“The Dreaming” by Kate Bush

"The Dreaming" is the title song of Kate Bush's fourth album, and it came out as a single in 1982: a song about white Australians tearing up Aboriginal Australians' traditional lands in the hunt for weapons-grade uranium, named after the Dreaming of Aboriginal mythology. Bush wrote it and plays piano and synthesizer, Stuart Elliott drums, and the textures get gloriously strange: Paddy Bush plays bullroarer and sings backup, Rolf Harris plays didgeridoo, and the bird impersonator Percy Edwards supplies sheep noises.

The B-side, "Dreamtime", was an alternative take that drops her lead vocal but keeps most of the backing voices and stretches out the intro and outro. Del Palmer, her partner at the time, did the cover art, which pictures the Wandjina, a sky spirit from Western Australian lore. It spent 3 weeks on the UK chart, peaking at 48.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.