this song fully was in 2022. I wanted to come back to The Dreaming for This Kate Bush: Something Like a Song. Get Out of My House is the final song from Kate Bush’s fourth studio album. I have spent a bit of time with this album the past few weeks or so. I have discussed The Dreaming and its use of percussion. I have also talked about its first single, Sat in Your Lap. Although my favourite song from the album – and my favourite Kate Bush song – is Houidini (the penultimate song), I think that the album finale is as intense and hypnotic as Kate Bush ever got. In a way, it was a precursor to the scale and ambition of Hounds of Love (her fifth album arrived in September 1985). However, Get Out of My House was Kate Bush in intense and paranoid mode. Inspired by Stephen King’s The Shining, it is a song that is rarely played on the radio. I am going to bring in some information I have used in previous features about Get Out of My House. However, I think it is worthwhile bringing this information back in to illustrate a wonderful song. Here are some interviews where Kate Bush discussed Get Out of My House:
“The Shining’ is the only book I’ve read that has frightened me. While reading it I swamped around in its snowy imagery and avoided visiting certain floors of the big, cold hotel, empty for the winter. As in ‘Alien’, the central characters are isolated, miles (or light years) away from anyone or anything, but there is something in the place with them. They’re not sure what, but it isn’t very nice.The setting for this song continues the theme – the house which is really a human being, has been shut up – locked and bolted, to stop any outside forces from entering. The person has been hurt and has decided to keep everybody out. They plant a ‘concierge’ at the front door to stop any determined callers from passing, but the thing has got into the house upstairs. It’s descending in the lift, and now it approaches the door of the room that you’re hiding in. You’re cornered, there’s no way out, so you turn into a bird and fly away, but the thing changes shape, too. You change, it changes; you can’t escape, so you turn around and face it, scare it away.
Kate Bush Club newsletter, October 1982
It’s meant to be a bit scary. It’s just the idea of someone being in this place and there’s something else there… You don’t know what it is. The track kept changing in the studio. This is something that’s never happened before on an album. That one was maybe half the length it is now. The guitarist got this really nice riff going, and I got this idea of two voices – a person in the house, trying to get away from this thing, but it’s still there. So in order to get away, they change their form – first into a bird trying to fly away from it. The thing can change as well, sothatchanges into this wind, and starts blowing all icy. The idea is to turn around and face it. You’ve got this image of something turning round and going “Aah!”‘ just to try and scare it away.
Kris Needs, ‘Dream Time In The Bush’. ZIgZag (UK), 1982”.
