FEATURE:
The Red Shoes, The Line, the Cross and the Curve and Beyond…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional photo for Eat the Music in 1993
Kate Bush and the Year 1993
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AS with many of my Kate Bush features…
I want to bring in a couple of reviews and bits from the media, as I think it adds context and colour. I was only nine when 1993 began, and I think The Red Shoes was the first Kate Bush album I recall upon its release. I have looked at the years 1978 and 1983 when talking about Bush and pivotal moments in her career. The reason I wanted to spotlight 1993 is, when many people talk about her work, 1993 sort of gets glossed over. Maybe that is not entirely true, but The Red Shoes is often considered the weakest Kate Bush album, we do not talk about her interviews from the time or the film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. Hounds of Love (in 1985) is the peak of her career; 1989’s The Sensual World, whilst a less-acclaimed follow-up, was still an ambitious work. I think, by 1993, Bush was looking to return to a simpler way of working that she might not have experienced since the very start of her career. Recording for The Red Shoes began in 1990 but, like so many Kate Bush albums, the writing was pretty quick, whereas the recording takes the longest time. Bush’s mother, Hannah, passed away on 14th February, 1992, and The Red Shoes is dedicated to her memory. Of course, we would not see another album Kate Bush (after The Red Shoes) for another twelve years – the double-album, Aerial, saw Bush return to the spotlight with aplomb (and a new son, Bertie, who was born in 1998).
Whilst we might like back at 1993 as a hard year where she would soon hibernate from the music scene, at the time, I think there was this sort of deterioration in terms of the appreciation her music deserved. Certainly, The Sensual World was a very different record to Hounds of Love, and I think – although it won a lot of positive reviews – many people in the media wrote Bush off. To me, I think 1993 was a year where she produced a lot of great music and, actually, The Line, the Cross and the Curve deserves new inspection and attention. I think The Red Shoes is very underrated, and I actually prefer it to albums like The Sensual World and Director’s Cut (2011). Whilst many of the songs for The Red Shoes were written before Bush’s mother died, she was going through a break-up (or more than one) with her long-time boyfriend, Del Palmer (who she met in the 1970s and works with until this day), and maybe that mars her memories of the album and she was not able to produce her best work. I don’t know. I think The Red Shoes has a couple of week tracks, but it is overloaded with life and textures. There are a couple of cameos that were misguided, but I love how the Trio Bulgarka (who had contributed to The Sensual World) appeared on three songs: You're the One, The Song of Solomon, and Why Should I Love You?.
Bush revisited seven songs from The Red Shoes for Director’s Cut, as she was not happy with the digital production; she wanted the songs to breathe more and get stripped back. The problem is, I think only Top of the City sounds superior in its new setting: the remainder of the tracks are not improved upon. I can appreciate how Bush wanted to right some perceived wrongs on The Red Shoes, but I think there is a lot to love about The Red Shoes. Although some of the overly-glossy and compacted production does harm some tracks, I think it brings songs to life on the album in a way that Bush didn’t manage in 2011. I actually have no big beef with the sounds of the early-1990s – in terms of production and adapting to the compact disc -, and The Red Shoes has a lot going for it. The track listing is brilliant, so that one of the strongest tracks (and my favourite), Rubberband Girl, kicks things off, and that leads into the more emotive and softer And So Is Love – both tracks, I feel, rank alongside Bush’s best. Eat the Music is a feast of Worldbeat rhythms; it was the lead-off single in the U.S. – Rubberband Girl was the lead single elsewhere in the world -, and the video is wonderful. Although some of the lyrics on this song, and the album, are a bit lumpen and daft, I think Eat the Music charms and moves you with its energy and performance.
