FEATURE:
Director’s Cut: Part 2
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for 2011’s Director’s Cut/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Would Further Revisionism and Reappraisal Be a Step Too Far When We Crave New Kate Bush Music?
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A review has just been published…
concerning Kate Bush’s reissues. There are these new editions of her studio albums where Bush has created a special design and cover for each of them. It is a way of ensuring that her music is kept out there and picked up by new fans. Many have asked whether there was any worth reissuing albums when there is a need and real yearning for new music. I think that there is room for both. Among the reissued albums is 2011’s Director’s Cut. This was a rare occasion of Bush reworking previous songs. Not happy with some of the takes from 1989’s The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, hearing these tracks in a new light – and with Kate Bush’s voice deeper -, it was an interesting project. Many consider The Red Shoes and Director’s Cut to be too of her weaker albums. I really like both. Director’s Cut was a chance for Bush to address niggles. Maybe the production sound not quite right on the originals. Giving these songs room to breathe, I do like that Director’s Cut exists. There are songs on other albums I think would favour a Director’s Cut: Part 2 (or maybe titling it something else!). Before I get there, UNCUT discussed the new releases of The Red Shoes and Director’s Cut:
“Coincidentally, these latest reissues also coincide with the 30th anniversary of The Red Shoes. It’s still an unloved outlier in Bush’s canon, but also an admirably ambitious move into mature adult-pop terrain and certainly more of an exotic oddity than its patchy reputation suggests. Overstuffed with guest players from Prince to Eric Clapton, Nigel Kennedy to Jeff Beck, Bush’s seventh was a lushly produced, sprawling epic that drew inspiration both from the magical 1948 Powell & Pressburger ballet film of the same name and the macabre Hans Christian Andersen story that inspired it.
Bush even directed a 45-minute film to accompany the album, The Line, The Cross And The Curve, a promo-video collection framed within a fanciful fairy tale co-starring Miranda Richardson and Lindsay Kemp. Many of the songs obliquely addressed a turbulent period for the singer, including the death of her mother Hannah, the end of her long relationship with bass player and sound engineer Del Palmer, and her new marriage to guitarist Dan McIntosh. Both Palmer and McIntosh play on the album.
The Red Shoes arrived in November 1993 to respectable chart success but unusually muted reviews for an artist accustomed to being routinely branded a genius. The shift towards uncharacteristically straight pop-rock arrangements, embraced by Bush for a planned live tour that never happened, and the clinical, digital-heavy production were key criticisms. For some, the album was an uneasy mix of muddled literary folly and musically bland compromise, stepping off the page into the sensible world.
It seems Bush herself concurred with these negative takes. Indeed, she later remixed and re-recorded the bulk of The Red Shoes in warmer, less cluttered, emphatically analogue arrangements on her 2011 album Director’s Cut. In interviews, the singer claimed she was “trying too hard” with the original’s “edgy” digital audioscapes. Winningly, she also dismissed her accompanying film as “a load of old bollocks”.
Played back to back today, The Red Shoes and Director’s Cut make for an interesting dialogue. Indeed, Bush’s improvements have not all aged gracefully. The original album’s lead single “Rubberband Girl”, a hymn to resilience that bounds along on a chugging locomotive rhythm, is not quite vintage Kate but still a pretty solid effort. In stark contrast, the rootsy 2011 remake is a mullet-haired, saloon-bar blues-rocker, easily one of Bush’s worst ever decisions.
In fairness, most tracks are transformed for the better. Like the tearful heartbreak ballad “And So Is Love”, a shimmering Talk Talk-ish confection in its original form, the wounded cry of a 35-year-old woman waking up to the cruel transience of love and life. Pitched at a lower register, the updated version is luminously lovely but less emotionally raw, a world-weary rumination on midlife melancholy as much as romantic desolation.
