Hounds of love album how to#

What set Bush apart from Fairlight wizards like Thomas Dolby, who made a point of their geekdom, was that she also drew deeply from the world music that captivated her older brother Paddy Bush. By Hounds of Love, she’d mastered it as a musical instrument unto itself. On Never for Ever, the instrument was mostly a means to wrangle the sound effects that heighten her melodrama. One such boffin, Landscape’s Richard James Burgess, helped program Bush’s Fairlight on the very first album to feature it, 1980’s Never for Ever, which was also the first UK chart-topping album by a British female solo artist, one that marked a transition between the symphonic sweep of Bush’s earliest albums and what followed.

Hounds of love album how to#

The Fairlight was a notoriously expensive and complex computer the few who could afford and figure out how to play one during their ‘80s heyday were either established stars like Peter Gabriel and Stevie Wonder who were invested in cutting-edge sounds, or similarly brainy upstarts who funded their techno-pop through production. So Bush and her romantic partner/bassist Del Palmer abandoned London for a 17th-century farmhouse, spent the summer gardening, and built a 48-track studio in her family barn where she doubled down on the Fairlight CMI, the pioneering digital sampling synthesizer that ruled The Dreaming. and Siouxsie and the Banshees, not early Sheena Easton, and sold far less than its predecessors. Raging and experimental, it was akin to Public Image Ltd. Thanks to MTV, UK pop had exploded in worldwide popularity since The Dreaming, her self-produced record that EMI nearly returned for lacking potential singles its only hit, “Sat in Your Lap,” was 15 months old by the time the album finally reached stores in 1982. Despite her overnight success, she would never conform to conventional stardom: Instead, she reversed the usual rock ‘n’ roll process where once-provocative artists cave to commercial pressure and shake off the quirks that initially made them distinct: Maturity would only make Bush more daring.īut by 1985, the year of Hounds of Love, she needed to reaffirm her appeal. She exuded brains and beauty and suffused both with an unyielding otherness that made her an LGBT icon and spiked her international cult with aliens of every stripe, from African-American bohos like Prince and OutKast to Johnny Rotten. “There’s room for a life in your womb, woman,” she crooned with the earnestness of a Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival radical, and did so while much of Europe was watching. On this and ‘78’s follow-up Lionheart, Bush sang fearlessly of religion, incest, murder, homosexuality, and much more.