FEATURE:
Sounds of Love
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Love, Passion, Desire and Loss in Kate Bush’s Music
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BECAUSE it is…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional photo for 2011’s Director’s Cut
Valentine’s Day, I wanted to spend some time thinking about Kate Bush’s music. In the sense of the passion and love that she weaves through some of her absolute best moments. I am going to end with a playlist of Kate Bush songs that are about love, loss or desire. It is interesting how Bush addressed attraction and love through her career. When she released The Kick Inside in 1978 she was still a teenager. One might think that the songs would be typical of a teenage artist. Quite cliché and juvenile in their way. Maybe the odd wise thought, though for the most part the lyrics quite ordinary and predictable. Looking out at the Pop landscape and there is more depth and originality in that regard - though that perhaps wasn’t the case in 1978. Instead, there are these remarkably original and mature songs. We can see Wuthering Heights, her debut single, as a sort of love song. Albeit tragic. The ghost of Catherine Earnshaw trying to come for Heathcliff. For the debut single, it was remarkably bold! There is something of literature and classic film in her music. Bush writing about love more with older eyes. Rather than it being contemporary and teenage, The Kick Inside’s songs of passion, love and sex splice in something classic. Maybe an exception is The Man with the Child in His Eyes. This fictional or imagined man, even this song is quite heightened and epic. Not what you might associate with a teenage artist coming through in 1978. Other songs on the album are quite direct and frank, mixed with fiction, fantasy and flights of fancy. If L’Amour Looks Something Like You’s chorus is lustful and has that crackling energy of desire, its verses are more, well…poetic? “My eyes were shining/On the wine, and your aura/All in order, we move into the boudoir/But too soon the morning has resumed”. There is fun and frivolity but it is also serious. Bush not appearing naïve or aiming for something commercial and vacuous. The sentiments expressed on Feel It: “Nobody else can share this/Here comes one and one makes one/The glorious union/Well it could be love/Or it could be just lust/But it will be fun/It will be wonderful”. The title track for The Kick Inside. Tragic and hugely original.
There has always been that mix of the personal and fictional. Bush never truly putting her heart out there on the first few albums. I don’t think it was until maybe Hounds of Love in 1985 where we got something raw and truly honest from Bush. In terms of the way love can affect people. The bravery needed. However, the songs of love and desire on her first four albums are exceptional and come from this distinct voice. If The Kick Inside is one of the most female albums ever and there is this exploration of sex, desire, love and a woman’s body, then Lionheart was perhaps (consciously) a decision to be less personal. There are still songs of love. Kashka from Baghdad about two gay lovers. There are two examples of Bush’s distinct style focusing more inward – Symphony in Blue and In the Warm Room. The latter seeming fit for inclusion on The Kick Inside. The former is this newly-written song. One passage strikes my eye: “I associate love with red/The colour of my heart when she's dead/Red in my mind when the jealousy flies/Red in my eyes from emotional ties/Manipulation, the danger signs/The more I think about sex, the better it gets/Here we have a purpose in life/Good for the blood circulation/Good for releasing the tension/The root of our reincarnations”. So many emotions and ideas crammed in. Spiritual, theological at times but direct and open. Perhaps The Kick Inside is one of Bush’s most overtly sexual albums. Not in an explicit or crude way. I mean the way the songs explore her desires and curiosities. I think about 1980’s Never for Ever. Bush, only in her early-twenties, changing her lyrical direction and narrative.
Sure, relationships are examined on the album. However, Babooshka (the second single from the album) is about trust and deceit. A woman testing her husband’s devotion and faith by dressing as another woman and enticing him with a letter. The Infant Kiss was inspired by the gothic horror movie, The Innocents - which in turn was inspired by Henry James’ novel, The Turn of the Screw. The tale is about a governess who believes the ghost of her predecessor’s dead lover is trying to possess the bodies of the children she is looking after. If not especially personal, it is complex, original and deep. Whereas fellow artists might bleed their hearts out and release soppy songs or be too personal most of the time, Bush could examine love and attraction through different lenses. Think about The Wedding List. If there is jealousy, deceit and mistrust through Babooshka, The Wedding List is about revenge. Again, Bush inspired more from a filmic or literature source rather than her personal experiences. This is what Kate Bush said to Kris Needs in 1980 when discussing The Wedding List: “Revenge is so powerful and futile in the situation in the song. Instead of just one person being killed, it’s three: her husband, the guy who did it – who was right on top of the wedding list with the silver plates – and her, because when she’s done it, there’s nothing left. All her ambition and purpose has all gone into that one guy. She’s dead, there’s nothing there”. We would see a notable change in the way Bush discussed love and passion from The Sensual World onwards. The Dreaming may be the only Kate Bush album where physical attraction, relationships and love is practically absent. All the Love is earnest and honest. Bush writing about how we can be surrounded by family and friends but we feel lonely. She wanted to write a song about loneliness, but also thinking about love. How we do not say it or say it when it is too late. It is no surprise The Dreaming focuses on other subjects as it is her least commercial album. More a push for artistic credibility. More experimentation with the sound and lyrics.
