The Ninth Wave: An Introduction
a deep dive into Kate Bush's oceanic masterwork
In 1983, Kate Bush started work on a new album. She had just released The Dreaming, which was her most experimental album yet, and in which she took full hold of the production reins for the first time as sole producer. Due to the increasing cost of ratcheting up long hours at Abbey Road, Bush decided to build her own recording studio in a disused barn at her parents’ home, just outside London. She had it kitted out with all the equipment she needed, and began work on the album that would become Hounds of Love.
She had already written two songs when a third came along — and this one felt to Bush like an idea she wanted to develop further. She had long been toying with the idea of writing a conceptual suite of songs, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do it. That song was “And Dream of Sheep”, the first song in a sequence of seven songs which makes up the second half of the Hounds of Love album, called The Ninth Wave.
Back in the mid-80s vinyl was the primary physical format for music, so the suite was written with this in mind. On the album sleeve the tracks are split up into two parts, one titled Hounds of Love and the other titled The Ninth Wave, taking up one side of vinyl each. Thus, the best way to experience this album is on vinyl, if you can. It’s an album of two halves, related but separate from each other.
The album, released in 1985, is widely considered to be one of Kate’s best, and The Ninth Wave in particular to be one of her most ambitious and complete works. She would write another conceptual song-cycle twenty years later, called A Sky of Honey, which forms the second half of her 2005 double album Aerial.
This series of essays will be a deep dive (pun intended) into The Ninth Wave, covering the lyrics, the music, and the production. This first instalment will be an introduction, analysing some of the broad themes of the work and looking at the context surrounding its creation.
The Ninth Wave follows the journey of a woman who has found herself in the sea alone at night, with only a life jacket to keep her afloat. Presumably the boat she was on has sank, or she has been washed overboard in a storm. Through the night she tries to keep herself awake, as it’s believed that if you fall asleep you’ll roll over in the water and drown. She struggles to stay alive, battling with the forces of nature and with her own mind, and waits for rescue.
Kate Bush is from Britain, which, despite how large it looms in global history, is a small island, separated from mainland Europe by the English Channel and the North Sea. Bush’s mother was born in Ireland, also a small island, and right next door. Island nations tend to have a lot of mythology around water, as they are surrounded by it and have to navigate it, often for making their own living, or for travelling to trade with other countries.
There are various mythological creatures in Britain associated with water. The mermaids, who take their name from the Old English word mere, meaning a lake or a sea — the mere-maids, or maids of the mere — can be found in folk stories up and down Britain. Historically, they are not the alluringly mysterious sexy sirens they have come to be known as, but ferocious creatures, and an encounter with one is usually extremely dangerous. In Ireland and Scotland, the selkies are seal-human hybrids who can move between water and land. One famous tale tells of a selkie woman who is forced to marry a man and have children with him after he steals her seal-skin. She eventually gets it back and returns to the sea, but has to leave her child behind.
Holy wells have existed in Britain and Ireland since pagan times, as places where people would come to leave offerings and to use the water for its healing properties. Many of these holy wells still survive, especially in Ireland, where they have now come to be associated with the Christian saints. Water is commonly associated with healing and purity.1
The title The Ninth Wave comes from a long tradition of water myths. It most directly references a painting by Ivan Aivazovsky, also called The Ninth Wave (pictured above). The painting depicts a group of sailors clinging to the mast of their ship in choppy waters, the diffuse sun looming over the waves. On the back cover of the Hounds of Love album sleeve Bush prints a quotation of Tennyson, from his poem “The Coming of Arthur”:
“Wave after wave, each mightier than the last
‘Til 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 Arthurian legends are key to understanding the mythology of Britain in the Common Era, and water plays a significant role in them. They have been rewritten and reimagined countless times, but the story can be traced back to medieval times, in a work by a Welsh monk from the 12th Century called Geoffrey of Monmouth, called Historia Regum Brittaniae, or ‘The History of the Kings of Britain’. Possibly the most influential Arthurian text is Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, which, despite the title, was written in Middle English.
Tennyson, a 19th Century poet, wrote a number of Arthurian narrative poems, collectively titled Idylls of the King. In “The Coming of Arthur”, the titular character is said to have been born out of the ninth wave, a marker of his special status and that he came from the ‘Otherworld’ to rule over Britain. The poem continues:
“And down the wave and in the flame was borne
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin’s feet,
Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried, ‘The King!
