‘Cloudbusting’ is a song written by Kate Bush. It was originally released on her fifth studio album Hounds Of Love. ‘Cloudbusting’ became the second single from the album on 14 October 1985.

The song is about the very close relationship between psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich and his young son, Peter, told from the point of view of the son. It describes the boy’s memories of his life with Reich on their family farm, called Orgonon where the two spent time “cloudbusting”, a rain-making process which involved pointing at the sky a machine designed and built by Reich, called a cloudbuster. The lyric further describes Wilhelm Reich’s abrupt arrest and imprisonment, the pain of loss the young Peter felt, and his helplessness at being unable to protect his father. The song was inspired by Peter Reich’s 1973 memoir, A Book of Dreams, which Bush read and found deeply moving.

Kate actually contacted Peter Reich to explain her motives in writing ‘Cloudbusting’ and to express the wish that she hoped he would approve of the song. She received his reply a while later, saying that he loved what she was doing.

‘Cloudbusting’ was used in an advert for La Maison Bouyges.

The song was also used in the eleventh episode of the third series of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Formats

‘Cloudbusting’ was released as a 7″ single and 12″ single in the UK and Europe. The 7″ featured Burning Bridge on the B-side; the 12″ single consisted of the extended Organon re-mix of ‘Cloudbusting’, plus Burning Bridge and My Lagan Love on the B-side.
In the USA, the single was released in 1986. The 7″ single featured The Man With The Child In His Eyes on the B-side. The 12″ single incorrectly called the extended version of Cloudbusting ‘The Meteorological Mix’, and featured The Man With The Child In His Eyes and Sat In Your Lap on the B-side. A promotional CD-single was also made, featuring both the album version and the extended remix of Cloudbusting, plus the two B-sides.

Versions

There are three different versions of ‘Cloudbusting’: the album version (which was identical to the single version), the video version (released on CD in 1994) and the 12″ remix entitled ‘The Organon Re-Mix’, released as a 12″ single in 1985 and later on CD.
A live version appears on the album Before The Dawn.

Music video

The music video was directed by Julian Doyle and was conceived by Terry Gilliam and Kate as a short film. In it, Canadian actor Donald Sutherland, portrays Wilhelm Reich, and Kate Bush, portraying his son Peter. The music video was made over ten days, including four at the outside location – Uffington in Oxfordshire, England. Bush found out in which hotel Sutherland was staying from actress Julie Christie’s hairdresser and went to his room to personally ask him to participate in the project.

The video shows the two on the top of a hill trying to make the cloudbuster work. Reich leaves Peter on the machine and returns to his lab. In flashback, he remembers several times he and Peter enjoyed together as Reich worked on various scientific projects, until he is interrupted by government officials who arrest him and ransack the lab. Peter senses his father’s danger and tries to reach him, but is forced to watch helplessly as his father is driven away. Peter finally runs back to the cloudbuster and activates it successfully, to the delight of his father who sees it starting to rain.

In the UK, the music video was shown at some cinemas as an accompaniment to the main feature. Due to difficulties on obtaining a work visa for Sutherland at short notice, the actor offered to work on the video for free. Although the events depicted in the story took place in Maine, the newspaper clipping in the music video reads The Oregon Times, likely a reference to Reich’s home and laboratory Orgonon. The Cloudbusting machine in the video was designed and constructed by people who worked on the Alien creature. It was made out of cardboard and hardboard, and definitely not waterproof! The machine resembled the original cloudbusters only superficially. The original machines were smaller and with multiple narrow, straight tubes and pipes, and were operated while standing on the ground. In a reference to the source material of the song, Bush pulls a copy of Peter Reich’s A Book of Dreams out of Sutherland’s coat.

Performances

Kate performed ‘Cloudbusting’ in the German show Show Vor Acht in September 1985. This was a lipsynch performance. Another lipsynch performance happened on RAI television in Italy (date of broadcast unknown).
The song was also performed as the last encore during Kate’s Before The Dawn shows in London, 2014.