Moments of Pleasure – a top-thirty hit in the U.K. -, and Lily are wonderful tracks, and end a fabulous side. Look at the video for Moments of Pleasure, and it is one of Bush’s best videos; she was still producing stunning visuals in 1993 – something I will expand upon a bit later. I think the first side to The Red Shoes is among the strongest of Bush’s career, and I think a lot of critics were a bit harsh towards the album in 1993. I want to quote from a Pitchfork review because, although it is constructive in its criticism, it does offer some positives:
“The record’s personal themes of loss, perseverance, and memory coalesce on “Moments of Pleasure,” one of Bush’s most affecting ballads. She sings of the small memories of life—laughing at dumb jokes, snowy evenings high above New York City, a piece of wisdom from her mother—as Oscar-nominated composer Michael Kamen builds these quiet moments into monuments with a heroic string arrangement. Bush ends the song with a series of mini eulogies: for her aunt, her longtime guitarist, her dance partner. “Just being alive, it can really hurt,” she belts at the center of the track, stating the obvious with such conviction that it sounds revelatory”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during filming for The Line, The Cross and the Curve in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Bush was sort of doing everything herself, and definitely wanted to please only herself and nobody else. Perhaps that stubborn work ethic did take a big toll when we consider how long it would take Bush to follow The Red Shoes, but I think she should be commended for producing an album that is incredibly open, diverse and under-respected. In 1993, The Chicago Tribune had this to say:
“With a siren's voice and a taste for the eccentric, Bush has built a significant cult following over the past decade. With "The Red Shoes," she edges closer to the mainstream; her obsession with transcendence is now focused on affairs of the heart as opposed to the fairy tales of earlier work, she jump-cuts musical genres as voraciously as Prince (one of many guest stars she enlists), and her voice is more direct and soulful-check out the raspy belting on "Constellation of the Heart" and "You're the One." But there's still a touch of the strange, as when Bush compares her lover to a pomegranate on "Eat the Music." There's fruity imagery of a different stripe on "Moments of Pleasure," which announces, "Just being alive, it can really hurt!" But the variety of musical settings, from Celtic romp on the title track and the Latin rhythms of "Eat the Music" to the funky "Rubberband Girl" and arty skronk of "Big Stripey Lie," undercuts the melodrama. Bush has pulled it off: Her most accessible album has arrived without sacrificing her ravishing, quirky essence”
One can look at some obvious downsides – certain tracks are too long; a few songs suffer clunky and uninspired lyrics – and dismiss the album on that basis. Though The Red Shoes’ second side is not as strong as the first, there are some great cuts! I really love The Red Shoes, Top of the City and You’re the One. Bush’s voice is stunning and dedicated throughout The Red Shoes, and the album is certainly not the disaster many people paint it as – and I would urge people to give it some time when they can. There are two songs which, sadly, sap a lot of the good from The Red Shoes. Big Stripey Lie features some of Bush’s least impactful lyrics (“Oh my God it's a jungle in here/You've got wild animals loose in here”), and I think Why Should I Love You? suffers from there being too many cooks in the kitchen. Not only do we hear from Lenny Henry; there is a lot of input from Prince who, sadly, does not turn in his greatest performance and adds too many layers to the song – Prince was a much more impressive artist when working on his own (and his band) rather than collaborating with others. I will admit that an artist who was experiencing romantic and personal struggle was probably not in the best mindset to record her clearest and most consistent album, and a couple of tracks could have been trimmed and we would have seen a stronger album.
There are so many different moods explored, and there’s a nice range of sounds on The Red Shoes that stands up to repeated listens. I don’t think the compositions are too busy and stuffed, and Bush’s voice sounds wonderful from the first to last. I can understand her desire to reexplore the songs on Director’s Cut, but I think she (and many others) have been too dismissive of the album. It was evident that, in 1993, Bush was on the precipice of a major decision regarding her career and her relationship with the press. Even up to The Sensual World, she was conducting a fair few interviews, but there are relatively few from 1993 – there are a couple of good T.V. ones and one particularly interesting interview from Q – which I shall quote from shortly. Bush was worried, prior to The Red Shoes, that her music was too complicated, and she wanted to return to a more rooted sound. There was also the plan to record the album quickly and tour it but, as we know, other things got in the way. For someone who experienced the death of her mother and the break-up of a serious relationship so close together, it is amazing that she managed to finish an album at all! I concede that there are some clichés and similar-sounding songs on the album but, looking back, I think there is a lot to love about The Red Shoes.
