Kate Bush — The Ninth Wave — Musical Storytelling to the Max
Intensely powerful music, strong imagery of a vast ocean, and the emotions that come with it, there’s a lot to love about Kate Bush’s The Ninth Wave Suite. Found on the second side of her 1985 album Hounds of Love, The Ninth Wave consists of seven tracks focussed on the story of a person lost at sea, in Kate’s own words:
“The Ninth Wave was a film, that’s how I thought of it. It’s the idea of this person being in the water, how they’ve got there, we don’t know. But the idea is that they’ve been on a ship and they’ve been washed over the side so they’re alone in this water. And I find that horrific imagery, the thought of being completely alone in all this water.”
In my opinion, Kate is overwhelmingly successful in portraying this narrative, and manages to produce a whole host of other ideas and experiences in a relatively short time. To understand why, and start dissecting the suite, I think it helps to look into how other artists have approached the subject.
In the world of art, seascapes have long been an intriguing subject, and one of the true masters of painting the sea is Ivan Aivazovsky, who also has a painting entitled The Ninth Wave. This work depicts a group of sailors stranded at sea, clutching a piece of their wrecked ship. Their despair is juxtaposed against a beautiful setting sun, bouncing off the waves that build up before them.
Poetry too has often drawn from the sea. An example included by Kate in the Hounds of Love liner notes is from Tennyson’s “The Holy Grail:”
“Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame”
The subject has always been a favourite amongst British artists, being an island nation with a strong history with the ocean. Kate certainly had much material to draw inspiration from. Here’s the tracklist for The Ninth Wave.
And Dream of Sheep
Under Ice
Waking the Witch
Watching You Without Me
Jig of Life
Hello Earth
The Morning Fog
So in which direction did Kate Bush take her ocean story? Well, many. The tracks do play out like the film which was in Kate’s imagination, beginning with the wonderfully lonely “And Dream of Sheep,” in which the narrator floats alone in their life jacket, drifting in and out of consciousness. As the character falls into the “warmth” of a hallucinatory state, the scene is set for Kate to experiment with their mental state and the dreams they experience.
Beginning with “Under Ice,” the music becomes much darker and more intense. The lyrics of the track give a warped impression of the cold and hypothermia that the narrator is likely experiencing. We transition to the sudden direction to “wake up,” the theme of the track “Waking the Witch” (my personal favourite,) where things start to get more chaotic, the calm voices of the introduction being replaced by broken, fragmented jitters of speech — “Help me, listen to me, listen to me, tell them baby!”
With the most intense section of the suite over, Kate continues her experimentation into mental states, where in “Watching You Without Me” she describes an out of body experience — as a ghost in her own home, watching her loved ones worry. A third hallucination appears with “Jig of Life,” and we are suddenly enveloped in the sounds of Irish folk music — violin, fiddle, pipes, and drums. Confronted by her future self, the narrator is persuaded to fight for their life — the relentless, powerful instrumental driving the story forward.
The final tracks of the suite lead to and take us through the serenity and relief of the narrator’s ambiguous rescue. “Hello Earth” is Kate floating away further and further from the life she knows. We hear samples of NASA communications, conveying the feeling of being so far from human contact.
The iconic “The Morning Fog” is the final track of the album, in which Kate is rescued. The joyful tone highlights the journey we have been through, loss, mental states, hope, and finally the serene, joyous feeling of being safe. Kate stated in interviews that the suite was always intended to end in rescue, but it could be argued that “The Morning Fog” is instead the narrator succumbing to the water, experiencing the final moments of life.
As a concept, being lost at sea is so terrifyingly simple and effective. Kate took the idea to so many different places, and it is a project I truly treasure. Kate has recently experimented more with Ninth Wave. It formed the focus of her Hammersmith shows in 2014, where costumes and sets were made to accompany the music. She also released a video for “And Dream of Sheep” in 2016, where she floats in her lifejacket, her little light blinking.
Thanks for reading my article! Don’t forget to check out the Ninth Wave yourself, and leave a comment as to what you think of the suite below.
