FEATURE:
Behind the Scenes and Critics’ Reviews
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for 2011’s Director’s Cut/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut at Fourteen
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I might have touched…
on some of these reviews and interviews where previously covering Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut. This album was the first she released in 2011. The second, 50 Words for Snow, arrived in November. Director’s Cut was released on 16th May. Nobody was really expecting an album like this. Although some feel it is a lesser work, the fact she reproached songs from The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993) was intriguing. I have complained how Wikipedia describe the album as a remix album. It is not in any way. These are not remixes. They are newly-recorded songs. It is a studio album and not Bush taking pre-existing songs and tinkering with them. I am not sure why they have labelled it as a remix album as it is misleading and wrong. In any case, all of the tracks have new lead vocals, drums, and instrumentation. Three of the songs, including This Woman's Work, have been completely rerecorded, often with some lyrics changed. It was a chance for her to correct some errors. Or at least update the production and give the songs new depth. The selected tracks hang together well. I am one of the few people who have written about Director’s Cut. Without reviewing it. Just shining a light on it. I will end with a couple of positive critical reviews for the underrated Director’s Cut. I am going to start out with some exerts from an interview where Kate Bush was asked about her first album of 2011. The first time that she truly immersed herself in retrospection. Returning to Interview Magazine and their chat with Kate Bush. They were one of the few websites/print sources to speak with Kate Bush about the album. She did more press for 50 Words for Snow:
“DIMITRI EHRLICH: I thought we’d begin with talking about Director’s Cut. Let’s talk about “The Sensual World” [off 1989’s The Sensual World]. I know that when you first recorded that song, you had originally wanted to use some text from James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is always a favorite on pop radio here in America.
KATE BUSH: [laughs] Yes.
EHRLICH: But the Joyce estate refused permission, and now, 22 years later you finally got the okay.
BUSH: Yes, originally, as you say, I wanted to use part of the text, and approached for permission, and was refused. I was a bit disappointed, but it was completely their prerogative—they were being very protective to the work, which I think is a good thing. So I had to sort of go off and write my own lyrics, which . . . They were okay, but it always felt like a bit of a compromise really. It was nowhere near as interesting as the original idea. When I started to work on this project, I thought it was worth a shot just asking again, because they could only say no. But to my absolute delight—and surprise—they agreed.
EHRLICH: Looking at your lyrics to “Song of Solomon,” I found it interesting how you juxtaposed sexuality with spirituality. What inspired that?
BUSH: Well, it was quite an interesting process for me to go back and re-sing these songs because, for all kinds of reasons, they’re not the songs I would write now. I can’t really remember what my thought process was when I wrote that one originally. I just thought it was one of those songs that could benefit from a revisit. That was just one of the songs that popped into my head. I didn’t really take a great deal of time choosing the list of songs, I just kind of wrote down the first things that came into my head.
EHRLICH: It’s funny. I’d think revisiting those songs would almost be like looking at old photographs or reading old love letters from a long time ago, because as a songwriter, the emotions that you’re tapping into are the most primal, raw, and immediate ones. Was it strange to step into the emotional clothing you had worn 20 years ago and see how it fit and wonder, Who is this person?
BUSH: Yeah, it was. At first, it was quite difficult, and, at a couple of points, I nearly gave up the whole process. I found that by just slightly lowering the key of most of the songs, suddenly it kind of gave me a way in, because my voice is just lower now. So that helped me to step back into it. And although they were old songs, it all started to feel very much like a new process and, in a lot of ways, ended up feeling like I was just making a new album—it’s just that the material was already written. When I listen to it now, it feels like a new record to me.
EHRLICH: Why did you decide to re-record existing material rather than do something new, or just release the old versions remixed, or whatever?
BUSH: Well, I really didn’t see it as a substitute for a greatest hits package, but it was something I’d wanted to do for a few years. I guess I just kind of felt like there were songs on those two albums [The Sensual World and The Red Shoes (1993)] that were quite interesting but that they could really benefit from having new life breathed into them. I don’t really listen to my old stuff, but on occasion, I would either hear a track on the radio or a friend might play me one, and there was generally a bit of an edgy sound to it, which was mainly due to the digital equipment that we were using, which was state of the art at the time—and I think everyone felt pressured to be working that way. But I still remain a huge fan of analog. So there were elements of the production that I felt were either a little bit dated or a bit cluttered. So what I wanted to do was empty them out and let the songs breathe more.
