FEATURE:
Reaching Out for This Woman’s Work
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Kate Bush’s The Sensual World at Thirty-Four: The Interviews
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ONE of Kate Bush’s…
finest albums., The Sensual World, I feel, is one that is underplayed. Arriving on 17th October, 1989, it came four years after her masterpiece, Hounds of Love. I am going to do a few features on The Sensual World. It is an album where the major tracks such as This Woman’s Work and The Sensual World are played and know, and yet there are deeper cuts that are either unknown or virtually never played. Perhaps less recognisable than Hounds of Love in that sense, I think that The Sensual World is the album where Bush was opening up more. Revealing more of herself through the songs. An album wonderfully sequenced so the bigger songs – The Sensual World, Deeper Understanding and This Woman’s Work – are at the top, middle and bottom. Maybe tracks like Love and Anger and deeper cuts such as Never Be Mine are not as strong as other songs through the albums. I feel that Bush was trying to be a bit more personal and less oblique. More sensual and evocative, there is a whole new world created by her. With its own sound palette and this incredibly rich production throughout (by Bush), we get to bask in some magnificent singing. Bush’s voice sounding more mature and wide-ranging then ever. A cast of terrific musicians adding layers and nuance to each track. Featuring players such as Mick Karn, and a new addition of the Trio Bulgarka on three songs – they would reappear on the follow-up, 1993’s The Red Shoes -, The Sensual World is a classic! Reaching number two in the U.K. and doing well around the world (it got to forty-three in the U.S.), this album’s upcoming thirty-fourth anniversary should be celebrated.
In further features about the album, I will focus on particular songs, and get a sense of how The Sensual World has been received and how it endures. To start, there are some interview from 1989, where Bush was promoting her sixth studio album. At a time when things were changing for her – she was in a new relationship (as far as I confirm date-wise) with Danny McIntosh; Bush in her thirties -, this was an exciting stage of her career. I will bring in a couple of interviews. The first, with Steve Sutherland of Melody Maker, was published in October 1989:
“With her Sensual World LP being hailed as one of this year's best and the single of the same name still high in the charts <This was already untrue at the time this interview was published>, Kate Bush celebrates her triumphant return with Steve Sutherland.
An hour before she tells me I have a lovely energy and just about makes my year, she apologises for keeping me waiting. "I just had to have a fag," she says, dogging a butt in the ashtray. "I was just dying for one." for one."
Something isn't right here. I mean, I don't know who I thought Kate Bush would be when I walked into the downstairs room of Durrant's Hotel where she is drinking tea and, but I didn't think Kate Bush would smoke.
I think perhaps I was expecting her to be like Emma Thompson, a woman whose precocious talent has been critically downplayed because it springs from a privileged background rather than one of strife or suffering; a woman not so much other -worldly as cocooned from the weird old world for her own safety and sanity.
I think I still expected to meet a hippy nymph despite the evidence of my ears. Sitting in the foyer under the influence of her new LP, watching the first, solitary autumn leaf blow in off the street onto the Axminster, and reading symbolism into the American photographer asking for the price labels to be removed from the olde worlde mementoes on show in the Regency cabinets, I must have ignored the fact that only Prince has been more consistently intriguing <More? More ??>, more exuberantly experimental, more willing to take risks for the sake of pure music in the Eighties. Only the pneumatic Purple Rain pumped blood faster than Hounds of Love, only Around the World in a Day repatterned the embroidery of pop with the same haughty disregard for convention as The Sensual World, her seventh LP if you her seventh LP if you count the greatest hits compilation,
I think I thought Kate Bush would be Green and ozone-friendly--all ballet shoes and Laura Ashley frocks. The St. Michael's blouse and slacks, the tiny navy socks and no shoes, the Benson & Hedges freaked me out.
I think I thought of Kate Bush as a precious oasis in a tarnished world, a pearl cast before the swinish hordes. I guess I forgot Kate Bush is a genius.
