#15 - Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) / Kate Bush

‘When I was little, I really wanted to be a psychiatrist. That's what I always said at school. I had this idea of helping people, I suppose, but I found the idea of people's inner psychology fascinating, particularly in my teens.’ This is Kate Bush, talking about what she wanted to do before becoming a musician. In this episode I explore whether the trace of ideas from contemporary psychology can be found in the songs she would go on to write and what light it might shine on the meaning of one of her most famous, 'Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)', in particular her given explanation of its inspiration: 'I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman can't understand each other because we are a man and a woman'. 

All the songs discussed in this episode, including the original recording of 'Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)' can be heard here. If you've enjoyed it, please leave a review on Apple podcasts; thank you.

With very special thanks to Paul Wierdak, the producer of this episode. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Secret Life of Songs, a podcast on pop songs and what they mean to us with me, Anthony, a musician who writes and performs under the name sky coloured. When Kate Bush was asked in a 1992 interview on Radio 1 about the origin of her idea for her 1985 hit ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’, from the album Hounds of Love, she explained that it was about the knowledge which might be gained if a man and a woman could swap places, and that, ‘really the only way I could think it could be done was … a deal with the devil, you know. And I thought, “Well, no, why not a deal with God!”’

The myth she invokes here - making a deal with the devil - implies that to cross the line between male and female is not only impossible without supernatural assistance but bound to end in disaster. All stories involving this myth - the Faustian pact - result in catastrophe and torment for the person foolish enough to agree to such an arrangement. Elsewhere Bush explained her song like this: ‘I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman can't understand each other because we are a man and a woman.' I’m interested in the question of why someone like Kate Bush would arrive at such a strong conviction about the apparently unbridgeable differences between men and women. Born at the end of the 1950s into a family which placed great emphasis on reading, intellectual discussion and creative expression, Bush absorbed the interests of her older brothers, especially John, obsessed with ancient mythology, as well as some of the prevailing ideas of the day, above all those associated with the life of the mind. This episode will be about the various myths Bush reached for in this famous record to make sense of her tumultuous inner world, ‘the thunder in our hearts’, as she put it. But as we look at these myths - the symbols, theories and stories which shaped her thinking - it'll always be necessary to see how she rendered them into her unique form of recorded song, in the process, variously enriching or subverting them. What we find is a body of work which in its complexity and nuance goes well beyond its sometimes questionable conceptual starting-points - on gender, for instance, or the development of personality - and amounts to something more powerful and universal: a sustained effort to comes to terms with, as she put it in another interview, the ‘futile situations’ in life, how ‘to accept [them] … to cope with [them]’.

The Faustian pact myth resides at the heart of one of popular music’s most important origin stories: that of the bluesman Robert Johnson, who was said to have gained unprecedented musical abilities in exchange for his soul at a crossroads near Dockery Plantation, Mississippi. Greil Marcus, in his influential study of the rock n roll tradition, Mystery Train, wrote of Robert Johnson: ‘There were demons in his songs … his greatest fear seems to have been that his desires were so extreme that he could satisfy them only by becoming a kind of demon himself.’ Part of the legend of Johnson and the Devil at the crossroads is based in the fact that his songs are so often about running from something; the idea that the devil was constantly pursuing him was one he played with himself in his songs: he sang, ‘I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving/Blues falling down like hail … And the days keep on [re]minding me/There’s a hellhound on my trail’. Kate Bush, on the other hand, wasn’t being chased by the hounds of hell but by hounds of love, and it’s in this that one of the key questions in her work is posed: how do we cope with the extremity of feeling which our connection to other people involves? She sings, in the song, ‘Hounds of Love’ which follows ‘Running Up That Hill’ on the album, ‘Among your hounds of love/And [I] feel your arms surround me/I've always been a coward/And never know what's good for me’. 

From her earliest songs, she was scrutinising that fear of what can be the unsettling intensity of feeling produced in the moment of being held in someone’s arms. The difficulty of those feelings - their contradictions as well as their intensities - is something she returns to again and again, and can be seen as an extension of the interest she has always reported having in the ‘human mind’. She commented, in a 1993 interview, ‘When I was little, I really wanted to be a psychiatrist. That's what I always said at school. I had this idea of helping people, I suppose, but I found the idea of people's inner psychology fascinating, particularly in my teens.’ 