EHRLICH: Your music has always been defiantly different than American pop. Do you have a love-hate relationship with classic American pop? Do you just find it boring, or is there something about it that you secretly enjoy as a guilty pleasure?
BUSH: [laughs] What a thing to say! No, I mean, god, some of the best pop music ever has come out of the States. Some of that Motown stuff is some of the best songs ever written. It’s not that I don’t like American pop; I’m a huge admirer of it, but I think my roots came from a very English and Irish base. Is it all sort of totally non-American sounding, do you think?”.
I am going to move to a review from The Telegraph. Even though Director’s Cut was her lowest-rated album since maybe The Red Shoes (1993), there were some positive takes. It is commendable of Bush to put something out there that could divide people. Most were unaware that it would only be six months until her tenth studio album. Bush’s 2011 full with new recording and promotion:
“I wanted to drop this interview in again as it is a rare case of Bush being interviewed about Director’s Cut. I think that few people will celebrate its anniversary. I have speculated as to why that might be. There is a general feeling that it was a bit of mixed blessing. Bush providing us with this album but songs we were familiar with. The necesstiyt fo revisitng these tracks. Some felt it was unnecessary. Kate Bush definiktely had her reasonbs. I lovre the fact that she needed to get this album out before she could release new material. Looking back and taking tracjks back. Stripping them and providing rhse new versions. I think Director’s Cut is cannomn and should be seen as such. Rather than drop in the same reviews as I did for the previous Doirector’s Cut feature, I am going to dfcus on a couple of fifferent ones and then wrap up.
“As a fully crimped-up member of the fan club, I certainly felt misgivings which turned to horror at the first radio play of Deeper Understanding. This prescient song about a lonely woman trapped in an obsessive relationship with her computer, begins by sounding not different enough from the original to have been worth the remaking; then gets mangled by a vocoder, which now distorts the computer parts, as though 21st-century listeners might be too stupid to notice the lyrical dialogue. Surely the song was both more beautiful and more seductively sinister when the computer answered Kate in her own voice?
So when the full album arrived, I took a deep breath. By mixing up tracks from two albums, The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993), Bush would be breaking the bubble of intense, personal worlds I had inhabited for years. I began by angrily cataloguing all the little vocal and production flourishes I missed – a change of timing or emphasis here, a lost chorus there and where was that glorious, leonine growl on Lily? This was, of course, a childish approach.
Director’s Cut should really be enjoyed as a rare, live performance from an artist who hasn’t toured since 1979. The lead vocals and drums have all been re-recorded, allowing us to hear how Bush sounds in 2011. She’s stripped back the digital crunch of the production, giving the instrumentation more breathing space and creating a more intimate, organic feel: Rubberband Girl sounds like it could have been recorded in the backroom of an Irish pub.
There is, as Bush intended, much more air around the songs, which can reduce their original, raw intensity but also gives them a more mature, lingering potency.
Floating in a twinkling galaxy of synth notes, This Woman’s Work is a less acutely painful expression of grief than it was in the original piano-only cut – but it is more wisely accepting now. And it still made me cry.
Best of all, on And so is Love, Bush has changed the lyric, “We used to say, 'ah hell we’re young’/ But now we see that life is sad/ And so is love”, to “now we see that life is sweet”.
And so is this album. Fans should give it some time, and it will give them a deeper understanding”.
I am going to finish with another review. This one is from Drowned in Sound. There are some interesting observations. Some of the songs are arguably stronger than the originals, whilst some maybe take time getting used to. Fans will argue whether Director’s Cut is an essential and great album. I think it is an important one. Any album from Kate Bush is a blessing. I am glad that there were some positive and loving reviews. If you have not heard the album then I would strongly encourage you to listen to it:
“If Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut had been released, say, 15 years ago, then this odd project would surely have received a gazillionth of the attention it's enjoying now. Back then, in 1996, Britpop was at its lagery zenith and to some degree Bush appeared a relic of the golden age of AOR. Not that you’d find many with a bad word to say about her; indeed, the oompah oompah weirdness of 1982’s The Dreaming was clearly an influence on Britpop’s artier end. But it was over a decade since her tour de force Hounds of Love, and her most recent album, 1993’s The Red Shoes, was on the weak side, with a ghastly roll call of guests suggesting an artist mired in the past. Lenny Henry; Eric Clapton; Prince; Jeff Beck; some dude from Procul Harem – rich folks who’d peaked in the Eighties (at the latest), jarring outsiders who brought baggage into Bush’s rarefied studio fantasia.
