Dónal Lunny work on Kate Bush’s defining album brought his music to its widest audience

Singer wanted The Hounds of Love album to draw on her Irish heritage, which led her to Dublin and a lifelong friendship with Lunny

Tue Oct 27 2026 - 05:00 • 4 MIN READ

When Kate Bush 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 Dónal Lunny – the pied piper and eternal shapeshifter of Irish traditional music, who has died aged 79.

“She is a lovely woman. Working with her was a pleasure,” Lunny would recall of his collaborations with Bush. “Kate had recorded several sessions at Windmill Lane studio, where she had worked with [producer and arranger] Bill Whelan. He suggested that we work together.”

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, which went viral with Gen Z when it featured on Stranger Things in 2022.

But she wanted side two of the record to draw on her Irish heritage – 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.

Their creative relationship dated back to a cameo by Lunny on Bush’s 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).

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’s second half, which is devoted entirely to The Ninth Wave – a suite of trippy and mysterious songs that abandon the familiar waters of ‘80s pop and head out into the dark, deep unknown.

“The Ninth Wave was a film – that’s how I thought of it,” Bush later reflected. “It’s the idea of this person being in the water; how they’ve got there – we don’t know. But the idea is that they’ve been on a ship and they’ve been washed over the side, so they’re alone in this water. And I find that horrific imagery – the thought of being completely alone in all this water.”

The Ninth Wave’s centrepiece is The Jig of Life, a swirling, joyful tune that features Lunny on bouzouki and bodhrán alongside John Sheahan of The Dubliners on fiddle and tin whistle, and Liam O’Flynn’s uilleann pipes. It was intended to capture the excitement and terror of Bush’s protagonist as they fight against a rising ocean.

‘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’

—  John Sheahan on Kate Bush

“She was fastidious about getting things right,” Sheahan would later tell me. “I remember playing the [tin] whistle. She was saying ‘this is absolutely beautiful, but when you get to this note can you just slide up’. She was a real perfectionist.”

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).

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. “There were no roads – just tracks. You couldn’t make a phone call on a Sunday because the phone-master was away. They used to have wind-up telephones. It was very different.”

Today an artist of Bush’s stature could expect to travel in luxury, but not when she was in Ireland in 1984. “One night we had to sleep in the car. It was a Volkswagen Golf – nothing fancy,” said Palmer. “I can’t think of many other countries where you’d be fine about sleeping in a car.”

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’s 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 Seán Ó Riada composition, Mná na hÉireann.

[ Kate Bush: ‘I was beginning to think I’d never play again’Opens in new window ]

“She gave me a big hug and said, ‘Oh, you’re playing so emotionally’,” Sheahan would remember. He was deeply touched to receive a gift out of the blue from Bush many months later. “I was into origami,” he said. “I 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.”

Working with Kate Bush was just one among many highlights in the career of Lunny, whose collaborators ran from Bono to Elvis Costello – though not Rod Stewart, despite persistent rumours to the contrary.

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 bodhrán as if summoning angels out of the deep.

“She’s a brilliant woman,” Lunny said of Bush when recalling the music they made together. “She 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.”

IN THIS SECTION