An interest in psychology in Britain in the 1970s, when Bush was a teenager, would have meant an inevitable encounter with ideas derived from the Freudian psychoanalytical tradition, which had found a home in Britain during the 1930s, when the growing threat of Nazism in Central Europe led many psychoanalysts, including Freud himself, to relocate to London and join the British Psychoanalytic Society, which subsequently became the arena for fierce debate over the future direction of psychoanalysis in the wake of Freud’s death in 1939. The key distinctive trajectory within post-war British psychology was a renewed focus on child analysis, pioneered, to very different ends, by the two leading post-Freudians, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, and was taken up by the British psychologists John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott. Through infant observation at clinics such as the children’s department at the Tavistock Institute, they redirected the focus of psychoanalysis towards the mother-infant bond, leading Bowlby to formulate his influential ‘attachment theory’ and Winnicott to develop the idea that a mother’s attentive ‘holding’ of her baby plays the vital part in a child’s development, in widely-read books such as 1965’s The Child, the Family and the Outside World. At some stage, Bush also seems to have familiarised herself with the concepts of Freud’s great rival, Carl Jung, alluding to his notion of the ‘animus’ and the ‘anima’ - the idea that a masculine archetype - a sort of male mind or soul - resides in the subconscious of every woman and that a subconscious female figure - the ‘anima’ - exists in all men.

Psychoanalysis has an explicit presence on Hounds of Love in the song ‘Cloudbusting’, which was inspired by A Book of Dreams, the autobiography of Peter Reich, son of William Reich, initially a leading psychoanalyst in the generation after Freud but who broke dramatically with the Freudians in the 1930s, eventually settling in the US, where he conducted increasingly strange experiments at a ranch in Maine he named ‘Orgonon’, after ‘orgone’, a word of his own invention to name the substance - something like ‘life energy’ - which he believed existed throughout the universe and could be harnessed both to heal cancer and, as alluded to in Bush’s song, cause rain to fall. Her interest in the story, however, centres on the perspective provided by Reich’s son in his book, which tells this story from a child’s point-of-view, often in childlike language. A number of writers have spotted how frequently images of childhood appear in Bush’s work around this time but it’s something more specific and less nostalgic than this might imply. Much more in line with the psychoanalytic approach, Bush explored the ways childhood shapes adulthood, how early experiences seem to maintain some sort of presence much later in life, and even that our early self still exists within us, sometimes in a charming way, as she suggests in one of her earliest recordings, ‘The Man With the Child in his Eyes’, but also as a source of sadness and distress. Speaking of ‘Cloudbusting’, she explained it was ‘to do with how the son does begin to cope with the whole loneliness and pain of being without his father. It is the magic moments of a relationship through a child's eyes, but told by a sad adult.’

The importance of childhood is the theme of yet another song on Hounds of Love, ‘The Big Sky’, which aims to capture the directness of children’s experiences - the way they appear to be utterly immersed in the moment of doing something very simple, like looking at clouds. There’s wistfulness in the song - Bush has said that ‘we forget these pleasures as adults. We don't get as much time to enjoy those kinds of things, or think about them; we feel silly about what we used to do naturally’ - and it chimes with hints she has dropped about her upbringing: one that was initially ‘natural’ and spontaneous but which was interrupted by the incursions of the adult world, most of all, the impact of her formal education. Talking about her dancing, she has said: ‘When I was very little, I was quite extrovert. Whenever there was music on the telly, I'd always dance to it. And I remember one day, I was dancing around the room, and somebody started laughing at me. Suddenly I became very self-conscious, and just stopped doing it. Inhibitions start coming in as you get older. I think maybe I've been trying to get back there ever since.’ This too, has a psychoanalytic pre-history: Freud argued in works such as Civilization and its Discontents that our instincts, briefly seen in unfiltered form in childhood, inevitably undergo a process of repression and sublimation as we approach adolescence and eventual participation in adult society. Part of the work of the psychoanalyst is to excavate those feelings from behind the screen of repression we place on them, or, as Bush puts it, ‘to get back there’ to that blithely unselfconscious space of the child, dancing as if oblivious to the rational, respectable adult world. 

