FEATURE:
And This Curve Is Your Smile….
Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes at Thirty
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I keep forgetting that…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
the title song for The Red Shoes includes lyrics that form the title of Kate Bush’s 1993 short film, The Line, The Cross and the Curve. Near the start of the song, these lines are sung: “And this curve is your smile/And this cross is your heart/And this line is your path”. That film was released on 6th May, 1994. I will look more closely at it ahead of the anniversary. Eight songs from The Red Shoes were used in the film. The Red Shoes is the third song included in the film. It followed Rubberband Girl and And So Is Love. Even though some of the videos used in the film were not released as singles in the U.K. (such as Lily), we got visual representation. I wanted to focus on The Red Shoes. The fourth single from the album of the same name, it came out on 5th April, 1994. Technically, it was the third U.K. single. Rubberband Girl came out on 6th September, 1993. The day after, Eat the Music was released in the U.S. A song that should have been a single here too, Kate Bush is actually reissuing the song for this year’s Record Store Day. She is also the Ambassador for Record Store Day. Moments of Pleasure was the single that preceded The Red Shoes. The chart positions were okay but not brilliant. Rubberband Girl reached twelve in the U.K. Moment of Pleasure got to twenty-six (in the U.K.). Before the final single, And So Is Love, released on 7th November, 1994, The Red Shoes reached twenty-one in the U.K. It was a moderate success. I wanted to feature it here, as it is coming up for its thirtieth anniversary. A terrific title track with a great video. It is one that I feel should get a 4K remaster (there has been a fan HD remaster but nothing official). Such is its importance, not only in terms of the album it came from, but its place in The Line, the Cross and the Curve, it warrants a re-release.
The single was accompanied by different B-sides. The one that was on the 7-inch and cassette versions was You Want Alchemy. I shall include that track in here. It is an intriguing B-side that a great companion to The Red Shoes. Another reason why I wanted to look at the song is because it is not played enough. I guess the whole album is pretty under-represented and not discussed that much. I am going to go into more depth about The Red Shoes. The reaction from critics was, to say the least, a bit mixed:
“Chris Roberts from Melody Maker said, "'The Red Shoes' meets its jigging ambition and sticks a flag on top, making her dance till her legs fall off." Another editor, Peter Paphides, commented, "Only as a grown-up will I be able to fully apprehend the texture and allegorical resonance of the themes dealt with in 'The Red Shoes'. Until then, I'll content myself with Tori Amos and Edie Brickell." Parry Gettelman from Orlando Sentinel wrote, "The mandola, the whistles and various curious instruments on the driving title track really recall the fever-dream quality of the 1948 ballet film The Red Shoes, the album's namesake." Mark Sutherland from Smash Hits gave it two out of five, adding that "loads of spooky 'ethnic' noises and tribal beats make for a very weird single, but not a very good one”.
It is a shame that there was not a bigger and more passionate embrace of The Red Shoes. The singles from it didn’t get a lot of love. Apart from Moments of Pleasure. An underrated album from Kate Bush, I feel like it is worthy of reappraisal. The Red Shoes is a terrific song that should get more acclaim and respect.
There are some interviews from 1993 and 1994 that are well worth reading. Del Palmer was a musician and engineer for The Red Shoes. He talked to Sound on Sound about the recording process and the songs. One of the most exciting and pivotal moments on The Red Shoes and The Line, the Cross and the Curve, there does need to be this fresh interest and inspection of this song. There are a few different versions of The Red Shoes. We have the album version - which was also used on the single released -, in addition to Shoedance. That is a ten-minute remix by Karl Blagan of The Red Shoes, featuring excerpts from dialogue from the short film. Finally, there’s the version from Bush’s album Director’s Cut in 2011. That is my least favourite version, though I can appreciate why Kate Bush wanted to readdress it. The Red Shoes is one of her most energetic singles. It reminds me a bit of Hounds of Love’s Jig of Life. For Director’s Cut, she stripped it back a bit. I like the more frenzied version. You get so much life and energy from it. I am going to wrap up soon. I will come to an interview from Rock World that was published in October 1993. Paddy Bush’s, Kate’s brother, spoke about The Red Shoes, the creative process and the range of sounds that go into it. Paddy played quite a big part in the title track. In addition to backing vocals, he provides mandola, tin whistle and musical bow:
“To my mind the quality of the music justifies everything. People imagine Kate is this terrible paranoid creature, neurotic and full of hang-ups, but she's not like that at all. They think she's reclusive because she doesn't do a lot of press and promotion and isn't seen out and about, but she leads a regular life and believes the only thing interesting about her is the music. That's the only thing that sets her apart from anybody else and it's the one part of her life she feels comfortable discussing in public. I know this may give her a mystique and make the press all the more curious about her, but that's not the intention, it's not 'a ploy to get her more attention. She genuinely doesn't see why people should be interested in her personal life and she certainly doesn't like going out to clubs or trendy restaurants, it's just not her. So you never see anything about her in the gossip columns or much about her between records.
