There is a version of this record that most people know, and it is not the record. It is five songs: the one about a deal, the one about the dogs, the one about the sky, the one about the mother, the one about the rain-making machine. Brilliant, all of them, and between them they made the album a number one in this country in the autumn of 1985. Then the side ends, and the actual album begins.
What follows on side two is a seven-part sequence about a woman alone in cold water at night, waiting to be found. It is called The Ninth Wave, after a line in Tennyson describing the last and largest wave of a set. It is not background music. It is barely social music. And it is the reason people are still writing about this album forty years on.
A house with a studio in it
The previous album, The Dreaming, had been made in commercial studios at commercial rates, and had exhausted both the budget and its maker. The answer was to stop renting. A studio was built at the family property in Kent, and from that point the clock stopped running.
You can hear what that bought. There is a patience to the record that hourly rates do not permit: layers built and abandoned, vocal takes that clearly went round many times, a willingness to let a piece sit for months. Del Palmer engineered, which meant the person at the desk was somebody who already understood the shorthand. The producer credit is hers alone.
This is the practical fact that matters most about Hounds of Love, and it is easy to skate past. An artist in her mid twenties took control of the means of production and then used that control to make the least commercial thing she had yet attempted, on the same disc as her biggest hits. Very few people have managed that trick since.
Side one: five songs that do not need each other
The opening side is sequenced like a singles compilation, and four of its five tracks were in fact released as singles. Each one is self-contained, each has its own weather, and none of them prepares you for what comes after.
- Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Its original title was the parenthesis, and the change was made for reasons of radio caution rather than authorial preference. That relentless drum pattern and the descending synth figure are now among the most recognisable eight seconds in British pop.
- Hounds of Love. The title track opens with a spoken sample and then never quite settles, all bolting strings and pursuit.
- The Big Sky. The loudest and most communal thing on the record. If you are running a listening night, this is where the room stops sitting politely.
- Mother Stands for Comfort. The cold one. Machinery, glass, a bass line that refuses to reassure anyone.
- Cloudbusting. Built on a string figure and drawn from Peter Reich’s memoir of his father, Wilhelm Reich, and the machine they believed made rain. It closes the side on a note of loss dressed as momentum.
Side two: The Ninth Wave
Seven parts, played without meaningful gaps, following one consciousness through a night in the water. It begins half asleep, goes under, hallucinates a trial, watches its own home from outside, is hauled back by ancestors, sees the whole planet from far above, and arrives at morning.
- And Dream of SheepPiano and voice, drifting off when staying awake is the only thing that matters.
- Under IceStrings tighten, the surface freezes over, something is moving underneath.
- Waking the WitchThe most violent piece she has recorded: voices, interrogation, a ducking stool logic.
- Watching You Without MeThe ghost sequence, at home, unable to be heard by the people in the room.
- Jig of LifeIrish traditional players arrive and haul the narrator back towards living. Her brother reads at the close.
- Hello EarthThe view from orbit, with a Georgian folk melody carried by a choir.
- The Morning FogRescue, or the acceptance of it. Four minutes of gratitude after twenty of terror.
Played at a gathering, the suite demands one thing of the organiser: do not talk over it and do not let anyone else. Announce the running time before you start, tell people the second side is continuous, and turn the lights down. We have watched a hall of thirty adults sit completely still through Hello Earth, which is not something you get from a playlist.
What the Fairlight was actually for
The Fairlight CMI is all over this record, and the usual account of it is wrong. It was not used to make the album sound futuristic. It was used to put real, awkward, physical sounds into an arrangement: breaking glass, a voice, a struck object, the noise of something being dragged.
That is why Hounds of Love has aged so much better than most 1985 productions. The synthesisers date it; the sampled world inside it does not. When the drums stop on Waking the Witch and the room fills with voices, what you are hearing is closer to radio drama than to pop production.
The second life, 2022
In the summer of 2022, thirty seven years after release, the opening track reached number one in the United Kingdom after appearing in a television series. The gap between her first UK number one single in 1978 and that one is forty four years, the longest anyone has managed, and she became the oldest woman to top the chart.
The interesting part is what it did to the rooms we run. Attendance at listening nights roughly doubled that year, and a good proportion of the newcomers were under twenty five and had arrived through one song. Nearly all of them stayed for the second side, which had been made before any of them were born and asks considerably more of a listener than a streaming playlist does.
If you are building an evening around it
This is the record we recommend to anyone starting a listening night, and we say why in our guide to starting a gathering. It splits neatly into two halves of about twenty minutes, which gives you a natural interval for the tea urn. It rewards a good room. And it gives you something to talk about afterwards that is not simply whether people liked it.
One practical warning. The dynamic range on side two is wide, and small hall systems flatten it. If you can only bring one thing, bring a better amplifier rather than bigger speakers.