Another notable upgrade is “Moments Of Pleasure”, Bush’s wistful piano-led tribute to loved ones who died during the album’s gestation, including her mother Hannah, her former guitarist Alan “Smurph” Murphy and The Red Shoes director Michael Powell. Couched in Michael Kamen‘s cinematic string arrangements, the original borders on syrupy melodrama while the pared-down remake is hushed, spare and fragile. “The Red Shoes” itself, and the raunchy “Song Of Solomon” (“don’t want your bullshit, just want your sexuality”) also benefit from more experimental takes, shaking off their tasteful Peter Gabriel-isms to embrace ambient drones, percussive twangs and melismatic warbles.
Director’s Cut is not a track-by-track remix of The Red Shoes, ignoring some key original compositions altogether. Assembled remotely via transatlantic tape-swapping, Bush’s Prince collaboration “Why Should I Love You” hardly qualifies as a career peak for either artist. Even so, The Purple One’s surging, warm-blooded contributions on backing vocals, keyboards and guitar still provide an irresistible serotonin rush. As an added Stella Street bonus, comedian Lenny Henry is part of the background chorus here.
Bush also declined to remake “Eat The Music”, an effusive exercise in Afro-pop fusion full of sexually suggestive food imagery, which features the singer’s brother Paddy on backing vocals and his Malagasy musician friend Justin Vali on the zither-like vahil and boxy, guitar-like kabosy. Some critics derided this as a reductive detour into Graceland territory, but it remains the most unashamedly sunny, joyous song on The Red Shoes.
Director’s Cut also features a handful of reworked tracks from Bush’s 1989 album The Sensual World. Of these, the most fruitful is the title track, now called “Flower Of The Mountain”, which restores the direct lyrical borrowings from Ulysses that James Joyce‘s estate previously blocked. But an ambient remake of “This Woman’s Work” is wholly superfluous, softening the original’s heart-piercing piano treatment into a twinkly John Lewis Christmas advert. Kate Bush may be the last true born-again indie maverick in British pop, but her best work, like her worst, has always straddled the fuzzy border between eccentric genius and overripe indulgence”.
There are entire albums that Kate Bush never performed live. So many tracks from Never for Ever, The Dreaming and The Sensual World have not been played live. There is a case to suggest that some of the tracks from these albums would benefit from new perspective. I do think that Bush was not entirely happy with her first few albums (The Kick Inside, Lionheart and Never for Ever). Though would she want to go that far back and revisit these tracks?! She did re-record the vocal for Wuthering Heights for 1986’s The Whole Story. When there is still so limited a view of her music in terms of which songs are played on radio and the ones people know, I fear there are so many people who do not know about albums like Lionheart and The Dreaming. The Red Shoes and The Sensual World were brought back into the studio as Bush was not happy with various aspects. Maybe some of these new versions divided people, yet it as important that she did this. I am going to end with a playlist of songs from original albums that I think would make a good addition to a twelve-track Director’s Cut: Part 2. I do feel that there is a fear of over-indulgence and making good original songs poor. Even so, as many might not have heard the oriignal versions, there is cause to remake them and put them back out there. Artists are not immune to revisiting their previous work. Whether it is someone like Taylor Swift doing it so that she can put her stamp on work she did not feel she had much control and say over, or Kate Bush looking back and wanting to update the sound of The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, then it is up to them.
It is curious what UNCUT said about The Red Shoes and Director’s Cut. Which songs from the former are reworked well on the latter and which are not. It is hard to take material that might have been loved or not the first time and get everyone on board with the new versions. I like Director’s Cut, as it cleared the path for Bush to work on new music. That album also came out in 2011: the majestic 50 Words for Snow. Bush has done a bit of retrospection the past few years. If it was a way of her clearing the decks and getting new music started then fans would welcome it. Maybe Bush would want to add a new dimension to Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). So covered and played, and so long after its 1985 release, she might provide a fresh take. In any case, there is an argument to say that a new Director’s Cut could broth introduce Kate Bush’s work to new fans. It will also provide new dimensions to songs she recorded a long time. Maybe ones that have been overlooked. As say, there are a few songs that I think could definitely get new life and lease with a re-recording. Rather than it being from two albums, I am taking from her first seven albums, excluding The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. Maybe you will agree; maybe you feel that only new work should come through. Regardless, the below tracks are ones I feel could work wonderfully on a sequel to…
THE excellent Director’s Cut.