FEATURE:
Sacrilege? A Masterpiece? A Segue? A Much-Needed Revisit?
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for Director’s Cut/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut at Ten
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I am doing a few features about…
Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut, as it turns ten on 16th May. Questions were asked when Bush announced the release of the album. As I have said in previous features, it was exciting that we got the news that she would be putting out an album in 2011 – as it turned out, we would have two that year! Bush had not reworked older songs in such an extensive way prior to 2011. Taking songs from The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993) and giving them a new lease of life was always going to draw discussion. I felt that her re-recorded vocal for Wuthering Heights – which was included on the 1986 greatest hits album, The Whole Story – was unnecessary, in the sense that the original is as good as it gets! Whilst The Red Shoes did not score a lot of acclaim in 1993, I think that a lot of people hold the album close to their heart. It is definitely an album that deserves some new attention. The Sensual World was celebrated in 1989 and it remains one of her best-loved albums. How would people react to the news that The Sensual World would be retitled Flower of the Mountain and include lines from James Joyce’s Ulysses? Bush originally asked for permission in the Eighties when she'd wrote the original. The Joyce estate refused to release the words.. She kept the backing track but came back to the lyrics for a track that would become The Sensual World.
On Director's Cut, Bush wanted to include the original version of the song. She contacted the Joyce Estate again. This time, they gave permission. I think that was a big reason for doing Director’s Cut in the first place. Some feel that the original is perfect so, even if you do get access to some classic literature, can it match the mood and beauty of the version on The Sensual World? How about updating the beloved Deeper Understanding and This Woman’s Work (both from The Sensual World)? If people did not like the new versions then the originals are always available! I think some critics felt that Director’s Cut was needless, in the sense the original albums and songs were great and should remain untouched. Others felt that some of the reworkings are inferior to the originals. I am going to bring in a couple of reviews for Director’s Cut in order to give you a sense of what critics were saying in 2011. I think that Director’s Cut was a way for Bush to look back at songs that, perhaps, were a little overdone and lacked necessary soul. All the lead vocals on Director's Cut and some of the backing vocals were entirely re-recorded. Rather than keep the original compositions, the drum were reworked and re-recorded. A few of the tracks featured the legendary Steve Gadd. Danny Thompson appeared on bass; Mica Paris provides some great backing vocals.
Three songs on the album were completely re-recorded: This Woman's Work, Rubberband Girl and Moments of Pleasure. Two of those songs – This Woman’s Work and Moments of Pleasure – hold a very special place in fans’ hearts. I don’t think it was sacrilegious or wrong for Bush to return to some of her older tracks. They are hers to begin with, and I can appreciate that she had a chance to improve some songs that she was not completely happy with. As a new collection of songs, 50 Words for Snow, arrived in the winter of 2011, it was like Bush was clearing the way for new material – rectifying some wrongs and seeing to an important task before she could move on. I feel some of the new versions are stunning. I love how her voice sounds on Flower of the Mountain, Moments of Pleasure and This Woman’s Work. Even though Bush’s voice is different and deeper than it was in 1989 and 1993, I feel there is a new gravitas and weight that she gives to these songs. I like the fact that she took these tracks, stripped them back and then recomposed them. I think the vocals take centre stage and there is very little in the way of clutter and polish. You can hear that Bush holds affection for her previous work - she is not discarding the originals and casting them aside. Instead, she wanted to give them new respect and consideration.
I think the best way to approach Director’s Cut is as a completely new album – which, technically, it is! Though I have ranked my favourite five reversions, I am not someone who compares the old and new versions and critiques them heavily. My idea behind providing a ranking was to show that, actually, it was a great idea to come back to these songs! Bush really adds something new. In subtracting and taking away layers, she has given the songs room to breathe. In any case, just hearing Kate Bush sing is reason enough to love Director’s Cut! In her fifties (as she was then), she had not lost any of her power and beauty. Whilst she may not have the same vocal sound as she did years ago, her voice sounds amazing and has this smoky and deeper tone which is really pleasing. It was quite brave in a way to take on album like Director’s Cut, knowing that there would be objectionable corners and dissent from some fans and media outlets. Even though I would not place the album in my top-five of hers, I have been listening to it a lot in the run-up to its tenth anniversary and finding new things to love. It does not sound incongruous or strange placing tracks from two different albums together, as Bush has reworked them and it sounds like a complete body of work; a new album that is intended to flow and sound different. I also think that many people approached the original albums and discovered songs that they may have been unfamiliar with beforehand.
It would have been challenging following up the double album of Aerial (2005). That album came twelve years after The Red Shoes. After quite a gap, there would have been a desire and demand for another album quite soon after Aerial. I guess some people were wondering whether Bush would follow up Aerial. Happily, she was busy putting together two new, very different, albums. Rather than Director’s Cut being a passage or segue between Aerial and 50 Words for Snow, it was an important project where you can really hear and feel Bush working hard (and treating it as a completely fresh album). Whilst not every critics and fan was going to be entirely happy with the resultant Director’s Cut, it scored some very positive reviews. I will come to one of them very soon. Before that, I want to introduce sections from a Pitchfork review:
“What Bush has done on Director's Cut, put simply, is to strip the 80s from these songs. (That goes for the Red Shoes material, too, even though the album was released in the 90s.) The gigantic drums and digital polish, what both dated the music instantly and gave it that stark contrast between accessibility and the deeply personal, have been replaced with less showy rhythm tracks, and a warmer, more intimate atmosphere. On the original "The Sensual World", the elements drawn from Celtic folk felt like striking intrusions in an all-digital world. Renamed "Flower of the Mountain" here, those rustic elements no longer feel quite so out of place, whether you found the original an intriguing hybrid or an awkward merger of old and new.
