Love Kate Bush? Leah Kardos does too — and wrote a book about her favourite album, Hounds of Love
In 2022, Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill topped charts around the world … nearly 40 years after its initial release.
The resurgence came after the song was featured on the Netflix series Stranger Things — but according to the musician and writer Leah Kardos, the whole album, Hounds of Love, is a masterpiece.
"It's so immaculate and elegant, but original," she said on Bookends with Mattea Roach.
As part of Bloomsbury Publishing's 33 ⅓ series, in which each title dives into a single music album, Kardos wrote about Hounds of Love in a book of the same name.
"It's an album that has these amazing depths to it," she said. 'It's been an absolute pleasure writing about it. I miss writing it, actually."
Kardos joined Roach to discuss her connection to Hounds of Love, Bush's storytelling through song — and why writing about it was so much fun.
Mattea Roach: When did you first hear Kate's music and feel a connection to it?
Leah Kardos: I grew up in Australia, so the Kate Bush culture was a little bit different. It was really about the videos and the singles in Australia, so I remember growing up and seeing the Cloudbusting video and being quite mystified by it.
I think certainly, as a little girl, there was a lot to identify with. The sort of playfulness and the ethereal magic of what she was doing and how she was not just the sound, but also just the way she was in her body and the way she moved. I was really quite struck by her when I was young.
But I really connected with her music later in life when I went to music college and was playing the piano and trying to sing songs and really trying to feel my way around the way she felt around songs with chords and melody. That's when I sort of started becoming obsessed and joined the fandom.
I think the real moment for me where it was love was Ariel, the album she did in 2005. That, for me, was just the thing that sort of tilted the axis of my world. Then I went back and really took it seriously and went back through the catalogue and really spent time. That's when classic albums like Hounds of Love and The Dreaming and The Sensual World really started speaking to me. It was a gradual thing, it wasn't like a time and place so much.
Why was Hounds of Love the album that you wanted to write a book about?
It means so much because she produced it herself and it's so kick-ass. It's so immaculate and elegant, but original. The fact that she did it herself and the storyline of how she fought for her autonomy in order to work in this way — I really wanted to talk about it.
I teach record production and one of the things about my subject area is that it's really male-dominated and the whole music industry, particularly studio culture, is patriarchal and still male-controlled. And to have a female artist who writes her own material but also produces it in her own environment is a really powerful thing.
In all of the discourses that I read about Kate it's not very often that she is talked about as an elite producer — I believe she is. So I was really motivated to talk about that and contribute to the history of women in studios being amazing.
A song from this album, Running Up That Hill, was used throughout Stranger Things's fourth season in 2022, as part of the score but also a fundamental part of the story arc of one of the characters. Why was it a good fit?
First of all, it's a really good fit because obviously it's perfect for the era. Chronologically, it fits in the timing of season 4 of Stranger Things.
Max is one of the main characters of this friend group and she is sort of drawn into the dark underworld of Vecna, who's this monster who traps her. She obsessively listens to Kate Bush, Hounds of Love, on cassette, and she's often seen in the series listening to it and shutting out the world around her. But her friends play the song and it sort of brings her back. In that scene, she remembers her friends and she remembers that she loves them and that they love her and it gives her the strength to escape Vecna's lair. It's a pretty powerful moment in the show.
Running Up That Hill comes back again at the end, in the finale. It's also used as a leitmotif all the way through. You can hear it subtly woven into the underscoring of many scenes and played as a needle drop like at least more than maybe three times.
Can you talk about Running Up That Hill 's resurgence after Stranger Things and what it's been like to be engaging with Kate Bush's work at a time when a lot of people who didn't grow up with it have been really getting into it?
Straight away, it was just super gratifying to see younger generations discovering Kate Bush and discovering this music. It was also really interesting because you could see from online comments that people were surprised that the song was as old as it was.
I suppose it had really good timing in that pop music was also flirting with nostalgic aesthetics and synthwave. So it did sound like music that was coming out in 2021 and 2022. It sounded quite current.
She got a couple of Guinness World Records and she surpassed a billion streams and added more to her record-breaking history in this regard. It's a really amazing, miraculous story.
I think at the time when that song came back into everyone's consciousness, it was the second year or the third year getting into lockdown life. It was a different world we emerged into. And it was a frightening one, where there was climate collapse and there were wars and scary politics and a lot of people who were angry and a lot of people with issues that were exacerbated by their isolation.
So when you have a song that's about connection and about wanting to connect with somebody in an impossible way, that kind of aspiration and the yearning of the music I think speaks to people. It was certainly for me, at that moment, it was a tonic. It felt like a dose of medicine. I was like, "Oh, the world can be good. And yeah, we can actually empathize with each other. And if only we could connect."
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