FEATURE:
Kate Bush: The Tour of Life
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Michael Powell, New York, 1989
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FOR a start…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
I love to picture Kate Bush in America. A country that she visited a few times but never really captured the heart of until recently, there is a whole new chapter to write about Bush’s time in the U.S. From 1978 when she performed on SNL, to promoting Hounds of Love there in 1985 through to her returning in the 1990s when she was doing a brief promotional jaunt for her short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve (and The Red Shoes, I guess), there were mixed fortunes and blessing there. Perhaps it was harder navigating the press in America. They had never experienced anyone like Kate Bush. Some of those interviews in 1985 were excruciating! Bush doing her best to keep it together. At times, you can feel the frustration getting to her. She was in a bad headspace when she visited the U.S. I think there were plans in 1994 for her to tour. The Red Shoes in the spotlight. It was abandoned because of various factors. Bush’s mother died in 1992. She lost friends and was exhausted from work. It wasn’t viable. I think she was out of energy and very much wanted to step back. It is a pity that there was not a tour, as it would have been interesting to think what it would encompass. Even so, Bush did spend a bit of time in America. I do know that she was over there in 1989. The Sensual World was released that year. The Sensual World reached number forty-three on the Billboard 200 in 1989. Quite a big success story! Although Bush was not there for a massive campaign drive and extensive interviews, there was this one meeting that warms my heart and raises a lot of what-ifs! Bush meeting someone that was very important to her. For this Kate Bush: The Tour of Life, a brief little look at an event that could have led to something big. I will also drop in part of an interview from 1989 just to add some context and background.
The event I am referring to occurred in New York. In chapter thirty-four of Tom Doyle’s Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush is about this meeting between Bush and the legendary director Michael Powell. He died on 19th February, 1990. Moments of Pleasure, from The Red Shoes (1993), is in part a documentation of their encounter. In fact, The Red Shoes’ title is inspired by the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger The Red Shoes. That film came out in 1948. The Line, the Cross and the Curve also influenced by that film. I am not sure whether this one meeting alone compelled Bush to title her seventh studio album, The Red Shoes. One of her most beautiful songs, Moments of Pleasure talks about this chilly winter day when she had a brief meeting with a hero. As Tom Doyle writes, Kate Bush stepped out of the lift at “the Royalton, the Philippe Starck-designed New York hotel on Manhattan’s W. 44th Street”. He was waving his cane in the air trying to alert Bush to his presence. Amazing that such a revered filmmaker would recognise Bush and want to meet her. Bush was a fan of the Powell-Pressburger cannon. The fact that there was magic and excitement in their films but they also cast strong female characters. No wonder The Red Shoes was very much in Bush’s mind and would materialise four years after she met Michael Powell. Their films also had great visual effects. All of this ticked boxes for Bush! There is no doubt she embarked on writing, directing and starring in her own short film with the energy and inspiration of Michael Powell in her mind. This was not the first time Bush and Powell had made contact
Before their meeting, Bush wrote to Michael Powell to see whether he’d be interested in working with her. Whether that was a film venture of her music being used in one of Powell’s films, it is a tragedy that this never came to pass. Bush was bowled over by how charming he was. Powell wanted to hear Bush’s music so she sent him cassettes. They exchanged letters several times. This temporary friendship but a lasting legacy. Michael Powell’s spirit and kindness made a lasting impression on Kate Bush. Just after Bush released The Sensual World and would have been thinking of her next project, there is no telling how impactful this chance New York meeting was. When Bush met Powell in a New York lobby, it had begun to snow outside. An older man who was very ill, it must have been quite a struggle for him to navigate the New York cold. However, he was positively warmed when he saw Bush emerge from a lift. The two embraced and there was this last meeting. Bush, back in England, wrote alone at the piano – something she had not done for some time – and saw it snow outside. The song must have come quite freely and easily. Tom Doyle observes how Moments of Pleasure is like a Powell-Pressburger film in song. The fact that the song did not get toured and staged is a shame. To see it come to life as part of a suite.
