Odd this day
As Justin Lewis observes in his excellent Don’t Stop The Music:
There can’t be many top 20 singles based on the Peter Reich memoir, A Book of Dreams, in which Reich recalls helping his father Wilhelm to create a ‘Cloudbusting’ machine. Fortunately, Kate Bush has read and absorbed it.
Yes, with apologies to anyone else who’s old enough to remember it, and doesn’t want to be reminded just how fucking long ago it was, it’s the 39th anniversary of the release of Cloudbusting.
The video tells the story (or, at least, a story) about Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian doctor and psychoanalyst who — in what we might call a busy life — coined the term ‘sexual revolution’, left Norway on the last ship to leave for the States before WWII was declared, shagged lots of women who weren’t his wives/partners (including patients), invented the idea of ‘orgone energy’ (a sort of life force, whose name was a combination of the words orgasm and organism), invented orgone accumulators (which could, apparently, treat anything from minor ailments to cancer), and created ‘cloudbuster’ machines (which allegedly created rain). Not necessarily in that order, and this list is by no means exhaustive.
As you probably know, the video shows him being taken away in a large black car by large men in dark suits, supposedly for unleashing his weather device on the heavens.
In fact, he was taken away because the US Food and Drug Administration said he was a charlatan, and had got an injunction to prevent him moving his orgone accumulators across state lines. He was sentenced to two years in prison, where he died in 1957, aged just 60.
(Wikipedia, by the way, suggests that some farmers in Maine said they’d pay him if he could make it rain on their blueberry crop in July 1953, and he did — or, at least, he used his device, and it later rained, so they paid him. Whether the two events were related is another matter, of course.)
Anyway, the video is based on his son Peter’s book about his father, published in 1973 (which pops up in Sutherland’s pocket during the video), and does present a pretty accurate portrait of their relationship. There was a 30th anniversary article in Dazed magazine (nine years ago. Sorry), in which he’s quoted as saying:
Quite magically, this British musician had tapped precisely into a unique and magical fulfilment of father-son devotion, emotion and understanding. They had captured it all.
Intriguingly, it’s not the only cultural reference to Reich’s work. Obviously, there are other books about him, and documentaries such as 1971’s deeply weird WR: Mysteries of the Organism — and there’s the ‘orgasmatron’ in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), of course.
But there’s also a 1973 Hawkwind song, which I wasn’t previously aware of:
…featuring such magnificent lyrics as:
I’ve got an orgone accumulator
It makes me feel greater
I’ll see you sometime later
When I’m through with my accumulator
…and a Motörhead song, Orgasmatron, from 1986:
(Lemmy was famously fired from Hawkwind, and this happened two years after the album on which Orgone Accumulator appears, but he isn’t a credited writer on the track. It’s by Dave Brock and Bob Calvert, apparently, while Orgasmatron is by Lemmy and Phil Campbell, so perhaps the earlier track inspired Mr Kilmister in some way. Anyway…)
Reich’s work also gave rise to an exhibit at the Wellcome Collection’s Institute of Sexology show in 2014
…which prompted a magnificently po-faced letter to the Guardian from Peter Jones at something called the Centre for Orgonomic Research and Education in Preston (whose website is now tragically defunct):
The “metal-lined cabinet” Stephen Moss sat in has nothing in common with the orgasmatron, which was powered by electricity. To work, the orgone accumulator needs to be built carefully and used in certain conditions with various precautions observed … From Moss’s derisory comments, readers would never guess that the accumulator is a genuine scientific and medical device and that Reich’s discoveries can benefit us all today. Serious researchers have confirmed and extended many of his discoveries and claims.
[*sniggers behind hand*]
But one of the best things his work has given rise to, at least as far as teenagers of the 1980s are concerned (even those who tried to watch WR: Mysteries of the Organism when C4 showed it in the dead of night), is Kate Bush’s video. And one of the best things I’ve found about that is the Dazed article, in which Donald Sutherland talks about how he got the gig:
Barry Richardson, who was the hairdresser on Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, asked me if I’d do a music video with Kate Bush. I told him no and we went on to other conversations. A couple of days later there was a knock on my door. I lived in the Savoy Hotel … I loved it there. So cosseted. So private. Only the floor butler rang the door. I opened it. There was no one there. I heard a voice saying hello and I looked down. Standing down there was a very small Kate Bush. Barry had told her where I lived. What can you do? She wanted to explain what her video was about. I let her in.
There’s a moment in the video which — even allowing for the fact that she’s slightly downhill — does emphasise the height difference between them.
Apparently, he’d read Reich himself, and said yes very quickly. The best bit of the article, though, is undoubtedly:
I remember the first morning on set seeing her coming out of her trailer smoking a joint and I cautioned her, saying she shouldn’t smoke that, it’d affect her work, and she looked at me for a second and said she hadn’t been straight for nine years and I loved her.
And so say all of us, I think.