The Line, the Cross and the Curve, which Bush has distanced herself from and dismissed in ensuing years, is a short film/extended music video that features songs from The Red Shoes – inspired by the 1948 classic film, The Red Shoes, which was directed by Michael Powell (and it is a favourite film of Bush’s). In the film, Bush plays a frustrated singer-dancer who is enticed by a mysterious woman (played by Miranda Richardson) into putting on a pair of magical ballet slippers. Once on her feet, the shoes start dancing on their own, and Bush's character must battle Richardson to free herself from the spell of the shoes. Her guide on this strange journey is played by Lindsey Kemp (the famous choreographer and dancer who was instrumental in fostering Bush’s love of dance in the 1970s). Though the film was toured and made its way to cinemas, it was not a success with critics and Bush suffered ill health through the shooting of The Line, the Cross and the Curve. The fact she performed in it, wrote the script and directed meant that, perhaps, she was biting off more than she could chew – perhaps an outside director could have taken some of the pressure off of Bush and given her advice regarding her acting performance (which is inferior when compared to Miranda Richardson’s). Bush did decide to stop performing and working not long after promoting The Line, the Cross and the Curve, but I see the film in the same manner as The Red Shoes: it is given flack and snubbed, but there is a lot to love.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
I know Bush was hoping to tour again, and she definitely did want to make a visual statement, in the manner of her 1979 Tour of Life. Unable to get back to the stage – it would be 2014 when we saw her return -, The Line, the Cross and the Curve does sport some wonderful visual moments, and it is nice to see Bush and Richardson on screen together – they connect and play off of each other well, even if the more experienced Richardson has the superior acting chops. The songs used during the film (from The Red Shoes) are wonderful, and I especially admire the visuals for Rubberband Girl and Eat the Music. I wanted to write this feature, as many people write off The Red Shoes and The Line, the Cross and the Curve too quickly without offering many positives. The always-ambitious Bush had to shoulder a lot of loss and struggle, but I think The Red Shoes and The Line, the Cross and the Curve are a lot stronger than people give them credit for. I want to round off with a couple of interviews Bush was involved with in 1993. She was slowly pulling away from promotion and publicity – when she returned in 2005, there were relatively few interviews conducted to promote Aerial -, but I love hearing her thoughts and what people were asking her at different points in her career.
Looking back at an interview from Melody Maker, this passage caught my eye:
“With its mix of acoustic instruments (mandola, whistles, valiha) and synth-like keyboard textures, "The Red Shoes" immediately made me think Bush was trying to make a link between ancient and modern ideas of dance, pagan rites and techno-pagan raving. The way that these primal modes of ecstatic trance-endence have resurfaced in an ultra-modern hi-tech context --lasers, strobes, 50 K sub-bass sound--suggests that these impulses lie dormant in our collective unconscious or even genetic code. People have instinctively reinvented these rituals despite, or perhaps because, our culture in impoverished when it comes to forms of communal release.
"Something very similar was on my mind, the idea of trance, delirium, as a way of transcending the normal. Maybe human beings actually need that. Things are very hard for people in this country, maybe they instinctively need to transcend it. It's very much that ancient call".
One of the biggest and more in-depth Kate Bush interviews of 1993 happened in Q. The magazine’s cover in December 1993 featured a portrait of Bush looking contemplative-but-stunning with this quote: “Booze, Fags, Blokes And Me”. That might suggest a salacious, controversial or edgy interview but, in fact, it was Bush being open in a way she hadn’t been for a while – new sides were revealed, and I love reading her responses to the questions asked.
