Cloudbusting

I'm a great admirer of various kinds of music. Cloudbusting from Kate Bush is one of my favourites.

"The last song is called "Cloudbusting," and 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. 

Cover of the single 'Cloudbusting'

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, 1985, KBC 18

The book is a memoir called "A Book of Dreams" (1973), by Peter Reich. His father was Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian psychoanalyst (think of Sigmund Freud), and one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.

Read more about Wilhelm Reich here:

www.wilhelmreichtrust.org