That's just the way it is with her, and that's partly the reason why it seems there are long periods when she's not doing anything. She doesn't really spend any longer on albums than anyone else, it just seems that way because she doesn't go off on big promotional tours like most artists, so it looks like she's completely disappeared. She just prefers to spend that time on her music. Believe it or not she actually writes very quickly. Once she has an idea for a song she writes fast - she's brilliant like that. What takes the time is all the other bits that go with it, realising what she has visualised in music in the studio - and that can be a slow process. She will never settle for second-best.
She is open to suggestions and ideas, however. As well as playing, I'm an instrument maker and I'm interested in lots of different kinds of music. Using the Trio Bulgarka on the last record came about after I'd started playing her that stuff. They're on the new one too. She's always interested in using different styles and cultures...like the aborigine influence on 'The Dreaming', on which we had Roll Harris playing didgeridoo. He was lovely, too, one of the nicest guys I've met and a great talent - that whole idea of being able to draw and then play a tune to go with it is fantastic. He taught us to play didgeridoo! Roger Whittaker's another lovely guy, and a great whistler, though it's hard to get him to whistle - he seems embarrassed about it. And I've fallen in love with music from Madagascar and I've been playing a lot of that stuff to Kate, and we've got that influence on the new album 'The Red Shoes'.
We always had music all around us since we were kids. The family is Irish so we'd always be going across to Ireland and we had Irish music in the house all the time. I went on the road with the Irish fiddle player Kevin Burke and Kate moved on to the piano and started writing songs. I always knew she was special and the songs were great. She was signed to EMI for a couple of years before the first album came out and that was a very exciting time for all of us and, of course, it all took off from there. And we did the live dates, as well, which were brilliant”.
All of Kate Bush’s songs are oriignal and interesting. Always taking inspiration from sources other songwriters were not, The Red Shoes is one with a cool background. Concerning a girl who puts on a pair of enchanted ballet slippers and can't stop dancing until she breaks the spell, it was inspired by a character from the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger film The Red Shoes. That film was released in 1948. There is a snipper from an interview with Melody Maker of 1993 where Bush discussed The Red Shoes’ title track:
“Coincidentally, the title track of "The Red Shoes" hymns the trance-dental power of dance - an obsession that also inspired Bush's directorial debut, "The Line, The Cross, The Curve". Currently in the final throes of post-production, the hour long film stars Miranda Richardson and mime Lindsay Kemp, (with whom Bush studied dance in her early days of stardom). It's based on the same fairy story as Michael Powell and Emerick Pressburger's classic movie "The Red Shoes".
"It's just taking the idea of this shoes that have a life of their own," Bush says of both the song and her film. "If you're unfortunate enough to put them on, you're just going to dance and dance. It's almost like the idea that you're possessed by dance. Before I had any lyrics, the rhythm of the music led me to the image of, oh, horses, something that was running forward, and that led me to the image of the dancing shoes. Musically, I was just trying to get a sense of delirium, of something very circular and hypnotic, but building and building."
With its mix of acoustic instruments (mandola, whistles, valiha) and synth-like keyboard textures, "The Red Shoes" immediately made me think Bush was trying to make a link between ancient and modern ideas of dance, pagan rites and techno-pagan raving. The way that these primal modes of ecstatic trance-endence have resurfaced in an ultra-modern hi-tech context --lasers, strobes, 50 K sub-bass sound--suggests that these impulses lie dormant in our collective unconscious or even genetic code. People have instinctively reinvented these rituals despite, or perhaps because, our culture in impoverished when it comes to forms of communal release. "Something very similar was on my mind, the idea of trance, delirium, as a way of transcending the normal. Maybe human beings actually need that. Things are very hard for people in this country, maybe they instinctively need to transcend it. It's very much that ancient call”
On 5th April, The Red Shoes turns thirty. Taken from the album of the same name (released in 1993), it is one of these songs that should get a lot more attention. If you have not heard The Red Shoes in a while then make sure that…
YOU play it now.