So if, three years later, she’d issued a record consisting of tweaked tracks from The Red Shoes and 1989’s solid The Sensual World, one imagines it would have been seen as a curio at best, an indulgence at worst.
But this isn’t 1996. Since then, Bush’s legend has grown exponentially, her weaker albums fading out of collective memory as her great ones have grown in stature and reach. Much of this can be attributed to simple laws of supply and demand; it became hard to take her for granted when there was a 12 year gap between The Red Shoes and 2005’s Aerial; the fact Aerial was a masterpiece also helped. But also, people want big stars to believe in; in the present musical landscape, there simply are no art-pop auteurs comparable to Bush.
So yeah, the release of Director’s Cut - a mere five years after Aerial! - has got a lot of people excited. And rightly so, but let's keep it in perspective. It’s not new material, and much as there are a couple of jaw-dropping total reconstructions – notably ‘This Woman’s Work’ – it mostly amounts to intelligent tinkering. Opening track ‘Flower of the Mountain’ pretty much sets the tenor: it’s the seductive Celtic lushness of The Sensual World’s title track, only with Bush’s lyrics replaced with the extract from Joyce’s Ulysses that she’d been denied permission to use in 1989. Which is cool and all, and it’s a thrill to hear Bush slink richly through Molly Bloom’s climactic monologue, but ‘The Sensual World’ was a great song already and this new version is really just an act of housekeeping. Likewise, recent interviews would suggest that The Sensual World’s ‘Deeper Understanding’ was basically reworked because at the time of recording, Bush couldn’t get the vocal effect she wanted for the chorus. It does occur that it might have been a bit more practical to simply reissue The Sensual World with those two tracks tweaked, and then a totally overhauled The Red Shoes.
But then, if that had happened we’d have been deprived of the glacial, six and a half minute ‘This Woman’s Work’. Totally rerecorded, it’s creepingly claustrophobic and piercingly beautiful, in its own way just as perfect as the original. Over the barest electronic twinkle, each line is wrenched out painfully, like a cold crystal pulled from the earth. The lyrics remain opaque – is it about post-natal depression, perhaps? – but it builds to a climax whose raw, bitter sentiment is entirely discernible, a diamond hard electronic choir rising in the background as Bush spits the new lyric “all the things that you wanted for me/all the things that you wanted from me”. Though she probably started work on it during the last Tory government, it’s startlingly in tune with the current vogue for minimalism; for somebody who has always had a touch of nostalgia in her sound, it’s startlingly modern. Another total reformat goes to Red Shoes lead single ‘Rubberband Girl’: here it’s shorn of all synthetic trappings and reincarnated as charmingly dippy country strum. Paring things back has never really been Bush’s style, but after the ultra-expansive Aerial, maybe this could be the way forwards.
Most of the rest of the album consists of subtly improved Red Shoes songs, with a more organic, less synthetic feel generally derived from the addition of better vocals and the removal of Kate’s dickhead famous mates. Everything is at least a minor step forwards, but ‘This Woman’s Work’, ‘Deeper Understanding’ and ‘Rubberband Girl’ are the only total reconstructions, and thus the various tweaks do little to alter the fundamental quality of the originals. If it was great before (‘The Red Shoes’, ‘Lily’) it’s great now; if it wasn’t (the painfully bombastic ‘Top of the City’) then it’s still not.
Director’s Cut is a strange undertaking, but pretty much succeeds on its own terms. Hardcore Bush fans will appreciate it; newbies who may only know Hounds of Love and Aerial should certainly get this instead of The Red Shoes. Still, what Director’s Cut is not is a classic – or even proper – Kate Bush album. Some songs are far from her best, and it’s about as stylistically incoherent as you’d expect from a set consisting of bits of music recorded across four different decades. More to the point, was making this really a better use of Bush’s time than cracking on with Aerial’s follow up proper?
Still, at its best Director's Cut is a dazzling affirmation of Bush’s genius as songwriter, performer and producer. Maybe one day we'll take her for granted again. But not today”.
On 16th May, it is fourteen years since Kate Bush released her ninth studio album. The only time that she has reapproached older albums and reworked songs from them, it was a lot for some critics to get their heads around. It would have been great if there were more interviews with Kate Bush about the album. Not enough coverage of Director’s Cut. I love the promotional photos for the album. Bush treating it very seriously and presenting it as a new work. I am going to play Director’s Cut on 16th May. I am fascinated by the songs she chose and the way she recorded them. Many dismiss it as the runt of her output. I would strongly argue that Director’s Cut is more…
WORTHY than that.