I have selected a few exerts that really interested me; it sounds like Bush was a very willing and responsive interviewee, too:
“Kate Bush's career falls neatly in half like a well-thumbed book, the broken spine in this instance being The Dreaming, 1982's "difficult" album. Prior to this, Bush had established her stellar reputation with a debut Number 1 single at 19 with Wuthering Heights and a trio of albums that revealed her as rock's premier ingenue --precocious (she apparently wrote The Man With the Child In His Eyes at 12), beautiful, talented and with the ability to turn everything from incest, sexual yearning towards infants, the threat of nuclear incineration and Delius into limpid ballads and new-minted pop-rockers. Grown men and women alike cooed, DJs said "Great Lady!" and Bobby Davro and Faith Brown clogged up Saturday evening TV with unfunny impressions of her unrestricted performing style (although, weirdly, Kate once wrote a four-page letter of congratulation to Faith Brown).
She is oddly disparaging of albums like Lionheart and Never For Ever now and even then seemed keen to leave this phase behind, perhaps understandably -- she had been given two years to write the songs for The Kick Inside and, allegedly, four weeks to come up with Lionheart. By 1982 she was under the influence of Peter Gabriel and the revolutionary drum sound of Phil Collins's In The Air Tonight. Determined to do something like this herself, she became locked into a hellishly expensive round of aborted studio stints, finally emerging with The Dreaming, easily her weirdest effort and one that effectively stalled her career, peaking at Number 3 (Never For Ever entered at Number 1) and spawning a batch of flop singles. Wild rumours abounded, including the choice story advanced by the Daily Mail that she had ballooned up to 18 stone. This was patently untrue but she *had* ground herself down into a state of nervous fatigue, not helped by a reputed diet of junk food and chocolate. It was not the happiest of times.
"I look back at that record and it seems mad," she says now. "I heard it about three years ago and couldn't believe it. There's a lot of anger in it. There's a lot of 'I'm an artist, right!'" Fingers burned by the experience of The Dreaming, she decided that a studio of her own and a retreat into her domestic shell was a priority. Thus was ushered in a period of stability from whence came the enormously successful Hounds of Love and, in 1990 [1989], The Sensual World. These later records reflected her growing interest in the studio as a compositional tool and her growing desire to stay well out of the public eye.
Do you get stopped in the street?
"No, not really. Sometimes people will come up, but I don't generally get stopped in the street. People tend to just smile at you. But you may have your trousers on back to front. It may not be anything to do with fame."
You don't go out in Michael Jackson-style disguise?
(Laughing:) No, I'm not sure people care that much. Occasionally I see them nudging each other, but I feel it's more part of American culture, that idea of TV fame and celebrity. It's more of a laugh here, isn't it? 'Look, there's that bloke off the telly!'"
Are you into sport?
"Not really. I sometimes wish I was. I see friends getting enormous pleasure out of watching Wimbledon or something, but no, not for me, I'm afraid. Sometimes I enjoy watching athletes and gymnasts. But that's maybe because of dancing. I like dancing because there's the combination of music and athleticism without the competition that's integral to sport."
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during filming for The Line, The Cross and the Curve in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Do you go out dancing?
"I used to for a very short phase. Of course, when I was little the aunts would drag me up and get me to dance, and I'd love that. I had a phase as a teenager when a group of us would go dancing. But then I got famous after my first record and I'm not sure I had the desire to do it any more. It was something I did in my teens. But I've never felt very comfortable with it. Not unless I'm really drunk."
Do you get drunk often?
(Pause, smile:) "No, not really. I don't go out clubbing and all that. I don't make an exhibition of myself out on the floor".
I think Kate Bush produced some great work – and some of her best songs – for 1993’s The Red Shoes, and I don’t think that year was quite the car crash many (Bush included) talk about. It was a transformative year where she had sort of reached a barrier and needed to move away from the limelight for a while. I would encourage people to listen to The Red Shoes again (or for the first time) and watch The Line, the Cross and the Curve, as there are a lot of highlights. Whilst Kate Bush was active between 1993-2005, we did not see or hear too much from her. I look back at 1993 and wonder what would have happened if she had left an album on the shelf for a couple more years or personal circumstances had not played such a big role. The Red Shoes is a great-yet-flawed album, and one that she would not follow…
FOR another twelve years.