FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes at Twenty-Nine
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993 in the Moments of Pleasure video/PHOTO CREDIT: Gudio Harari
Moments of Pleasure: Inside One of Her Most Underrated Singles
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THERE are a few reasons…
why I want to explore Kate Bush’s Moments of Pleasure. Not only is it one of her best songs and most underrated singles. It was also written for an album, The Red Shoes, that does not get a great deal of credit. Released as a single on 15th November, 1993, it is a phenomenal song. The Red Shoes came out on 2nd November. I like the fact that Bush chose this as the second single from the album. It is celebratory and heartbreaking. Bush wrote the chorus "To those we love, to those who will survive" for her mother Hannah, who was sick at the time of recording. She died a short time later. Bush reworked Moments of Pleasure for 2011’s Director’s Cut, but she took the lyrics out of the chorus. It is clear that Moments of Pleasure is personal and has rawness, but it is also one of her most beautiful and hopeful songs too. There are various aspects to explore when it comes to Moments of Pleasure. Before that, here are interview quotes where Bush spoke about one of The Red Shoes’ best songs:
“I think the problem is that during [the recording of] that album there were a lot of unhappy things going on in my life, but when the songs were written none of that had really happened yet. I think a lot of people presume that particularly that song was written after my mother had died for instance, which wasn't so at all. There's a line in there that mentions a phrase that she used to say, 'every old sock meets an old shoe', and when I recorded it and played it to her she just thought it was hilarious!
She couldn't stop laughing, she just thought it was so funny that I'd put it into this song. So I don't see it as a sad song. I think there's a sort of reflective quality, but I guess I think of it more as a celebration of life. (Interview with Ken Bruce, BBC Radio 2, 9 May 2011)
I wasn't really quite sure how "Moments of Pleasure" was going to come together, so I just sat down and tried to play it again-- I hadn't played it for about 20 years. I immediately wanted to get a sense of the fact that it was more of a narrative now than the original version; getting rid of the chorus sections somehow made it more of a narrative than a straightforward song. (Ryan Dombai, 'Kate Bush: The elusive art-rock originator on her time-travelling new LP, Director's Cut'. Pitchfork, May 16, 2011)”.
The video featured in Bush’s short film, The Line, the Cross and the Cure. With Bush directing and starring in that film (and she wrote it), I think Moments of Pleasure is one of her most gorgeous videos. There is mystery and beauty throughout the song. The colour palette, mood and look of the video is stunning. Bush twirls and has this hypnotic quality. I like the longer version where there is spoken word at the beginning. There is hopeful and romantic lyrics: “I think about us lying/Lying on a beach somewhere/I think about us diving/Diving off a rock, into another moment”. We have something funny, quirky, and self-deprecating: “The case of George the Wipe/Oh God I can't stop laughing”. I believe ‘George the Wipe’ referrers to a tape op (a person who performs menial operations in a recording studio in a similar manner to a tea boy or gopher) at Townhouse Studios who, back in 1981, accidentally wiped a whole song that had been recorded for her album The Dreaming. Packed with so many vivid scenes and interesting thoughts, Moments of Pleasure is a song that shows how strong The Red Shoes is! Bush had lost none of her genius and vision. The album has so many songs that are as arresting. I wanted to mark the album anniversary next month - but I also wanted to focus on this brilliant song. The fact that she is so personal was relatively new at that point. She could not help but be affected by her mother’s ailing health: “Just being alive/It can really hurt/And these moments given/Are a gift from time/Just let us try/To give these moments back/To those we love/To those who will survive/And I can hear my mother saying/"Every old sock meets an old shoe"/Isn't that a great saying?/"Every old sock meets an old shoe"/Here come the Hills of Time”.
Bush vocal performance throughout is so wonderful and filled with emotion! The effectiveness of Moments of Pleasure comes from Bush and her piano. No percussion or bass, Michael Kamen is responsible for the orchestral arrangements. It nods forward to Aerial (2005), where Bush would strip things back in some ways, but also add strings and something regal and more elegant. Although The Red Shoes’ first single, Rubberband Girl, got to twelve in the U.K., Moments of Pleasure only reached twenty-six. I said this recently when talking about the anniversary of Cloudbusting (released from her 1985 album, Hounds of Love) and the fact that it only charted at twenty. Such great and compelling songs that did not perform as well as they deserved. Maybe too emotive or lacking a punchy chorus, this is a rich and soulful song with Bush painting us images from home and away. Taking us to a New York balcony, her mother’s side, and recording mishaps, you become engrossed and transported! I do like the fact Bush also takes us into the studio and introduces characters we might not know about: “Hey there Maureen/Hey there Bubba/Dancing down the aisle of a plane/'S Murph, playing his guitar refrain/Hey there Teddy/Spinning in the chair at Abbey Road/Hey there Michael/Do you really love me?/Hey there Bill/Could you turn the lights up?”. There is Bush referring to some people she lost. The ‘Murphy’ is her long-time guitarist Alan Murphy, who sadly died on 19th October, 1989 (a few days after The Sensual World was released). ‘Bill’ is Bill Duffield, the young lighting assistant who died in a freak accident after the warm-up date for The Tour of Life at Poole Arts Centre on 2nd April, 1979. I am not quite sure who the ‘Michael’ is. Maybe Karmen? Although there are some gaps, Bush was keeping some people who died alive.
Moments of Pleasure is not a morbid song where Bush tackles mortality. It is beautiful and graceful. I also like the different formats and B-sides. In the U.K., Moments of Pleasure was released as cassette single, a 12" single with free poster, in addition to a regular C.D.-single and a limited-edition box-set C.D.-single with card prints. On the 7" single and the cassette single, there was the instrumental version of Moments of Pleasure on the B-side. The 12" single had the track, Home for Christmas. The C.D.-singles added, besides the title track, December Will Be Magic Again and Experiment IV. The non-limited version also had the track, Show a Little Devotion. Bush performed Moments of Pleasure after an interview with Michael Aspel in 1993 (the interview is not that great in terms of the questions, but the performance is reliably stunning!). The Red Shoes is sequenced interestingly. Opening with the bouncy Rubberband Girl, it then sandwiches between the more serious (And So Is Love is second) and the fun (Eat the Music is third). The fourth track takes us back into the more reflective with Moments of Pleasure. Tackling relationship strain and the illness of her mother, this was a different Kate Bush. She was putting more of herself into the music. Addressing changing circumstances and things happening around her, I think many critics wanted something more uplifting. The Red Shoes has these moments, but it is an album that gets personal and does look more into Kate Bush’s life and heart. This was not new for her, though I think it is more explicit on The Red Shoes. Moments of Pleasure is a fabulous song that is a natural single. I think it should have fared better. Twenty-six is not a low chart position but, seeing as Rubberband Girl was in the top twenty, I am not sure why the public were not similarly enamored with Moments of Pleasure. All these years later, the song is played and loved! In the song, Bush says how her sense of humour is funny at all. Maybe trying to make light and find humour at dark times, “Oh but we sit up all night/Talking about it”. Whether the ‘we’ is her and her mother or a friend/lover, I am not too sure. Moments of Pleasure offers these mysteries alongside the personal. Released as a single on 15th November, 1993, Moments of Pleasure is…
A mesmerising song.