FEATURE:
Of All the Things I Should Have Said
Kate Bush’s This Woman’s Work
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IN future pieces relating to Kate Bush…
I am going to be more general and explore various aspects of her work. At the moment, I am keen to dive into particular songs, as I think, in a streaming age, how often do we digest entire songs or take them apart? The Sensual World is an album that is not among my most-spun of Bush’s, and I have been coming back to it in recent weeks. A while ago, I argued that The Dreaming’s Get Out of My House might be her finest closing track on any album. That song has such an intensity and physicality that it is impossible to follow it! It is one of Bush’s most-underrated songs and brought a magnificent album to a powerful end. On the opposite end of the scale is The Sensual World’s This Woman’s Work. This is a song that is very dear to Kate Bush fans, and it is a song that could only have ended The Sensual World, such is its weight of emotion and effect on the listener – the C.D. bonus track had Walk Down the Middle ending the album, but This Woman’s Work is the true closer. The song was originally included on the soundtrack of the American film, She's Having a Baby (1988). I have never seen the film, but it was a rare occasion of a Kate Bush song featuring on a film soundtrack – I still think there are many films that could be lifted by including a Bush song on them!
Sourcing from the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia, here is some more information about This Woman’s Work – including interview quotes where Bush discussed the track:
“Song written by Kate Bush. Originally released on the soundtrack of the movie She's Having A Baby in 1988. A year later, the song was included in Kate's sixth studio album The Sensual World. The lyric is about being forced to confront an unexpected and frightening crisis during the normal event of childbirth. Written for the movie She's Having a Baby, director John Hughes used the song during the film's dramatic climax, when Jake (Kevin Bacon) learns that the lives of his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) and their unborn child are in danger. As the song plays, we see a montage sequence of flashbacks showing the couple in happier times, intercut with shots of him waiting for news of Elizabeth and their baby's condition. Bush wrote the song specifically for the sequence, writing from a man's (Jake's) viewpoint and matching the words to the visuals which had already been filmed.
The song was used in the 21st episode of the third season of Party Of Five. The song was also used in the first episode of the second season of The Handmaid's Tale.
The music video was directed by Bush herself. It starts with Bush, spotlighted in an otherwise black room, playing the introductory notes on a piano. In the next scene, a distraught man (played by Tim McInnerny) is pacing in the waiting room of a hospital. It is then revealed through flashbacks that his wife (played by Bush) has collapsed while they were having dinner. The story blurs into a continuous scene where he carries her to the car, a desperate race to the hospital, and his wife being wheeled away on a stretcher as he races in behind her.
While waiting, the husband is wracked with fear and imagines his wife in happier times, kissing him in the rain, and even imagines the nurse coming to tell him she has died. The nurse then pulls him out of his reverie, as she reassuringly puts her hand on his shoulder and tells him about his wife's situation, the outcome of this is left ambiguous; yet the nurse is seen smiling as she speaks, implying a happy outcome. The final scene of the video returns to Bush as silently closes the piano keyboard.
John Hughes, the American film director, had just made this film called 'She's Having A Baby', and he had a scene in the film that he wanted a song to go with. And the film's very light: it's a lovely comedy. His films are very human, and it's just about this young guy - falls in love with a girl, marries her. He's still very much a kid. She gets pregnant, and it's all still very light and child-like until she's just about to have the baby and the nurse comes up to him and says it's a in a breech position and they don't know what the situation will be. So, while she's in the operating room, he has so sit and wait in the waiting room and it's a very powerful piece of film where he's just sitting, thinking; and this is actually the moment in the film where he has to grow up. He has no choice.
There he is, he's not a kid any more; you can see he's in a very grown-up situation. And he starts, in his head, going back to the times they were together. There are clips of film of them laughing together and doing up their flat and all this kind of thing. And it was such a powerful visual: it's one of the quickest songs I've ever written. It was so easy to write. We had the piece of footage on video, so we plugged it up so that I could actually watch the monitor while I was sitting at the piano and I just wrote the song to these visuals. It was almost a matter of telling the story, and it was a lovely thing to do: I really enjoyed doing it. (Roger Scott Interview, BBC Radio 1 (UK), 14 October 1989)
That's the sequence I had to write the song about, and it's really very moving, him in the waiting room, having flashbacks of his wife and him going for walks, decorating... It's exploring his sadness and guilt: suddenly it's the point where he has to grow up. He'd been such a wally up to this point. (Len Brown, 'In The Realm Of The Senses'. NME (UK), 7 October 1989)”.
I guess one can interpret the lyrics to This Woman’s Work in different ways. If you see it in the film, you get this idea of what the song is trying to represent but, actually, when listening without visuals, various listeners will have different perspectives. I really love the music video and what Kate Bush did as a director on it, as it is a powerful and moving clip. I am surprised that Bush re-recorded the track for 2011’s Director’s Cut. That album was a reaction to Bush’s view that a collection of her songs from The Sensual World, and The Red Shoes (1993) needed reworking – the originals perhaps sounding too cluttered and needed to be opened and stripped back to an extent. The version of This Woman’s Work that we hear on The Sensual World was edited from the She’s Having a Baby soundtrack; the single version was a different mix, so we have four different versions of the same song – the version on The Sensual World, I feel, is the definitive! I admire the sparse version on Director’s Cut, but there is something more evocative and spine-tingling when listening to the 1989 version.
Although This Woman’s Work only reached number-twenty five in 1989, I think it is one of Bush’s best songs, and it constantly is included in polls of her finest tracks – Louder Sound included it in a top-twenty-five poll in 2018; Far Out feel This Woman’s Work is one of Bush’s essential songs, whilst Consequence of Sound ranked it high in 2016, and The Guardian placed the song at number-three in 2018. This Woman’s Work has been sampled and covered by others, and it was the name given to a compilation boxset released on 22nd October, 1990 – which I shall mark in a future feature. The Sensual World is a phenomenal album, and I have already covered its opening number, the title track, and the opener to the second side, Deeper Understanding. I might cover The Fog, and Love and Anger later in the year, but I have not featured This Woman’s Work, and it is such an important song in her cannon. Over thirty years since its release, This Woman’s Work still has the power to move, and it is one of Kate Bush’s most hard-hitting and emotive songs – even though there is a lot of hope and strength to be found. In a career filled with hugely important and memorable songs, This Woman’s Work holds a very…
SPECIAL place in people’s hearts.