Critical reception

The reviews for the song, when it was released as a single, were a mixture of acclaim, bewilder and incomprehension.

Makes me shiver. (…) The string sextet will wrap themselves around your nervous system and start to beat like a pulse… I really think she does this sort of thing deliberately.

Jane Simon, Sounds, 19 OCTOBER 1985

A fine vocal… married to a rotten boring tune and some orchestral wittering.

David Quantick, NME, 19 October 1985

A dreamy gentle intense Sousaesque marching tune chockablock with the unsual whimsey.

Caroline Sullivan, MelodyMaker, 19 October 1985

Kate Bush is an Authentic… an album track. Kate’s luscious melodies are underpinned by a strident and remorseless chop of violins… refreshing.

Martin Townsend, The Hit, 26 October 1985

There’s no denying her ability to make thoroughly stylistic, English, sexy pop, and do it very well indeed…. Infuriatingly catchy bit of stringy nonsense.

Andy StricklanD, Record Mirror, 26 October 1985

Cover versions

‘Cloudbusting’ was covered by Anthem In, Baby Bushka, Theo Bleckmann, Clay Broome Band, Kat Devlin, Tophy Dye, E-Clypse featuring Emma Price, Eklipse, Thomas Eklund, Geographer, Goodknight Productions, Göteborgs Symfoniker, Neil Halstead, Steve Hogarth, The Hounds Of Love, Nick Jaina, Just Us, Yuri Kono, Little Beards, Liz, Katie Malco, Charlotte Martin, Matches, Richard Navarro, Novembre, Paper Crows, Benoit Pioulard, Niki Romijn, Scala & Kolacny Brothers, Sergeant Thunderhoof, Storm Of Capricorn, Swimmer OneTM Collective, Twilight Singers, Two Librarians on the First Floor, Wild Nothing and Yules.

The song was sampled by Utah Saints for their track Something Good.
The song was sampled by Beyond for their track Still Dream.
The song was remixed by Just Us and released as Everytime It Rains in 2016, before they covered ‘Cloudbusting’ with an other vocalist in 2017.
UK punk band P.A.I.N. used a sample in their song ‘Eastern Dub (Wilhelm Reich In Hell)’, without permission of record company EMI.

Kate about ‘Cloudbusting’

This was inspired by a book that I first found on a shelf nearly nine years ago. It was just calling me from the shelf, and when I read it I was very moved by the magic of it. It’s about a special relationship between a young son and his father. The book was written from a child’s point of view. His father is everything to him; he is the magic in his life, and he teaches him everything, teaching him to be open-minded and not to build up barriers. His father has built a machine that can make it rain, a ‘cloudbuster’; and the son and his father go out together cloudbusting. They point big pipes up into the sky, and they make it rain. The song is very much taking a comparison with a yo-yo that glowed in the dark and which was given to the boy by a best friend. It was really special to him; he loved it. But his father believed in things having positive and negative energy, and that fluorescent light was a very negative energy – as was the material they used to make glow-in-the-dark toys then – and his father told him he had to get rid of it, he wasn’t allowed to keep it. But the boy, rather than throwing it away, buried it in the garden, so that he would placate his father but could also go and dig it up occasionally and play with it. It’s a parallel in some ways between how much he loved the yo-yo – how special it was – and yet how dangerous it was considered to be. He loved his father (who was perhaps considered dangerous by some people); and he loved how he could bury his yo-yo and retrieve it whenever he wanted to play with it. But there’s nothing he can do about his father being taken away, he is completely helpless. But it’s very much more 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.

Kate Bush Club newsletter, 1985

‘Cloudbusting’ is a track that was very much inspired by a book calledA Book Of Dreams. This book is written through a child’s eyes, looking at his father and how much his father means to him in his world – he’s everything. his father has a machine that can make it rain, amongst many other things, and there’s a wonderful sense of magic as he and his father make it rain together on this machine. The book is full of imagery of an innocent child and yet it’s being written by a sad adult, which gives it a strange kind of personal intimacy and magic that is quite extraordinary. The song is really about how much that father meant to the son and how much he misses him now he’s gone.

