Some songs evoke memories of a special evening. Some conjure particular shades of joy or sorrow. In the case of Kate Bush’s extraordinary album Hounds of Love, one line from the title track transports me instantly to a very specific place and time. “Take my shoes off, and THROW them in the lake …”
Between my two spells as a DJ I had a fourteen-year career in theatrical stage management. It was like DJ-ing in that it was a backstage, supporting role. Most of that time was spent in small-scale tours around Scotland, a country with perhaps only half a dozen major centres of population. For a tour to reach all the corners of the nation it must perform in rural schools and village halls and on the many archipelagos detached from the Scottish mainland.
I was a Kate Bush fan from the start and saw her show in Edinburgh's Usher Hall in 1979 during her only UK tour. I bought the cassette of Hounds of Love in the Fort William branch of WH Smiths (along with John Martyn’s album Piece by Piece) in the autumn of 1985 while on tour with Communicado Theatre Company’s production of Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The album remains in my view the single most innovative recording in the history of popular music – my own personal Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The depth of sound foreshadowed in Bush’s previous LP The Dreaming, the rawness of emotion evident since her first releases – these things combined with a completely unexpected unleashing of musical creativity which entirely envelope the listener. Four out the five tracks on the original Side 1 were hit singles. The original Side 2, subtitled The Ninth Wave, is an evocation of a dream state which still leaves me breathless.
It was my first proper freelance job as a stage manager
after three years with my first employer, TAG Theatre Co in Glasgow.
Communicado had a strong reputation for innovative theatre on a shoestring, and
I was pleased as punch to be working for them. But I was woefully
under-experienced for the responsibility of this, my first national tour, and had rather bluffed my way into the post. "I'm the man you're looking for," I told the company's director, although I was very insecure in that belief.
On such tours of mostly one-night stands, the cast all helped out with the fit-up and the strike (the dismantling of the set and loading back into the tour van). But I felt keenly the responsibility of being the only fulltime technician on the tour, with a director – the inspirational and inventive Gerry Mulgrew - who often requested big production changes in mid-tour with minimal resources. I had to come up with a new lighting effect in the tiny outpost of Ullapool with only the local crofters’ hardware store to supply me. In Craigmillar I was asked to create the scenery for an entirely new dramatic location (a prison) from wooden pallets which were already serving as the walls of the orchestra pit.
In Portree on the Isle of Skye I left my luggage with that of the rest of the cast in the hotel lobby while I collected the tour van for the next leg, and sat at the wheel while the cast loaded all their bags into the back – but not mine. We did not discover the error until we arrived at the next stop, Stornoway on the island of Lewis, where the opportunities for clothes shopping were limited. Already insecure, I began to feel unconsidered by and isolated from the performing members of the company, and the long sea journey from Stornoway back to the Scottish mainland was the closest I’ve ever come to throwing myself overboard. Years later one of the cast confided that they had all been very worried about me.
The tour concluded in the island community of Shetland and in the dark of a November evening before a show in one waterside village hall I wandered down to the water’s edge with Hounds of Love in my Walkman and that line ringing in my ears. The song is about being afraid of love, a fear represented by the hounds of love in pursuit; but I suppose what I heard were the hounds of responsibility chasing me to the water’s edge until I had nowhere else to run. I wanted to take my shoes off, throw them in the sea and follow them.
The next day I did. We had an afternoon off while we waited to board the overnight ferry back to Aberdeen. We celebrated the end of a critically successful tour with a beach barbecue and (bearing in mind that this was mid-November in the most northerly part of the United Kingdom) some of us took off not only our shoes but everything else except our underpants and ran into the north Atlantic Ocean. It was unimaginably cold, like being suddenly clamped between two huge blocks of ice. I came out of the water immediately, glad to be alive.
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