I am going to talk more about Hounds of Love’s title track for an anniversary feature very soon. By 1985, new emotions finding their way into music. If there was something of the innocent and moon-eyed about earlier songs of love and passion, there is are more dimensions around caution and fear. Quite natural when you get older. Bush was twenty-seven when Hounds of Love (the album) was released. In a newsletter from 1985, this is what Bush wrote about the majestic title track: “[‘Hounds Of Love’] is really about someone who is afraid of being caught by the hounds that are chasing him. I wonder if everyone is perhaps ruled by fear, and afraid of getting into relationships on some level or another. They can involve pain, confusion and responsibilities, and I think a lot of people are particularly scared of responsibility. Maybe the being involved isn’t as horrific as your imagination can build it up to being – perhaps these baying hounds are really friendly”. Hounds of Love might suggest an album filled with personal tales of love. Dissections on personal travails and passions. However, it is an album where passion is channelled into survival, wonder and other desires. The desire for men and women to swap places to better understand one another (as in Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Bush grateful to have reached dry land to tell her family she loves them. The Morning Fog, the final song on the album, ends The Ninth Wave (a suite where Bush/a woman is lost at sea and is rescued). One might see The Ninth Wave as a metaphor for love and relationships. An allegory on the complexity of love. There is definitely love for family. That absence one feels when they are apart. However, Bush would write in a more personal and direct way soon enough. Her passion and desires more to the fore.
It is credit to Bush, as I have noted in a previous feature, how she never attacked or shamed men in her songs. One of the only artists in history whose songs of love and relationships were not negative. Even if, when she was dating Del Palmer during the 1970 and 1980s, there would have been conflict and arguments, she never dragged him through the mud. Always using her music to be one of positivity. Even when their relationship ended, Bush was singing about loss and sadness rather than putting the boot in. The Sensual World, released in 1989, has some direct examples of Bush’s addressing love and relationship complexities. If This Woman’s Work is more about a father having to grow up and take responsibility when his wife’s birth goes wrong and she and the baby are in trouble, you can feel something personal on a song like Love and Anger. A song that is not really angry at all: “Tell you what I'm feeling/But I don't know if I'm ready yet/You come walking into this room/Like you're walking into my arms/What would I do without you?”. If Bush’s viewpoint on love and sex was about new bloom and desire when she was a teenager and in her twenties, albums such as The Sensual World are more about loss and separation. Never Be Mine is an example: “I want you as the dream,/Not the reality/That clumsy goodbye-kiss could fool me,/But I’m looking back over my shoulder/At you, happy without me”. Like Hounds of Love, Bush reserved the most extraordinary and powerful moment for the title track. The Sensual World is one of the most tremulous, sensual and passionate songs. Bush wanted to get access to words from James Joyce’s Ulysses and recreate the soliloquy from Molly Bloom (she did for 2011’s Director’s Cut). She was frustrated she was denied permission. However, what was left was perhaps even more remarkable. This is what Bush said in 1989: “A lot of people have said it’s sexy. That’s nice. The original piece was sexy, too; it had an incredible sensuality which I’d like to think this track has as well. I suppose it is walking the thin line a bit, but it’s about the sensuality of the world and how it is so incredibly pleasurable to our senses if we open up to it. You know, just simple things, like sitting in the sun, just contact with nature. It’s like, for most people, their holidays are the only time they get a real burst of the planet!”.
How do you look at 2005’s Aerial and 2011’s 50 Words for Snow and talk about love and passion? How does Bush represent these subjects. I guess Aerial is the love for her son, Bertie (born in 1998). Family and home more at the fore. A nod to her late mother on A Coral Room. Passion and love less directed at a lover and more towards her son and family. A Sky of Honey is about a summer’s day and there is plenty of passionate moments to be found. Though less about sex and more passion for the world around her. Nocturn and Aerial crackle with energy and electricity. 50 Words for Snow, Bush’s most recent album, has a few examples of love and passion. Snowed in At Wheeler Street about lovers divided through various periods of time. Misty about a woman’s tryst with a snowman. One that melts in the morning. It is understandable the tone and viewpoint of love and passion would change as Bush ages. She would not write songs like she did when she was a teenager. However, this hugely original voice still remains. Bush not shying away from passion and attraction. One of the most complex albums, in terms of Bush’s views on love, is 1993’s The Red Shoes. Aside from The Kick Inside, I think The Red Shoes very much puts love, relationships and passion at the front. Eat the Music uses fruit as metaphors. This imagery of fruit being devoured and opened. “Let's split him open like a pomegranate/Insides out, all is revealed/Not only women bleed/You take the stone out of the mango/Put it in your mouth and pull a plum out”. If some see The Red Shoes’ lyrics as being conventional and cliché at times, there is no denying the fact that it is one of her most personal album. Giving the fact her relationship with Del Palmer was ending and she started a new one (she and Dan McIntosh would eventually marry), it is no surprise.
You’re the One offers these lines: “It's alright, I'll come 'round when you're not in/And I'll pick up all my things/Everything I have, I bought with you”. A cocktail of letting go but also exploring new possibilities. Why Should I Love You? provides these words: “The "L" of the lips are open/To the "O" of the host/The "V" of the velvet/The "E" of my eye/The eye in wonder/The eye that sees/The "I" that loves you”. Intrigue and something almost mysterious in Big Stripey Lie: “Don't want to hurt you baby/I only want to help you/I could be good for you”. Moments of Pleasure being less about love and sex. Life’s pleasurable moments. However, there is heartache to be found. “Just being alive/It can really hurt”. Being thankful for the moments we have. These lines among the most standout and striking Bush ever wrote: “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?”. That is a bit of a race through Kate Bush’s discography. A look at how love, passion, sex and relationships are assessed. From the more lustful and explorative The Kick Inside, through to more oblique or less personal moments, through to the way family, new responsibility or the loss of a long-term relationship were written about. One might not feel Bush is very personal when it comes to love but, if you take a deep dive, you can find plenty of examples of her being very honest and open. However, as someone raised on great literature, films and music, there is more nuance and layers. Bush writing about women’s experiences – whether mothers or lover – and writing in a way none of her contemporaries were. As it is Valentine’ day today, I wanted to address love and passion through Kate Bush’s music. Alongside hurt, revelation, wonder, desire, pain and detachment, there are plenty of…
MOMENTS of pleasure.