The songs still don't have the feel of a band playing together, but they have a new unity, even the synthetic elements part of a lovingly handcrafted sound. "The Red Shoes", another Celtic-inflected standout, with one of Bush's wildest performances, gains a new intensity precisely because the instruments no longer feel so sterile. But not every element of this patchwork has been pieced together perfectly. The eerie keyboard textures on "And So Love Is", the kind of sour 80s kitsch beloved by Gang Gang Dance, seem surprisingly natural in this new environment. But Eric Clapton's bluesy wanking sounds even more out of place now, stadium pop bluster in a homemade world. It produces tension for sure, but the wrong sort.
It's the singing that just as often startles, though. Bush is less show-offy on Director's Cut than any of her pre-hiatus albums. For a woman known for her range, and her fearlessness at using that range, her performances are always tempered and often low-key here. As with so many songs on Director's Cut, "This Woman's Work" becomes almost shocking in its difference, not least because it's transformed from one of Bush's biggest showstoppers into something far more mournful, the singer restraining herself as if almost but not quite broken by love. The backing track is just as minimal, but deeper, the instrumental textures less brittle. A hushed, lonely Bush sounds as if she's drifting through a vast, lonely space. But instead of the original's childlike verses surging to grown-ass-woman longing on the choruses, Bush is more evenly paced here, communicating deep regret more through a bereft tone than diva theatrics. It's desolate and intimate, like much of Director's Cut, where the original's bravura made it feel both tender and defiant, like much of Bush's early work.
Even with an older and more reserved Bush occasionally putting the brakes on that melodrama, these reworked songs don't totally relinquish that unashamed grandiosity that makes Bush such a love-hate proposition. Director's Cut provides a unique opportunity to do an A/B comparison between a late-career artist and her younger self. But which you'll prefer likely depends on whether you favor a more assured artist working within her strengths, or a brash younger artist delighting in the defying of pop conventions”.
It is impressive how Bush managed to take a selection of songs from two previous albums and unite them into a cohesive and natural new whole. Other artists might have made the album sound inconsistent or poorly structured. Instead, Director’s Cut sounds like Bush has put The Sensual World and The Red Shoes out of her head and started from scratch. In this review from The Independent, Andy Gill discusses Bush’s new vocal elements and tones:
“Despite its being comprised of reworked versions of songs that originally appeared around two decades ago, Kate Bush regards her Director's Cut as a new album in and of itself.
And she's right to: There's a consistency and homogeneity about the 11 tracks (seven from The Red Shoes, four from The Sensual World) which echoes her work on Aerial, and which lends the project a character entirely its own.
This is largely due to her re-doing all the lead vocals, which has imposed a warmer, more reflective tone on proceedings. The most striking change is on the closing "Rubberband Girl", where she sounds oddly muffled: the original stratospheric yelps are gone, along with Jeff Beck's flashy guitar, replaced by an understated harmonica groove that aims for more hypnotic impact – as too does "The Red Shoes" itself, whose mesmeric mandola groove is nudged along by softly pulsing drums. Ironically, though less flamboyantly abandoned, Kate's vocals here better evoke the sense of possession in the dance.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for Director’s Cut/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
All the new versions are longer than the originals, some considerably: completely re-recorded, "This Woman's Work" has almost doubled in size in this new, more restrained form. Originally written for the film She's Having a Baby, and frequently used in TV dramas ever since, this, ethereal re-imagining untethers the song from those associations, allowing it to float free again. A similarly effective renovation has been done to "The Sensual World", here retitled "Flower of the Mountain": denied the use of Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Ulysses in the original, Bush was this time granted permission by James Joyce's estate, and the effect is remarkable. With her voice up close and intimate, the undulating repetitions are hypnotically gripping, as Uillean pipes dance with abandon about the gently puttering groove, caressed with string-pad synths: yes, yes! It's the most genuinely sensual music you'll hear this year.
Elsewhere, the computer love song "Deeper Understanding" profits from a less brittle, more lovingly cossetting arrangement, while the balance between Eric Clapton's guitar and the fluting keyboards and backing vocals of "And So Is Love" seems much more subtly resolved in this new incarnation. That song's underlying message ("We let it in, we give it out/ And in the end, what's it all about?/ It must be love") could stand as the motif for the album as a whole, which constitutes the latest of Kate Bush's series of investigations of the nature of love, both sexual and spiritual.
It's her forte, and it's a theme which she has learned to express in music as much as in lyrics. Even when suddenly blurting out "Don't want your bullshit, just want your sexuality" in "The Song of Solomon", the attention to texture in the arrangement of harp, piano, murmuring synth and Bulgarian backing vocal creates a delicate web strong enough to carry her demand without snapping the song in two. That combination of gentle touch and toughness is a rare gift indeed”.
Ahead of the tenth anniversary of Director’s Cut, I wanted to do a series of features that approaches the album in different ways. Few of us would have known that, so soon after giving us a new album, Bush would be readying another for release in the form of 50 Words for Snow. It is testament to her hard work and organisation that she not only released two albums in 2011; she also managed to make them sound very different - and there was no sense of overlap between them. I am glad that Bush recorded Director’s Cut. It is a rare chance to see these familiar and older tracks approached and recorded…
IN a whole new light.