of the morning ['The Morning Fog'] where everything comes to life again. The sense of loneliness is taken over by the sense of someone saving them. (1985, Pulse) [Dreams -] that's what the whole second side of Hounds Of Love talks about? More the struggle brought about by the need to stay awake, when it would be so easy to fall asleep. It's the story of someone who is in the sea, at night, and the experiences through which they pass in order to emerge a better person by morning. I'm making a long story short. (1985, Guitares et Claviers) It's about someone who is in the water for the night. Alone in the water. And it's really about their past, present and future coming to keep them awake to stop them drowning, to stop them going to sleep until the morning comes. It isn't immediately obvious, is it, if you listen to the album? No, I don't think so. I don't know if that's relevant or important though. I think the most important thing is that people that listen to it get something out of it, that they enjoy it. Alright. Now, you seem to have a fascination with water. I noticed that a couple of your favorite movies, Don't Look Now and Cruel Sea, which are very much on a watery theme. So have you a fascination for water? Yes, yes I do. I think that everyone does really. I think that Cruel Sea was one film that I particularly mentioned though as being a very influential force for this side. So, it would have to do something with water. [Chuckles] And also, there's the Tennyson poem, isn't it? "The Coming Of Arthur"? I think, um, a lot of people tend to presume that the whole side was written from that quote and, in fact, that it was completely the other way around, where, I just needed a title for the whole piece and there was nothing within any of the songs, any of the titles that was right for it. so I just started looking through some books to try and find a title and found that quote, which seemed to be saying, more or less, what I wanted to say, so it was used to express the title. (1985, Profile 6) * The last album contained a lot of different energies. It did take people to lots of different places very quickly and some people found that difficult to take. I think this album has more of a positive energy. It's a great deal more optimistic. I rather think of the album as two separate sides. The A side is really called Hounds of Love, and the B side is called The Ninth Wave. The B side is a story, and that took a lot more work - it couldn't be longer than half an hour, and it had to flow. This time when you get to the end of one track, what happens after it is very affect by what's come before. It's really difficult to work out the dynamics within seven tracks. The concept took a long time. It's about someone who comes off a ship and they've been in the water all night by themselves, and it's about that person re-evaluating their life from a point which they've never been before. It's about waking up from things and being reborn - going through something and coming out the other side very different. Sounds suspiciously like The Ancient Mariner revisited... Oh no! It's completely different. It ends really positively - as things always should if you have control. (1985, Melody Maker) Last year we went to Ireland to do some recording in Dublin, and took a couple of weeks out. It was brilliant, because I was writing lyrics, and we were right by the sea. A lot of the time that I was thinking about putting this album together, I was right there with the water. I love the sea. It's the energy that's so attractive - the fact that it's so huge. And war films, where people would come off the ship and be stuck in the water with no sense of where they were or of time, like sensory deprivation. It's got to be ultimately terrifying. (1985, ZigZag) --- rhill@netrun.cts.com (ronald hill) NetRunner's Paradise BBS, San Diego CA