"I think most people tend to think of me as the weird Wuthering Heights singer--that is definitely the image that's stuck with most people, which I find extraordinary because it's...so long ago."
She laughs and, when she laughs, her cheeks dimple like a Disney chipmunk.
"Extraordinary is a very good word, I think. I don't know why people are still keen on...I don't know why people bother with me."
Really?
"Really."
She's so small, it't extraordinary.
It took Kate Bush four years to make The Sensual World, and we've been given an hour to talk about it. Great.
I think about telling Kate how surprised I am she's so small, or how shocked I am she smokes, but time is not on my side so I decide, instead, to tell her how delighted I am that she's come to the conclusion that the past and the future aren't beyond changing. The album sounds so optimistic in an era when absolutely everything appears to be falling apart.
Kate naturally loves this interpretation, but the fact is that the album is certainly as loaded with dark and pessimistic images and ideas as it is with optimistic ones. In IED's opinion Sutherland has swotted up on what Kate has been saying recently, and is now rephrasing a lot of her own preferences in conversation with her, as though they were his own ideas rather than borrowed ones, precisely in order to ingratiate Kate. It works, and it may even be a good idea, since the other methods of engaging her in conversation have seldom produced great publishable material.
"Oh, thank you! Thank you so much! That's really how I wanted it to be but, talking to a lot of friends and that, they feel it's a dark album."
I didn't think that at all...
"Oh, great."
...I thought some of the situations were dark, but the way they're resolved is optimistic. <What about the way Heads, We're Dancing is "resolved"? What about the way Deeper Understanding is "resolved"? What about the way Never Be Mine is "resolved"?
"Oh, that's great. Thank you. Yes. That's really great. I'm so pleased you heard it like that. You see, for a lot of people it's so complicated to listen to, and that worries me, because I like the idea of people being able to listen to it easily and...uh...I don't want to confuse people but, for some people, it's very hard for them to even take it in, let alone sort of get anything out of it.
"I do think art should be simple, you see. It shouldn't be complicated, and I think, in some ways, this has come across a bit complicated." <This is one of Kate's "new" ideas--opinions which she has not really made prior to 1989, but which she has been repeating in multiple interviews since the release of the new album. IED finds it highly intriguing, because it is so vague and so patently at odds with the way her own art has always been--and continues to be--made.
Maybe that's because, for me, the album's about relationships--the relationship between language and emotion, the relationship between language and music, the relationship between emotion and music and how all this expresses, or more crucially fails to express, the relationship between people. And relationships, as we all know, are never ever easy”.
I would recommend people check out interviews Kate Bush was involved with around The Sensual World. I may have brought these in before, yet it is worth revisiting for this anniversary feature. I will end with an interview from Q. Conducted by Phil Sutcliffe, it was printed in November 1989. There are sections from the interview that caught my eye that I want to highlight:
“This time round, apart from dancing and running, the panacea was the garden at the house she and Del moved into three years ago in Eltham, Southeast London (brother Jay and family live next door; her parents' home still only half an hour away). "I sometimes I think I might as well just be a brain and a big pair of ears on legs, stuck in front of a mixing desk," she says. "But when I took that break from The Sensual World I really got into gardening. I mean, it's literally a very down-to-earth thing, isn't it? Real air. Away from the artificial light. Very therapeutic."
Another renewable source of inspiration has been exotic instrumentation, usually provided by a visit to Dublin and various members of the staunchly traditional folk troupe, The Chieftains, or by turning to brother Paddy (who specialised in making medieval instruments at the London College of Furniture and will knock out the odd koto or strumento de porco as and when). But for The Sensual World she's leavened the Celtic skirl with a bit of Balkan. She first heard the Trio Bulgarka in '86 and was suitably astonished. A year later it dawned on her that their full-throated harmonies might suit her songs. Connections were made through Joe Boyd of Hannibal Records, their UK label, and Kate flew out to Sofia for an entrancing experience of world music.
