The song and its music video are based on a moment from the life of Wilhelm Reich, a student of Sigmund Freud's work and one of the most controversial psychoanalysts, therapists and (pseudo)scientists of the 20th century. He was originally born in Austria in 1897 but moved to America in 1939 to avoid being prosecuted by the Nazis. There, he continued his controversial research into sex, psychology and physics and developed his own highly disputed philosophical theories on the connections between these three subjects. He then set up on his farm a laboratory called Orgonon, named after the energy he believed to exist in nature, where he conducted various controversial experiments to prove his theories and even offered his orgonon-based therapy for people with serious traumas who thought he could help them. He also developed the so-called cloudbusting technology that was supposed to be able to cause rain. Unlike in the video, Reich's rain-making machine never became functional in real life. On the other hand, Reich was indeed arrested by the U.S. government and put in prison where he died from heart attack in 1957. While some believed that Reich was a genius who perfected Sigmund Freud's theories on sex and the psyche, which made him an enemy of the conservative 1950s U.S. government and directly led to his imprisonment on trumped up charges for no other reason than this, others thought that he was at best a well-meaning crackpot who made his own sex cult on his estate in Oregon and that the U.S. government had no choice but to finally shut him and his highly controversial research down. Reich's legacy is now seen as the precursor of later, more famous and mainstream movements like the hippy or the new age movement. One of his more famous fans in the world of cinema was Yugoslavian avant-garde film director Dusan Makavejev who made a famous anti-authoritarian art-house film called WR: Mysteries of the Organism in 1971, that's partially about Reich and his research as well as the U.S. government's crackdown on him.
The video was mostly filmed at the Uffington White Horse Hill, near Faringdon/Wantage in the Vale of the White Horse, Oxfordshire. Dragon Hill opposite the White Horse, features heavily also. The buildings are still in use, comprising Britchcombe Farm situated at the foot of the hill and just off the Ridgeway trail. There is a fantastic cafe, the Teapot Tearoom, bar and shop there to refresh walkers and campers alike.
Although it may seem like Kate Bush is playing a female character in the music video, she is actually playing Reich's young real-life son Peter, who loved spending time with his father while he worked on the cloudbusting machine.