FEATURE:
Not Enough of the Former…
PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Kate Bush’s Love and Anger: Her Most Unappreciated and Underrated Single?
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PERHAPS the fact that…
Kate Bush had trouble putting the song together and was not sure what it is about is a reason why Love and Anger is not played more. Although the album it is from, The Sensual World, is highly regarded, songs like Love and Anger are ranked quite low in terms of the best from the album. Reaching number thirty-eight in the U.K., it was the third and final single from The Sensual World. After the success of The Sensual World (the single reached number twelve here) and This Woman’s Work (it got to number twenty-five), Love and Anger did not fare as well. I think The Sensual World, unlike its predecessor, Hounds of Love (1985) is less singles-obvious and does not have a lot of commercial songs. Maybe that explains why some Kate Bush fans place The Sensual World quite low when it comes to ranking the albums. Not choosing to include another song from The Sensual World as a B-side – I think that tracks like The Fog and Between a Man and a Woman would have made great B-sides -, Bush included Ken, One Last Look Around the House Before We Go and The Confrontation (the latter two of which are instrumentals and were only available on the C.D. release and 12" version of this single. These songs were written for the episode GLC: The Carnage Continues..., the British T.V. show, The Comic Strip).
The fact that these B-sides were more whimsical or instrumental than previous ones suggests that Bush was not entirely convinced about Love and Anger as a single. It is a shame that she seems to have taken a while to get to the meaning behind the song – and one suspects it is not one of her favourite contributions to The Sensual World. Before moving on, the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia gathered interviews where Bush talked about Love and Anger. I have selected a couple:
“This song! This bloody song!
It was one of the most difficult to put together, yet the first to be written. I came back to it 18 months later and pieced it together. It doesn't really have a story. It's just me trying to write a song, ha-ha.
Obviously the imagery you get as a child is very strong. This is about who you can or cannot confide in when there's something you can't talk about. "If you can't tell your sister, If you can't tell a priest..." Who did I have in the lyrics? Was it sister or mother? I can't remember. (Len Brown, 'In The Realm Of The Senses'. NME (UK), 7 October 1989)
It's one of the most difficult songs I think I've ever written. It was so elusive, and even today I don't like to talk about it, because I never really felt it let me know what it's about. It's just kind of a song that pulled itself together, and with a tremendous amount of encouragement from people around me. There were so many times I thought it would never get on the album. But I'm really pleased it did now. (Interview, WFNX Boston (USA), 1989).
I couldn't get the lyrics. They were one of the last things to do. I just couldn't find out what the song was about, though the tune was there. The first verse was always there, and that was the problem, because I'd already set some form of direction, but I couldn't follow through. I didn't know what I wanted to say at all. I guess I was just tying to make a song that was comforting, up tempo, and about how when things get really bad, it's alright really - "Don't worry old bean. Someone will come and help you out."
The song started with a piano, and Del put a straight rhythm down. Then we got the drummer, and it stayed like that for at least a year and a half. Then I thought maybe it could be okay, so we got Dave Gilmour in. This is actually one of the more difficult songs - everyone I asked to try and play something on this track had problems. It was one of those awful tracks where either everything would sound ordinary, really MOR, or people just couldn't come to terms with it. They'd ask me what it was about, but I didn't know because I hadn't written the lyrics. Dave was great - I think he gave me a bit of a foothold there, really. At least there was a guitar that made some sense. And John [Giblin] putting the bass on - that was very important. He was one of the few people brave enough to say that he actually liked the song. (Tony Horkins, 'What Katie Did Next'. International Musician, December 1989)”.
Even though the song’s origins are a little spotty and vague, I think the lyrics are among some of her most personal and powerful. Bush broke up with Del Palmer (who she still works with today) around 1993. Maybe she was reacting to a relationship of long standing breaking down or facing a rough patch: “Take away the love and the anger/And a little piece of hope holding us together/Looking for a moment that'll never happen/Living in the gap between past and future/Take away the stone and the timber/And a little piece of rope won't hold it together”. With some great guitar work from Dave Gilmour, and Paddy Bush on the valiha, there is a great mix of sounds and scents on Love and Anger. I think that Bush provides such a beautiful vocal for the song. The second track on The Sensual World Bush, as producer, clearly had some hope and faith in the song when the album came out. Often ranked low when people are listing Kate Bush’s best singles, I do think Love and Anger is a great song that deserves more respect. At a time in her career when she was one of the most loved and successful artists in the world, Bush was still very much at the peak of her powers. The Sensual World is an album that is still not as regarded and explored as it should be. It is full of wonderful songs. Love and Anger should have charted higher as a single, though maybe Bush’s first single of the 1990s arrived a bit too long after The Sensual World in terms of momentum. I think that the beautiful Love and Anger is…
A terrific song.