Prompted by the news of a new album release from Kate Bush, I’ve been revisiting her earlier work.  Specifically my two favourite albums, The Dreaming and Hounds of Love, the later arguably being one of the greatest albums ever released, certainly by a British Artist.

Its release in 1985 coincided perfectly with my ‘teenage angst’ years and it resided almost permanently in my Aiwa auto-reverse personal stereo for three or four years, thus I became intimately acquainted with it.

Many of the tracks contain audio samples of things such as clips from films and various sound effects.  Hello Earth is the penultimate track on The Ninth Wave which is the name given to side 2 (remember when albums had sides.)

The track begins with voice samples which I believed were taken from television coverage of the early Columbia Space Shuttle Missions.  The samples are quiet and overlap each other and it is therefore difficult to be sure exactly was is said, so far I’ve come up with this:-

The first Columbia mission (STS-1) was launched in 1981, I remember watching the launch with great excitement in our school library on one of those TV’s on wheels. Between this first launch and the release of Hounds of Love Columbia flew five more missions, STS-2, 3, 4, 5 and 9 with Challenger taking over duties for STS-6, 7 and 8.  TACAN incidently is the acronym for Tactical Air Navigation System.

With the power of the Internet now at my disposal I thought it might be interesting to try and track down the sources of the samples.  So I headed over to Youtube and began watching old coverage of the missions.

I was initially looking for ‘Columbia now at nine times the speed of sound’ but the first sample I came across was ‘The (tracking/backing data?), map data and pre-planned trajectory are all one line on the block’ which can be heard at 37 seconds on the following video:-

Hearing those words was a seriously weird experience.  It’s no exaggeration to suggest that I’ve listened to The Hounds of Love several hundred times and to hear the words outside the context of the track was bizarre.

Thusfar I’ve had no luck finding the other samples, I would particularly like to track down ‘Columbia now at nine times the speed of sound’ so any help would be appreciated.

I also noticed that Kate now has Youtube channel, so go on over and watch some of those classic videos:-

Kate Bush Channel