"They couldn't speak a word of English and I couldn't speak a word of Bulgarian," she says. "Everything went through translators and it didn't matter at all. Lovely working with women, and especially them, they're very affectionate. We tended to communicate through cuddles rather than words. In fact, we could get on perfectly well without the translators. At one point we were talking away in the studio when the translator walked in and we all shut up because she'd suddenly made us self-conscious about what we were doing." The Trio can be heard on three tracks, including the strikingly unlikely setting of Deeper Understanding, a very modern-world song about an alienated woman and her relationship with her computer.
"This is definitely my most personal, honest album," she says. "And I think it's my most *feminine* album, in that I feel maybe I'm not trying to prove something in terms of a woman in a man's world -- God, here we go!" She seems to be wary of provoking a heavy debate about feminism. "On The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love, particularly from a production standpoint, I wanted to get a lot more weight and power, which I felt was a very male attitude. In some cases it worked very well, but.. . perhaps this time I felt braver as a woman, not trying to do the things that men do in music."
The Fog is a brave song. It co-stars Kate's dad on spoken vocals intoning with fatherly/doctorly reassurance, "Just put your feet down child/'Cos you're all grown-up now".
"I started with the idea of a relationship in deep water and thought I could parallel that with learning to swim, the moment of letting go," she says. "When my dad was teaching me to swim he'd hold both my hands, then say, Now, let go. So I would, then he'd take two paces back and say, Right, swim to me, and I'd be, Oo-er, blub, blub, blerb. But I though it was such a beautiful image of the father and child, all wrapped up in the idea of really loving someone, but letting them go, because that's a part of real love, don't you think, the letting go?"
So it's personal about Kate and her father then. It sounds as though it might be personal about her and Del too.
"Yes, it does, doesn't it?" She laughs, really amused by her professionally evasive reply. "Have you ever watched Woody Allen being interviewed? Obviously his films are very personal and when the interviewer asks him the 'Has this happened to you then?' question, he's all.. ." She cowers back into her chair, crosses and uncrosses her legs, thrashes about like a speared fish. "Then he'll say, Uh, well, no, I'm just acting out a role. It's ironic, but it's much easier to speak about very personal things to lots of people through a song, a poem or a film than it is to confront the world with them through someone asking questions. Maybe you worry because it's going to be indirectly reported."
Kate Bush leads a quiet, fairly limited life so her options on subject matter my be relatively restricted. Although she has ventured into political issues with Breathing (nuclear war) and The Dreaming (Aborigine rights), she generally declares her own ignorance and refrains from writing songs that would only prove it. But she will often borrow a story and make it her own -- from books (Wuthering Heights, obviously, and Cloudbusting, from Peter Reich's memoir of his father called A Book Of Dreams), TV (Pull Out The Pin was inspired by a documentary about the Viet Cong), or films (the idea for Get Out Of My House came from The Shining).
However, it was a story told by an older friend that sowed the seeds for Heads We're Dancing, a near-disco piece about a night out with Hitler. "Years ago this friend of mine went to a dinner and spent the whole evening chatting to this fascinating guy, incredibly charming, witty, well-read, but never found out his name," she says. "The next day he asked someone else who'd been there who it was. 'Oh, didn't you know? That's Oppenheimer, the man who invented the atomic bomb.' My friend was horrified because he thought he should have given the guy hell, attacked him, he didn't know what.
"But the point was one moment this person is charming, then when you find out who he is, he's completely different. So I thought, Who's the worst person you could possibly meet in those circumstances? Hitler! And the story developed. A woman at a dance before the war and this guy comes up to her tossing a coin with this cocky chat-up line, Heads we're dancing. She doesn't recognise him until she sees his face in the paper later on and then she's devastated. She thinks that if she'd known she might have been able to *get* him and change the course of history. But he was a person who fooled a tremendous number of people and I don't think they can be blamed. It worries me a bit that this song could be received wrongly, though."
It could well be that the musically extended family and extended home of Kate Bush even embrace her feelings for her songs themselves. She has an intimacy with them, a distinctive candour about sensuality and sexuality to which her present album title track is something of a natural conclusion.