Conversation Disc Series, ABCD 012, 1985

It’s a song with a very American inspiration, which draws its subject from ‘A Book Of Dreams’ by Peter Reich. The book was written as if by a child who was telling of his strange and unique relationship with his father. They lived in a place called Organon, where the father, a respected psycho-analyst, had some very advanced theories on Vital Energy; furthermore, he owned a rain-making machine, the Cloudbuster. His son and he loved to use it to make it rain. Unfortunately, the father was imprisoned because of his ideas. In fact, in America, in that period, it was safer not to stick out. Sadly, the father dies in prison. From that point on, his son becomes unable to put up with an orthodox lifestyle, to adapt himself. The song evokes the days of happiness when the little boy was making it rain with his father.

Yves Bigot, ‘Englishwoman Is Crossing The Continents’. Guitares et Claviers (France), February 1986

If I’ve got this right,he believed that sexual energy was positive, usable energy that he tied in with his concept of orgone energy. He upset a lot of people selling orgone boxes, saying they could cure cancer and stuff. He ended up being arrested and put in prison. I knew nothing about Wilhelm when I read the book,which was his son’s experience of all this, written from a child’s point of view with a tremendous innocence and sadness. Years ago, I just went into a shop and picked it off the shelf, and really liked the title and the picture on the front. I’d never bought a book before which I hadn’t known anything about;I just felt I’d found something really special. And nine, 10 years later, I re-read it and it turned into a song. When it was finished, I wrote a letter to Peter Reich saying what I’d done. It was important to me in some way to have a sense of his blessing because his book really moved me. He sent me back such a lovely letter. It was an incredible feeling of returning something he’d given to me.

Mat Snow, ‘Follow That!’. Q/HMV special magazine, 1990

That did all fall apart over a period of about ten bars. And everything just started falling apart, ’cause it didn’t end properly, and, you know, the drummer would stop and then the strings would just sorta start wiggling around and talking. And I felt it needed an ending, and I didn’t really know what to do. And then I thought maybedecoytactics were the way, and we covered the whole thing over with the sound of a steam engine slowing down so that you had the sense of the journey coming to an end. And it worked, it covered up all the falling apart and actually made it sound verycompletein a way. And we had terrible trouble getting a sound effect of steam train so we actually made up the sound effect out of various sounds, and Del was the steam. (Laughs) And we got a whistle on the Fairlight for the “poo poop”.

Richard Skinner, ‘Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love’. BBC Radio 1, 26 January 1992

Highest chart positions

Germany: 20
Ireland: 13
Netherlands: 11
UK: 20

Lyrics

I still dream of Orgonon
I wake up crying
You’re making rain
And you’re just in reach
When you and sleep escape me

You’re like my yo-yo
That glowed in the dark
What made it special
Made it dangerous
So I bury it
And forget

But every time it rains
You’re here in my head
Like the sun coming out
Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen
And I don’t know when
But just saying it could even make it happen

On top of the world,
Looking over the edge,
You could see them coming
You looked too small
In their big, black car
To be a threat to the men in power

I hid my yo-yo
In the garden
I can’t hide you
From the government
Oh, God, Daddy
I won’t forget,

‘Cause every time it rains,
You’re here in my head,
Like the sun coming out
Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen
And I don’t know when
But just saying it could even make it happen

The sun’s coming out
Your son’s coming out

Credits

Drums: Stuart Elliott, Charlie Morgan
Strings: The Medicci Sextet
Arranged for strings by Dave Lawson
Backing vocals: Brian Bath, Paddy Bush, John Carder Bush, Del Palmer

References

  • Cloudbusting. Wikipedia, retrieved 1 November 2014.
  • Graeme Thomson, Under The Ivy: The Life & Music Of Kate Bush, cop. 2012. ISBN 9781780381466.