It’s only through keeping this aspect of Bush’s intellectual background in mind that we can begin to understand the importance of eroticism in her work, for no form of repressed impulse is as important to Freud’s explanation of the mind than that of our sexual desires, and to Bush, expressing powerful physical feelings - including those constituting our sexuality - is an essential part of understanding the nature of the self. On the album which followed Hounds of Love, 1989’s The Sensual World, she moved even further into Freudian territory by exploring the link between formative childhood moments and adult sexual relationships: on her song, ‘The Fog’, for instance, she connects a memory of being taught to swim as a child by her father with the love she feels for her partner, singing, ‘This love of yours/Was big enough to be frightened of/It’s deep and dark like the water was/The day I learned to swim’. 

The final area of her work in this part of her career which indicates the extensive cultural legacy of psychoanalysis is in her thoughts on gender, which crop up frequently in both her songs and her statements on them. The formation of our identities as men and women is, of course, central to the psychoanalytic model of child development. In Carl Jung’s system, for instance, the process by which our gender identity comes to affirm our birth sex is the essential journey of healthy psychological development, and Freud, typically more tolerant than Jung on non-hetero sexualities, nonetheless believed that sexual difference was the 'bedrock' of psychoanalysis, beyond which it could not go. With striking frequency, in her interviews of this period Bush alludes to universal notions of maleness or femaleness, even when referring to her so-called masculine side: about ‘The Man with the Child in his Eyes’, for instance, she said, ‘I, myself, am attracted to older men, I guess, but I think that’s the same with every female’, while stating that her musical creativity came from a ‘male place’, saying, ‘being brought up with two brothers I'd sit philosophising with them while my girlfriends wanted to talk about clothes and food. Maybe it's the male energy to be the hunter and I feel I have that in me’, and finally, about ‘Running Up That Hill’, she said, in addition to the difficulties of being in love with someone, that it was ‘also perhaps talking about some fundamental differences between men and women’. 

Here we encounter one of the dangers of applying an essentially mythic framework to explain our experiences of life. The philosopher of science, Karl Popper, famously compared Freud’s theory to ‘Homer's collected stories from the Olympus’ for all the scientific value it contained: a myth, in other words, and even if we’re not willing to dismiss it so completely, it must be acknowledged that its everyday use by people often resembles the way myth is used to explain what happens in life - a big, overarching framework which encompasses and rationalises complex experiences through a sequence of vivid symbols and images - and that this seems to be how someone like Kate Bush understood it: something not to be scrutinised for its scientific validity but as a tool to explain the world, particularly the complex and slippery areas of our inner life which seem so resistant to rational analysis. Myths can be profoundly helpful in allowing us to accept the inexplicable or inconsolable, and they may even map accurately onto our experiences of reality, so if the psychoanalytic account of gender or desire matches with your experience, it may seem like it truly offers the key to your self-acceptance and mental well-being. Remember that in Bush’s comments on wanting to be a psychiatrist as a teenager, she held ‘the idea of helping people’ as of equal importance to ‘wanting to understand people’s inner psychology’, and I think this impulse is perceptible in her work of this time too. She does not simply lay bare her feelings but extends them to a broad, empathetic statement on the nature of being alive. On the song, ‘All We Ever Look For’, on 1980’s Never for Ever, for instance, she runs over a set of family relationships, alluding to the pain inflicted by loved ones, the harsh scolding and beatings which children receive from their parents, who received them in turn when they were children: ‘The whims that we're weeping for/Our parents would be beaten for’. It’s phrased entirely in the first person plural: this is the pain we all endure, and indeed leads to some suggestively Freudian conclusions: ‘All we ever look for, another womb/All we ever look for, our own tomb’. Bush offers these thoughts as consolation: she starts from an observation of her own life: ‘Just look at your father/And you'll see how you took after him/Me, I'm just another/Like my brothers’ before making that key gear change into a universal statement about the human condition; it becomes the song’s refrain: ‘All we ever look for’. 