I do wonder whether Bush considered it for 2014’s Before the Dawn. Bush did revisit the song for 2011’s Director’s Cut. Giving the song an extra dimension of poignancy. Some might hear other emotions. I do love the track and have dissected it before. The song is about the people she loved and touched her. Those who made her laugh. The spirits of friends past are present on Moments of Pleasure. Including her aunt Maureen; her dancer friend, Gary ‘Bubba’ Hurst; Alan Murphy (who, like Hurst, died of AIDS-related complications) and Bill Duffield (who was first immortalised in Never for Ever’s Blow Away (For Bill). Bush gently asking Duffield to light and illuminate the close of the song. In 2011, Bush approached the song in a lower key. A slower version. New depth after the passing of more than twenty years. MOJO’s Keith Cameron interviewed Bush about Director’s Cut and noticed the new version omitted some of the names included in the original. Bush laughed and said it wasn’t deliberate. When she went to redo the piano, she didn’t make it long enough - so some names fell by the wayside. The irony that the song mentions George the Wipe. There is a bit of mystery as to who this person is. Some say it was a man who accidentally erased the master tape of a song (like Steely Dan faced with Gaucho’s The Second Arrangement). Others say Kate Bush and Del Palmer (her boyfriend at the time, engineer and musician) asking him to erase a tape that was not needed and then informing him he'd erased the wrong one. I suspect it might have been the second one. An in-joke/prank that shows Bush could write a song with heavy emotions, departed friends and this sadness but also humour. Bush recalling the tale of George the Wipe. How she cannot stop laughing.
I think about how Michael Powell was also included in Moments of Pleasure. I was eager to explore their meeting and how there was this possibility of the two working together. I did not know that they had exchanged letters prior to meeting in New York in late-1989. Thinking about that meeting, I want to quote from an interview from Pulse!. Included in their December 1989 issue, Pulse! was an in-store magazine of Tower Records in America:
“But it's the overall feeling of sensuality, of Bush's concept of the being and its relationship with the outside world, that underscores the entire album. In particular, it's the way in which the child comes to realize and experience his or her environment. The solo violin of the aforementioned Nigel Kennedy is accompanied by cello, Celtic harp, whistles, the mysterious Dr. Bush, and Kate's manic witch-like laughter on the eerie, "The Fog": "The day I learned to swim/He said, 'Just put your feet down child'. .. . The water is only waist high/I'll let go of you gently/Then you can swim wiht me." [sic]
"I do like the quiet life," she replies almost bashfully. "I do like having privacy; it's incredibly important to me, because I do end up feeling quite probed by the public side of what I have to do. I'm just quite a private person, really. You just end up feeling quite exposed; it's this vulnerability. After I've done the salesman bit, I like to be quiet and retreat, because that's where I write from. I'm a sort of quiet little person."
Which my explain why it's taken so long for this idiosyncratic yet compelling artist to break in the States. "Yes," she says perkily, "I've really had no success in America at all, apart from the Hounds of Love LP. That did quite well, and it was really exciting to think that there were people out there wanting it. But I've never seen it in terms of you make and album and then conquer the world. I must say it's never really worried me that I've not been big in America, but I'm with a new record company over there now, and I really feel good about the people -- they're lovely to talk to and to deal with. It's quite exciting for me. I just hope people out there will have the chance to know that the album's out. Then, if people want to hear it, they can. If they don't, well, that's absolutely fine.
"You know," she continues, "what I like about America is that there's a tremendous sort of hyper energy that I really like. Especially in New York -- there's a much stronger social setup, especially between artists. It's a very isolated setup here, because London's so spread out and everybody's off doing their own thing. You don't seem to bump into people the way you do over there; it's exciting to have that interchanging of ideas, just to talk to people who're going through similar things. It's real modern energy stuff. And also, I really like the positivity of the Americans. I mean here, although I love being here and I love the English, we're very hard on one another, very critical, whilst they have a wonderful willingness to give everyone a chance. We're really hard on people trying to get off the ground -- it's really unfair".
I think about Kate Bush and Michael Powell meeting in New York in 1989. With snow falling, there was this combination of magic and tenderness. Also this sense of sadness as Powell was ill and would die a couple/few months later. That encounter impacted Bush hugely. Just before Kate Bush ends Moments of Pleasure by asking “Hey there Bill/Could you turn the lights up?”, she sings “Hey there Michael/Do you really love me?”. Sweet words. Even if that meeting in New York was short, as Bush also sings on Moments of Pleasure: “And these moments given…
ARE a gift from time”.