This House is Full of Madness – Get out of My House

Horror Moments, Kate Bush Edition

You’ve got to love a song where a woman turns into a mule.

In 1982 Kate Bush released her fourth album The Dreaming, a tour de force of strange, experimental storytelling. She made extensive use of the brand-new Fairlight synthesiser with its endless possibilities for sampling sound, and this gives the album an identity quite distinct from anything she had written before despite the fact that, from track to track, these songs are very different.

There’s the folky ‘Night of the Swallow’, about a smuggler arguing with his lover, the title track, ‘The Dreaming’, which pairs a didgeridoo with the sound of a car crash to evoke the violence of colonisation in Australia, the pseudo-Cockney ‘There Goes a Tenner’ about a bank robbery gone wrong, ‘Houdini’ where the widow of the famous escapologist remembers his last fatal stunt, and so on.

Critics didn’t quite know what to make of it. Neil Tennant of Smash Hits described it simply as “very weird” and suggested that “she's obviously trying to become less commercial.” Colin Irwin of Melody Maker admitted there was merit in-between its “twisted overkill” and “histrionic fits.” Bush herself called it her “she’s gone mad album,” but it has proved enduringly influential and is a favourite of many fans.

The characters in these songs have every right to be ‘weird’ and ‘histrionic.’ They are being pushed to extremes of fear, grief, and desire — why wouldn’t they screech and scream? ‘Get out of My House’ is a great case in point: this is a song about a house haunted by the projections of a troubled psyche or, perhaps, a troubled psyche beginning to feel like a haunted house.

This house is full of m-m-my mess
(Slamming)
This house is full of m-m-mistakes
(Slamming)
This house is full of m-m-madness
(Slamming)
This house is full of, full of, full of fight!
(Slam it)

‘Get Out of My House’ is loosely based on Stephen King’s The Shining which Bush said was ‘the only book I’ve read that has frightened me.’ Interestingly, she drew a link between haunted houses like the Overlook Hotel and the spaceship in Alien, something I explored in one of my Wallace & Gromit horror moments last year, ‘In Space, No One Can Hear Gromit Scream’.

She said:

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. — Kate Bush, 1982.

Whilst the lyrics evoke Jack Torrance going mad in the almost-abandoned hotel, the percussive sound we hear with the lines ‘No stranger’s feet will enter me’ also reminds me of the presence that goes knocking down the wall in The Haunting (1963), another story where the line between the ‘vile’ house and the characters’ unsettled inner worlds begins to blur.

Bush explained further:¹

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, 1982.

And so the narrator turns and starts hee-hawing at the unwelcome presence.

I will not let you in
I face towards the wind
I change into the Mule
“I change into the Mule”

Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Hee-haw-hee-haw-hee-haw-hee-haw…

“Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Hee-haw!”

Has she scared it away, or has it driven her mad? And why does she change into a mule? There are a couple of stories I can think of where a character turns into a donkey as a punishment, most notably the grim transformation sequence in Pinocchio where the boys who have been tempted away to Pleasure Island lose their humanity and are carted off to a life of enslavement. The way their voices calling out for their mothers turn to braying is surely one of the most disturbing scenes in children’s cinema.

In Brazilian folklore it is a headless mule, not a donkey, that can supposedly be heard braying and crying with the voice of a woman: is a sinful woman who has been cursed with involuntary shapeshifting and must gallop across seven parishes every night.

Has the narrator of our song committed some sin that now afflicts her mind this way? Is this animal spirit that duets with her then seems to steal her power of speech a representation of evil or intrusive thoughts? Is this about being overcome with mule-like stubbornness? Or is there something liberating in this moment of possession, has some animal instinct been ecstatically unleashed? The song never reveals exactly what has happened, though Bush herself seems to view it as a moment of triumph and release. How do you interpret its strange symbolism? And if your mind was a haunted house, what sorts of spirits would but lurking in its corridors?

Next week we’ll explore what is probably Kate Bush’s most uncomfortable song so brace yourselves. Until next time, happy nightmares everyone!

Horror moments are posted every Thursday and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Monday afternoons.

1. Quotes from http://gaffa.org/garden/kate14.html, transcribed by Andy Marvick.