She performs a similar manoeuvre on the extraordinary song, ‘Reaching Out’, on Sensual World, which pushes the universalist thrust of earlier songs like ‘All We Ever Look For’ even further into a suggestion that these basic primal desires are not just consistent with the whole of humanity but are also in alignment with non-human nature: it starts with a close observation of a tiny human gesture: ‘See how the child reaches out instinctively/To feel how the fire will feel’ and builds it into a grand parallel with all organic processes: ‘See how the flower leans instinctively toward the light’ and ‘the Star that explodes’, before bringing it back to that same child, ‘reaching out for Mama’, a line which is repeated dramatically at the very end of the song to no accompaniment. We sense a vision of a cosmically coherent universe, in which everything is connected, and everything operates according to the same fundamental principles. It situates the feelings we experience in relationships - including the painful ones - within a grand picture of all life on earth, and it’s consoling, isn’t it, to think that our pain might actually be of a piece with the fundamental forces moving the sun and stars, or what Bush calls in that song, ‘the push and pull of it all’? It certainly, if we’re able to believe it, stands to make it less confusing, and perhaps less frightening.

The problem, of course, is if our lives simply do not and cannot match up to the mythic structure we have been handed to explain the world. It is only recently that the historic damage wrought on trans and non-binary people by psychoanalytic practice is being recognised. Given its intellectual foundations, it’s hardly surprising that traditional psychoanalysis has either ignored, dismissed or pathologised the existence of those who do not identify with their birth sex, leading Tim Dean and Christopher Lane, in their history of psychoanalysis, to conclude ‘that throughout [its] confrontation with gender variance, [the] institutions [of psychoanalysis] have in their development normalized moralistic and discriminatory practices.’ By exploring her experience via absolute notions of gender difference, endorsed by the psychoanalytical mainstream of her time, and expanding those personal observations into universalist statements on all human life, albeit inadvertently, Bush risked reproducing an exclusionary picture of what men and women are. When she implies, for instance, in the song, ‘Room for the Life’, on her 1979 album, The Kick Inside, that the vital power women possess is derived from their ability to get pregnant and have children - again, in consoling terms; the song is addressed to ‘a lady in tears’ - I nonetheless can’t help think of how this might be heard by a woman who cannot get pregnant, or indeed by a woman who does not have a uterus. 

And yet what we find in her work is never reducible to a bare statement of an attitude as crude and limited as that held by most early psychoanalysts on gender and sexuality. For a start, she frequently demonstrates a willingness to probe inherited notions about what men and women should be, most tellingly on the fifth song on Hounds of Love, ‘Mother Stands for Comfort’, which appears to confront directly that key principle of post-war British psychology, the mother’s boundless love for her child: it tells the story of a man who has done something terrible, possibly murder, and has taken refuge with his mother, who he knows will protect him regardless of what he’s done or the lies he may be telling her. Bush has said that the song is about the mother’s love but also, importantly, about its exploitation: the son, she’s said, is ‘using the mother’. It’s an unsettling song because it takes aim at this cherished idea - a mother’s protectiveness - and suggests that this powerful, supposedly ‘natural’ emotion can be taken advantage of.

But, more pervasively, the reason Bush’s songs are always both more mysterious and more convincing than the sometimes dubious mythic schemes which seem to have prompted them, resides in the fact that her focus - and her genius - is in the recording medium, and it’s in her exploits with voice, instrumentation, structure, harmony and melody, and production, that the full complex meaning of her work on emotion, desire and sex is found, and which is never reducible to a particular psychoanalytic idea or model. 

So, in ‘Running Up That Hill’, we find that the harmonic complexity of much of her earlier songwriting has been more or less abandoned in favour of a tight focus on C minor, which the song is woven around. We hear, along with the relentless drum track, an insistent tonic pedal in the bass and a high minor third on a synth pad throughout the song, from the first moment to the last. The melody takes a similar approach, fixating on a single note - Bb - to a striking degree. It’s emphasised in virtually every vocal phrase from start to end and - crucially - never goes above it. It’s also the accented note in the song’s central riff, the Bb-G-C figure heard in the intro and throughout. Bb, tellingly, is the seventh - i.e. the final - note of the C minor scale. This seventh note is known, in traditional harmonic theory, as the leading note, because it’s said to ‘lead’ the ear back to the tonic, the ‘home’ note, which all tonal music is oriented around; in Bush’s song, at least in the melody, we never arrive there. Listen to the end of each chorus, stretching out, falling only to the minor third over C minor (i.e. not the tonic note), intimating a lack of fulfilment, reflecting perfectly the chorus’s opening phrase, ‘If I only could’; the end of the song does not provide us with a sense of finality: the structure simply extends via repetitions into a subdued coda, with no satisfying or definitive harmonic closure. The repeating chord pattern is based on parallel movement (Ab-Bb-Cminor) rather than anything like a conventional cadence, and it’s significant that what harmonic variation there is - subtle as it is - comes on the phrase, ‘You … it’s you and me … ‘, when a brief Fminor is heard, and the song’s propulsion is paused briefly.  This, it suggests, is the theme of the song: it’s You and Me. 

