Kate Bush - a little harmonic analysis

First of all, unless I am mistaken, today is Kate's 64th birthday. 64 is a great number: 8², which is 4⁴, which is 2⁸. A very round and palindromic number. Happy birthday!

But I'm not writing numerical analysis and not sending birthday greetings. Instead I want to give a little harmonic analysis of a few of Kate's songs. My interest was picqued by the several analysis videos that I've seen on YouTube about 'Running up that hill', each coming from a different angle. What is clear is that the song is composed entirely of three chords: in roman numeral analysis, i bVI bVII (the song is in C minor, so these chords are Cm, Ab and Bb).

Although this isn't world shattering, this did start me thinking about the chord sequences in Kate's songs - or rather, the lack of conventional sequences. This reminded me of why I was originally attracted to Kate's songs - they are unpredictable and mainly defy analysis. The prime example might be the opening to 'Wuthering Heights', the original (in more ways than one) song that introduced me and thousands of others to KB. The first phrase repeated twice consists of the chords A F E C#. Apart from the fact that these are all major chords, they don't belong to any one key. Whilst E is the dominant of A, there is no key that contains the A, F and C# chords. F is the submediant of A (the flattened sixth, to be accurate) and C# is the mediant of A (the diatonic chord would be C# minor). One could say that this is a series of chromatic mediants - A to F, E to C#, C# to A. As a result of all this, Kate Bush is one of the few artists whose songs I don't automatically analyse in my head.

I started thinking about other KB songs that have the i bVI bVII sequence and two songs came to mind. The first song on the first KB album, 'Moving' starts off with this sequence but afterwards continues in a more diatonic path. The first song on 'The sensual world' (alternatively called 'The sensual world' or 'Flower of the mountain' depending on which version is being played) has a variation on this: I VII VI VII repeated throughout the song, although it might be that the fourth chord (VII) is really v (i.e. the minor dominant chord).

Today I was plunking around on the piano when it suddenly occurred to me that 'Cloudbusting', a song from the same album as 'Running up that hill' has exactly the same chord sequence (i VII VI) although I don't know in which key (I have relative pitch, not absolute pitch). But the two songs are so different in every aspect that one would never reach this conclusion easily.

[Addition from several months later] It was pointed out to me that the opening song on the second side of the album, 'And dream of sheep', starts with exactly the same chord sequence as 'Cloudbusting', even in the same key, C# minor.