It passed more or less unnoticed in her early days that she was casually breaking taboos in every other song. Tricky items on her agenda included incest (brother and sister in The Kick Inside, woman and young boy in The Infant Kiss), homosexuality (Wow, Kashka From Baghdad) and period pains (Strange Phenomena, Kites [sic]). Her sympathetic, non-judgmental approach was probably one of the less obvious reasons why she appealed so strongly to both sexes, but she would occasionally remark that she was grateful the tabloids didn't read lyric sheets. Otherwise she could have been up to her neck in bishops and Mrs. Whitehouse demanding that the nation's children be protected from this filth.
In fact, the moment anyone other than a fan thinks they've spotted a hint of sex in her songs she becomes very hesitant. Once, when she was working on Breathing, an EMI executive walked in to be greeted by the hypnotic "out-in, out-in, out-in" chant. Taking a firm hold on the wrong end of the stick, he asked her how she could even dream of releasing this pornography. The possibility of such gross misunderstandings shakes her faith in the "purity" -- a favourite word -- of what she's doing. But not enough to make her back off.
"Don't you think Art is a tremendous sensual-sexual expression? I feel that energy often.. . the driving force is probably not the right way to put it," she says, still trying to skirt the fnaarr-fnaarr potential of the topic.
Whether or not her speculation about the nature of Art is on the money, she made her own experience of the creative process quite clear with the cover of Never For Ever. A cornucopia of fantastic and real, beautiful and vile creatures -- the products of her imagination -- is shown swirling our from beneath her skirt. At the time, thinking about this and the steamy, masturbatory atmosphere of many of the songs she wrote in her teens such as The Man With The Child In His Eyes and Saxophone Song, she said: "It's not such an open thing for women to be physically attracted to the male body and fantasise about it. I can't understand that because to me the male body is absolutely beautiful.. . Physical masturbation, it's a feeling so bottled up you have to relieve it, as if you were crying."
The Sensual World is a song that translates the old ache to a different level -- with the invaluable help of James Joyce. "I had a rhythm idea with a synth line I took home to work on one night," she says. "While I was playing it this repeated *Yes* came to me and made me think of Molly Bloom's speech right at the end of Ulysses -- which I *have* actually read all through! I went downstairs and read it again, this unending sentence punctuated with 'yeses', fantastic stuff, and it was uncanny, it fitted the rhythm of my song." (The last lines of Molly Bloom's great stream of consciousness read: "then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.")
Although to Kate "it felt like it was meant to happen", when she applied through "official channels" (presumably the Joyce estate) for permission to use it, she was refused. But she wasn't to be deflected. "I tried to write it like Joyce," she says, smiling in self-mockery. "The rhythm at least I wanted to keep. Obviously I couldn't do his style. It became a song about Molly Bloom, the character, stepping out of the page -- black and white, two-dimensional, you see -- and into the real world, the sensual world. Touching things." She declaims exaggeratedly. "The grass underfoot! The mountain air! I know it sounds corny, but it's about the whole sensual experience, this wonderfully human thing. . ."
And lines like "his spark took life in my hand"?
"Yes, it is rather saucy. But not nearly as sexy as James Joyce." She looks concerned again. "I'd be really worried -- there's nothing I can do about it now because it's all part of the process -- but I would be worried if people felt this ambiguity between sensual and sexual”.
On 17th October, one of Kate Bush’s best albums turns thirty-four. The majestic and beautiful The Sensual World is one of the critical favourites. Out of her ten studio albums so far, it always comes in the top five – for the most part anyway! In 2022, SPIN ranked it fourth; Rough Trade placed it third this year; Pink News put it in fifth last year; in 2019, NME ranked it third; Far Out Magazine have it as third-best, whereas Stereogum placed The Sensual World in first in their feature from 2013. Maybe it is subjective or related to time. The Sensual World has aged very well. What we do know is how revered and loved the album is. From its divine title track to lesser-heard songs such as Rocket’s Tail, The Sensual World is…
A true classic.