FEATURE:
Her Sensual World
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush’s Language of Love
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WE are heading closer to Valentine’s Day…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush photographed on 23rd October, 1983/PHOTO CREDIT: Sunday Mirror/Mirrorpix/Getty Images
and I have been thinking about Kate Bush’s music. I have written a fair few features about her, but I don’t think, if I remember rightly, I have ever really talked about her sensuality and sexuality. One of the most affecting things about her music is its honesty and openness. Even on her debut, The Kick Inside, Bush was writing about desire, sex, and love in a very arresting and uninhibited way. It is one of the reasons I love that album as much as I do. Bush’s take on love, even as a teenager, was never of someone scornful and judgmental. One would be hard-placed to name many modern artists whose music has the same balance of sensuality, positivity and depth. I am reminded of a song like The Man with the Child in His Eyes. It is about a man having that innocence and child-like curiosity; Bush songs in a very impassioned and committed way. It was about her then-boyfriend, Steve Blacknell, and right throughout The Kick Inside, we hear this young woman exploring love and sex in a very positive way. Not only was Bush hopeful and lacking in any resentment, she could describe lust and attraction like nobody else. Phrases like “You came out of the night/Wearing a mask in white colour” (from L'Amour Looks Something Like You) is a superb image; Feel It is a gorgeously-delivered song where Bush sings: “Here comes one and one makes one/The glorious union, well, it could be love/Or it could be just lust but it will be fun/It will be wonderful”.
Whilst Bush would write more complex love songs later in her career, that combination of her angelic, arresting voice and the way she describes longing and affecting…it is like no other artist! I am not saying a positive outlook on love is rare – as plenty of artists have written songs that are hopeful -, but Bush has rarely penned a line where she scolds her lover or talks about the cruelty of love. Maybe some of her expressions and lyrics on The Kick Inside – “My heart is thrown to the pebbles and the boatmen/All the time I find I'm living in that evening/With that feeling of sticky love inside” from L'Amour Looks Something Like You veers from the poetic to the explicit in a manner of seconds – are not overly-sophisticated and, at times, they bordered on the explicit. The Kick Inside turns forty-two on 17th February, and I have been revisiting it quite a bit. When a then-teenage Bush sings of desire and sex, It does not sound like her contemporaries – rather juvenile and commercial -, but more like an older soul; one who has greater wisdom and curiosity and, with it, a much more interesting take on love and romance. Bush’s debut album came at a time when Punk was all the rage and, with very few comparisons out there, her songwriting was a breath of fresh air. I want to quote from Laura Snapes’ review of The Kick Inside where she discusses Bush’s musical urges and the way her writing/mindset differed from artists of the time:
“Besides, Bush had always felt that she had male musical urges, drawing distinctions between herself and the female songwriters of the 1960s. “That sort of stuff is sweet and lyrical,” Bush said of Carole King and co. in 1978, “but it doesn’t push it on you, and most male music—not all of it, but the good stuff—really lays it on you. It’s like an interrogation. It really puts you against the wall and that’s what I’d like my music to do. I’d like my music to intrude.”
But provocation for its own sake wasn’t Bush’s project. EMI not pushing her to make an album at 15 was a blessing: The Kick Inside arrived the year after punk broke, which Bush knew served her well. “People were waiting for something new to come out—something with feeling,” she said in 1978. For anyone who scoffed at her punk affiliation—given her teenage mentorship at the hands of Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour and her taste for the baroque—she indisputably subverted wanky prog with her explicit desire and sexuality: Here was how she might intrude. The limited presence of women in prog tended to orgasmic moaning that amplified the supposed sexual potency of the group’s playing. Bush demanded pleasure, grew impatient when she had to wait for it, and ignored the issue of male climax—rock’s founding pleasure principle—to focus on how sex might transform her. “I won’t pull away,” she sings almost as a threat on “Feel It,” alone with the piano. “My passion always wins.”
What made Bush’s writing truly radical was the angles she could take on female desire without ever resorting to submissiveness. “Wuthering Heights” is menacing melodrama and ectoplasmic empowerment; “The Saxophone Song”—one of two recordings made when she was 15—finds her fantasizing about sitting in a Berlin bar, enjoying a saxophonist’s playing and the effect it has on her. But she is hardly there to praise him: “Of all the stars I’ve seen that shine so brightly/I’ve never known or felt in myself so rightly,” she sings of her reverie, with deep seriousness. We hear his playing, and it isn’t conventionally romantic but stuttering, coarse, telling us something about the unconventional spirits that stir her”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy
Bush was an artist who did not just write about relationships and love. A lot of modern artists could learn something from Bush when it comes to lyrics variety and imagination but, when she did put passions in the spotlight, she was always unique, original and engaging. Lionheart’s Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake uses images of a vehicle and a slippery road to describe a woman (Emma) losing her flame. In the Warm Room begins with the evocative and stunning opening verse: “In the warm room/Her perfume reaches you/Eventually you'll fall for her/Down you'll go/To where the mellow wallows”. Some people – idiots – scoff at Bush’s gymnastic vocals and lyrics, thinking they are a bit ridiculous and hippy-dippy. Even from her first album, Bush was writing lines that took love away from the cliché and heartbroken to new realms and heights. I was actually going to write a feature about the song, Breathing, as it turns forty on 14th April; a gem of a song from Never for Ever (1980), it is a moment where Bush embraced the political in a way she had never done before. I digress. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) from Hounds of Love (1985) is about Bush trading shoes/bodies with a man so they could see what the other goes through and, in doing so, have a greater understanding of one another.
It is almost Valentine’s Day and, on the radio, we will hear a slew of classic love songs that, whilst good, are riddled with clichés, hyperbole and, often, negativity. I have only mentioned a few of Kate Bush’s great songs but, on every occasion, she wrote something original and different to what came before. I have mentioned how Bush rarely wrote anything judgmental and bitter; she has a very positive attitude towards men and, when it comes to love, she could blend incredible poetry with racy images without losing focus. Bush’s voice is, obviously, very beautiful and varied, but few people mention her way with words when it comes to matters of the heart. If you are not a fan of Valentine’s Day or the usual kind of love song, spend some time investigating Kate Bush’s music and one will find something much more immersive and intriguing. Her incredible lyrical approach and majestic voice is a stunning blend that overpowers the heart and mind. I think a lot of songs that deal with love and relationships leave a bitter taste and can be quite forlorn. Even when Bush has lost love and is looking around for meaning – “Every day and night I pray/And pray that you will stay away forever/It's so hard for love to stay together/With the modern Western pressures” (Between a Man and a Woman, The Sensual World), there seems to be this hope; something the listener can take away or, at the very least, a set of lyrics that is miles removed from anything anyone else is doing. Bush is a masterful lyricist and is someone who can talk of war and loss as memorably as desire and passion. When it comes to matters of the heart and soul (and loins), Kate Bush is…
ONE of the all-time greats writers.