Here is an heir for Uther!’ And the fringe
of that great breaker, sweeping up the strand,
Lashed at the wizard as he spake the word”
A photo of Kate floating in water surrounded by flowers, which was used as a promo image for the album, is a pretty clear reference to various water-doomed heroines of lore, including Shakespeare’s Ophelia, but it could also be a reference to another character from the Idylls of the King. Take this passage from “Lancelot and Elaine”:
“And Lancelot answered nothing, but he went,
And at the inrunning of a little brook
Sat by the river in a cove, and watched
The high reed wave, and lifted up his eyes
And saw the barge that brought her moving down,
Far-off, a blot upon the stream, and said
Low in himself, ‘Ah simple heart and sweet,
Ye loved me, damsel, surely with a love
Far tenderer than my Queen’s. Pray for thy soul?
Ay, that will I. Farewell, too–now, at last–
Farewell, fair lily.’”
Lancelot is watching Elaine’s body being carried down the river on a funeral barge, and reflecting on her love for him. In The Ninth Wave, the perspective is flipped and we see things from a woman’s point of view. Our narrator is praying for her own soul as she is carried by the ocean’s current — as are her family and friends, no doubt. But she isn’t dead — not yet, at least.
Another key figure in Arthurian legend is the Lady of the Lake, who has been given a number of different names throughout time, including Viviane, Nimue, and Niniane. In Marion Zimmer Bradley’s novel The Mists of Avalon, another retelling of the Arthurian legend, all of these names are given distinct characters, and each occupy or are in line to occupy the role of Lady of the Lake at some point in the book, including Morgaine, the novel’s protagonist. In the legend, the Lady of the Lake is the person who gives Arthur the sword Excalibur. Tennyson again:
“For barefoot on the keystone, which was lined
And rippled like an ever-fleeting wave,
The Lady of the Lake stood: all her dress
Wept from her sides as water flowing away”
— Gareth and Lynette
Mythical islands are also a theme in British folklore. Irish legend tells of Hy-Brasil, a mythic enchanted island said to promise eternal youth and everlasting peace. It was believed to lie ‘beyond the ninth wave’, and was thought to be located somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean far-west of Ireland. Then there’s the island of Avalon from the Arthurian legend, accessible only by boat, which is the final resting place of King Arthur after he is mortally wounded in battle. Real-world analogues for Avalon include Glastonbury Tor, which used to be an island, and Bardsey Island off the coast of north Wales.
The Ninth Wave is dense with this mythology and folklore, not just in the broader themes of the work but in the details of the songs themselves, which we will see later. Musically, Bush draws on influences from a variety of different places. She makes good use of the synthesiser, which was cutting-edge back in the 80s, as well as the piano as a primary compositional tool. We also get the classic rock set-up of bass, guitar and drums, as well as some orchestral moments and traditional Irish instrumentation.
The tracks are not only full of melody but are littered with sound effects and voice clips. Probably the most ground-breaking aspect of The Ninth Wave is Bush’s use of tape splicing — this was back when analogue tape was the only tool for mixing, and in order to get the effect we hear on the songs themselves she had to painstakingly attach pieces of tape together and layer up each track in the mix. This is much easier to do now in the age of digital music software like Pro Tools, which makes it all the more impressive what Bush managed to achieve using analogue equipment.
The sea, as well as being biologically fertile ground for all kinds of life, is fertile psychic ground as well. Water is often an image of the unconscious — floods, being submerged in water, what lies below the surface — and the deep darkness of the ocean has come to symbolise the things which lurk unbidden inside of us, our fears and desires, the generative forces of the psyche that drive change and movement. Myths, especially fairy tales, are themselves representations of psychological realities, their constituent parts symbolic of different aspects of a singular or collective mind.
It’s also worth noting that the artist who created The Ninth Wave is a woman, and so is the protagonist, because water is closely associated with femininity — especially with the mother, the giver of life. Think the ‘water of life’, or the ‘fountain of youth’, or the Lady of the Lake. We need water to survive; most of the human body is made up of water. This connection of water with women comes up particularly in the song “Waking the Witch”. Carl Jung writes:
“The maternal meaning of water is one of the clearest symbolic interpretations in the area of mythology [...]. Life comes from water […]. In dreams and fantasies, the sea and any larger body of water means the unconscious. The mother aspect of water coincides with the nature of the unconscious in that it can be addressed as the mother or matrix [womb] of the conscious.”
— Symbols of Change
So, there’s the preamble. Next time, we’ll dive into the dark waters to join our protagonist at the start of her ordeal with the first song of the collection, “And Dream of Sheep”. Until then, stay safe, and don’t fall into any oceans if you can help it.
Writer and Substacker Paul Kingsnorth is currently writing a series on his pilgrimages to the holy wells in Ireland, where he lives.
Really fascinating, Jack. All of it.
Interesting use of “keystone” in Tennyson.
And how can we not fall in love with Kate in the hound photo?🤍