What is all this propulsive energy and singular harmonic focus tending us towards? The tremendous sense of drive the song generates from the moment the drums kick in might itself have psychoanalytic overtones, as important as ‘drives’ are to the Freudian system, but Bush makes clear that she is specifically impelled towards knowledge, and a form of knowledge which seems impossible, even forbidden: that of knowing what it is to experience life as a person of the opposite sex. 

In this song, and generally in the wonderful album it's found on, Bush was never better at capturing sharply conflicting instincts: in 'Hounds of Love', it's desire for love competing with the fear of it, in 'Running Up That Hill', it's the punishing drive towards a type of understanding she knows she can't have, and it's reflected in the arrangement: listen again to the synth sounds she picks out to play her chords - soft, with slow 'attacks' which make them sound tentative, over that unabating drum track. 

Bush, in the same interview where she said that this song concerned ‘some fundamental differences between men and women’, goes on to say that 'if we (a man and a woman) could actually swap each other’s roles, if we could actually be in each other’s place for a while, I think we'd both be very surprised!'

Here we might sense the presence of yet another myth: Tiresias, the prophet who, according to Ovid, changed from a man into a woman and back again, and was blinded by the goddess Hera for revealing details of his sexual experiences as both genders. The taboo around crossing over the sex divide is less clear in the song itself, however, which doesn't, with the arguable exception of Bush's singing voice, involve anything gender-specific at all. We're faced again with the feeling that Bush's music, almost in spite of itself, has left the mythologies and symbolic schemes in its background behind, expressing something in the gap between the model and the reality the model seeks to represent, and what are we left with? A remarkably tormented, almost panicked, portrayal of mutual misunderstanding - 'You don't want to hurt me/But see how deep the bullet lies/Unaware I'm tearing you asunder/There is thunder in our hearts' - and a sense of the sheer impossibility of overcoming it - reflected in its musical structure: all those unresolved leading notes - no matter how much we may want it. The great divide in human affairs is not between man and woman but between person and person, and this is, I think, what's so powerful about the first line of the chorus: 'If I could, I'd make a deal with God': '*If* I could' - either God exists, Bush suggests, but He is not the type of God who makes deals with us, or he doesn't exist in the first place, in which case there's no one to appeal to for the sort of universal perspective needed to truly understand each other, and, more urgently, there's no one to reassure us that any of it means anything at all. The heart of the lyric is surely the moment she sings, with a sort of desperate ferocity, 'Is there so much hate for the ones we love?', before following it, suddenly alone-sounding, with 'Tell us we both matter don't we?'. When we set myth aside, we are left only with fallible, flesh-and-blood humans, and the relationships - which may include almost as much hatred and incomprehension as love - that we form with them, to give us reassurance that 'we both matter, don't we?' 

It's empathy - the capacity not merely to be alongside someone in pain but to actually experience their suffering from inside it - which is held up as the bridge across this divide, although the conclusion of the song, if you can call it that, is that this 'swapping places' is in practice extremely difficult. Why then, does she not sound more pessimistic than she does? If there’s no hope for understanding, why write the song in the first place? I think it's something to do with what a song is - a gesture which extends across the divide between people: when I sing a song to you, that is an invitation, albeit briefly, to switch our places, to feel how something feels for me. Listen again to some of those opening lines, and you can hear Bush addressing us, the listener, directly: 'Do you want to feel how it feels ... It's You, You and Me'.