{"id":666825,"date":"2026-10-27T13:16:15","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T13:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/666825\/"},"modified":"2026-10-27T13:16:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T13:16:15","slug":"donal-lunny-work-on-kate-bushs-defining-album-brought-his-music-to-its-widest-audience-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/666825\/","title":{"rendered":"D\u00f3nal Lunny work on Kate Bush\u2019s defining album brought his music to its widest audience \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Kate Bush<\/a> arrived in Ireland in the spring of 1984, she had adventure on her mind. And adventure is what she found, as she ended up in a recording studio in Dublin with D\u00f3nal Lunny<\/a> \u2013 the pied piper and eternal shapeshifter of Irish traditional music, who has died aged 79<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe is a lovely woman. Working with her was a pleasure,\u201d Lunny would recall of his collaborations with Bush. \u201cKate had recorded several sessions at Windmill Lane studio<\/a>, where she had worked with [producer and arranger] Bill Whelan. He suggested that we work together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bush was in the midst of recording Hounds of Love, the album today regarded as her defining work, largely thanks to an A-side containing hits such as Cloudbusting and Running Up That Hill<\/a>, which went viral with Gen Z when it featured on Stranger Things in 2022.<\/p>\n

But she wanted side two of the record to draw on her Irish heritage \u2013 and so she headed to Windmill Lane studio, deep in the Dublin docklands, where she put together an all-star team of Irish trad players, headed by the enigmatic and mischievous Lunny.<\/p>\n

Their creative relationship dated back to a cameo by Lunny on Bush\u2019s divisive 1982 album, The Dreaming, which had alienated critics and confounded fans with its flights into whimsy (the less said about the didgeridoo solo by Rolf Harris, the better).<\/p>\n

But she would thoroughly rehabilitate herself with Hounds of Love, the LP that confirmed her status as one of the great songwriters of her generation. Aside from the smashes, much of its mystique is owed to the album\u2019s second half, which is devoted entirely to The Ninth Wave \u2013 a suite of trippy and mysterious songs that abandon the familiar waters of \u201880s pop and head out into the dark, deep unknown.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Ninth Wave was a film \u2013 that\u2019s how I thought of it,\u201d Bush later reflected. \u201cIt\u2019s the idea of this person being in the water; how they\u2019ve got there \u2013 we don\u2019t know. But the idea is that they\u2019ve been on a ship and they\u2019ve been washed over the side, so they\u2019re alone in this water. And I find that horrific imagery \u2013 the thought of being completely alone in all this water.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Ninth Wave\u2019s centrepiece is The Jig of Life, a swirling, joyful tune that features Lunny on bouzouki and bodhr\u00e1n alongside John Sheahan<\/a> of The Dubliners<\/a> on fiddle and tin whistle, and Liam O\u2019Flynn<\/a>\u2019s uilleann pipes. It was intended to capture the excitement and terror of Bush\u2019s protagonist as they fight against a rising ocean. <\/p>\n

\u2018The following Christmas I got, in the post, a present of this official origami book from Japan she had acquired from somewhere. She was charming\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0John Sheahan on Kate Bush<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was fastidious about getting things right,\u201d Sheahan would later tell me. \u201cI remember playing the [tin] whistle. She was saying \u2018this is absolutely beautiful, but when you get to this note can you just slide up\u2019. She was a real perfectionist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Going to Ireland and working with artists of the calibre of Lunny made a huge impression on Bush, her then partner and collaborator Del Palmer would remember (Palmer worked as an engineer on Hounds of Love and played bass on Running Up That Hill).<\/p>\n

He recalled how he and Bush had taken a break from recording to take a road trip in a rickety hatchback that took them all the way to Dingle. \u201cThere were no roads \u2013 just tracks. You couldn\u2019t make a phone call on a Sunday because the phone-master was away. They used to have wind-up telephones. It was very different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today an artist of Bush\u2019s stature could expect to travel in luxury, but not when she was in Ireland in 1984. \u201cOne night we had to sleep in the car. It was a Volkswagen Golf \u2013 nothing fancy,\u201d said Palmer. \u201cI can\u2019t think of many other countries where you\u2019d be fine about sleeping in a car.\u201d <\/p>\n

Back at Windmill Lane, she would encourage the musicians to pour their hearts into The Jig of Life. These sessions would crystallise her friendship with Lunny, with whom she would again collaborate on 1989\u2019s The Sensual World and his 1996 trad concept LP Common Ground: Voices of Modern Irish Music, where she mastered Irish pronunciation in order to sing the Se\u00e1n \u00d3 Riada<\/a> composition, Mn\u00e1 na h\u00c9ireann.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Kate Bush: \u2018I was beginning to think I\u2019d never play again\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cShe gave me a big hug and said, \u2018Oh, you\u2019re playing so emotionally\u2019,\u201d Sheahan would remember. He was deeply touched to receive a gift out of the blue from Bush many months later. \u201cI was into origami,\u201d he said. \u201cI left a couple of little birds and frogs [around the studio]. The following Christmas I got, in the post, a present of this official origami book from Japan she had acquired from somewhere. She was charming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working with Kate Bush was just one among many highlights in the career of Lunny, whose collaborators ran from Bono<\/a> to Elvis Costello<\/a> \u2013 though not Rod Stewart<\/a>, despite persistent rumours to the contrary. <\/p>\n

But of all the records that bear his thumbprints, Hounds of Love may be the one that has found the widest audience. It continues to speak to this day to listeners who get lost in the eerie swells of The Ninth Wave and are then lifted high by The Jig of Life and by Lunny strumming the bouzouki and playing the bodhr\u00e1n as if summoning angels out of the deep.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s a brilliant woman,\u201d Lunny said of Bush when recalling the music they made together. \u201cShe is such fun and is absolutely grounded in herself. She also has an awareness of the Irish songwriting tradition. Working with her was tremendous fun.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Kate Bush arrived in Ireland in the spring of 1984, she had adventure on her mind. And…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":666826,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[26016,20528,57582,93,61,60,282438,86887,282439,28227,32980,91462,282437],"class_list":["post-666825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-bono","tag-donal-lunny","tag-elvis-costello","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-john-sheahan","tag-kate-bush","tag-liam-o-flynn","tag-rod-stewart","tag-sean-o-riada","tag-the-dubliners","tag-windmill-lane"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/666826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}