FEATURE:
Oh, She Move Like the Diva Do
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional photo for The Red Shoes in 1993
The Title Track of Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes at Thirty-One
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I will make this a short feature…
as there is previous little written about the title track of Kate Bush’s 1993 album, The Red Shoes. It is a remarkable song that is one of the highlights of the album. I don’t think the album as a whole gets discussed that much. Certainly not in positive tones. I think that there is something extra special and emotional when it comes to Kate Bush’s title tracks. The Red Shoes’ reminds me of the some of her most extraordinary moments. The energy of the track is infectious! Alongside Eat the Music, there is this sense of frenzy and dance that is impossible to escape. As there is very little available regarding the track, I am going to offer a few words on it, include a snippet of a 1993 interview with Kate Bush. It came out on 5th April, 1994. The album it came from arrived six months earlier. It was an album where quite a few singles were released. Maybe Bush seeing The Red Shoes as a commercial album or one that was seen as more accessible, five singles were released. The Red Shoes was the fourth. The final, And So Is Love, came out in November 1994. The Red Shoes was one of the songs included in the short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. That film’s initial release was 13th November, 1993, so fans got to see The Red Shoes before it was released as a single. The wider release of The Line, the Cross and the Curve was on 6th May, 1994. So it coincided nicely with the single release. The lead single from that film as it was. There is a bit of confusion regarding the exact release date of the single. Some say 4th April, 1994, though I think it was the day after. So I will say it is thirty-one on 5th April.
In any case, it is worth looking at the single release. Reaching number twenty-one in the U.K. upon its release, it was a moderate success. Considering April 1994 was a period when bands in the Britpop scene were coming to the fore, it is quite impressive that Kate Bush nearly made it into the top twenty with the fourth single from her seventh studio album Not surprising, because the track is among her best. I have written about The Red Shoes’ title track before. Bush reapproached the song for 2011’s Director’s Cut. I must say I prefer the original as it is so full of life and movement. The 2011 version is quite different. Before moving on, here is some information about the single’s release and its different versions:
“Formats
‘The Red Shoes’ was released in the UK as a 7″ single, a cassette single and two different CD-singles. The 7″ single and cassette single feature the B-side track You Want Alchemy. CD-single 1 added ‘Cloudbusting (Video Mix)’ and This Woman’s Work, and CD-single 2, released one week after the other formats, features Shoedance (see below), together with the single remix of The Big Sky and the 12″ version of Running Up That Hill.
Versions
There are three versions of ‘The Red Shoes’: the album version, which was also used on the single released, and ‘Shoedance’, which is a 10 minute remix by Karl Blagan of ‘The Red Shoes’, featuring excerpts from dialogue from the movie The Line, The Cross & The Curve. Finally, there’s the version from Bush’s album Director’s Cut in 2011”.
I will wrap up soon enough. I want to head back to 1993 and an interview from Vox. Published in November of that year (the same month The Red Shoes was released), we get a bit of context and background to the album. I think that The Red Shoes’ title track is extraordinary. A song that should be played a lot more than it is. I do think it also deserved a higher chart position:
“As befits a masterwork, The Red Shoes was kept carefully under wraps, reviewers being handed numbered lyric sheets (for later collection) at select playbacks. The detail within the tracks and the choice of guests offer witness to Bush's confessed pursuit of perfection. Sadly, history does not relate whether Prince and backing vocalist Lenny Henry were in the studio at the same time for the track 'Why Should I Love You', or whether Henry got to say: "Hey Vic, I do this great impression of you".
A film to accompany the album, with a working title of A Lion. A Cross And A Curve, features Miranda Richardson and Lindsay Kemp. Currently, its release is being delayed (and the album with it) as Bush toils over getting it right. It's been described as her Magical Mystery Tour, but she's reluctant to discuss it until completed, and has postponed other interviews to allow a clear run at the work. Again, she told the nationals: "I've always been tenacious when it comes to my work. It seemed ironic that I was expected to do interviews and television which took me away from the thing that had put me into that situation. It was no longer relevant that I wrote songs. I could see my work becoming something that had no thought in it, becoming a personality. All I wanted was the creative process."
In the following interview, Kate Bush reveals just how important that process has become...
What inspires you? Do you have to achieve a particular mood or are songs triggered off by particular events?
"I think it's incredibly elusive. I think I used to write in a more formulated way. When I was very young, I would sit there at the piano and just write a song - I actually hadn't done that for a long time.
"When I'm working, I'm continually hit by how you start off with something, and though it doesn't necessarily change in essence, there's this whole evolution that happens around it, little ideas that get pulled in. I think that may be one reason why the albums take so long. I feel very grateful, really, to have my work."
Do you escape into it?
"Umm... I don't know about escape - I think it's inseparable, that's what it is. It's not that I'm running away into my work, it's more that my work moves headlong into my life. There's a lot of my very personal experiences that go into my work, and my work gives me a lot of very personal experiences."
If something traumatic occurs in your life, do you find it easy to express, or does it come out in some other form?
"It depends on the trauma, it depends how heartbroken you are. Usually, 1 can pull myself through things like feeling low or having problems by working that through. But I have been at points where I just couldn't work. I couldn't possibly sing--it was beyond me, it just hurt too much. Sometimes you have to allow a bit of time to come between you and the experience in order to even touch it.
"I think the biggest thing on this album is that I lost my mother. I haven't been able to write about any of it--nevertheless, the experience is in there. It's something I couldn't possibly express in music, and yet it is being expressed through very subliminal things, like the quality of some of the performances. I couldn't work for months, I couldn't go near the whole process. I had no desire to start, no desire to work at all.
It was a terrible shock for all of us. Really, I'm so grateful that we had so much time together and we had such a good relationship. I had an incredibly good relationship with her, as did all my family. I often think how awful it must be for people who don't really get on with their parents--or don't know them - to lose them and be so bereft after having had nothing."
What happens if people want to interfere in your work? I take it you don't let them?
"I don't think it's so much that I got interference at the start, but I was aware that things wouldn't be how I wanted them to be unless I was willing to fight. I think you have to fight for everything you want. Whether it's work or life, it's just that sort of thing of struggling; struggle is very important. It's how you grow and change and it also tests your intention - if you really care about something, you won't let go.
I was 19 when it [the first album] came out, and my life completely changed. The big emphasis was that I was no longer allowed to work. My whole day used to be centred around work, in the most pleasurable way: I'd get up and play around on the piano, then I'd go up to London and see some friends, go dancing ..."
Did you feel that you were manipulated. Were you ever encouraged to be bimbo-esque for pictures?
"I think, on a couple of occasions, I was very naive and I was very young. It was all very new to me and, in the first year, 1 learnt so many lessons about how people wanted to manipulate me. I was always quite strong about what I didn't want to do, but nevertheless it doesn't take much."
Do you think of yourself as a feminist?
"I think a lot of respect went for the feminist movement. I think it's really wrong. A lot of women resent women who have pushed their energies, because it's kind of made feminine energy look stupid. I believe there is a way that feminine energy can stand strong and powerful without having to be something it's not."
Qualities such as ambition and competiveness are, supposedly, traditionally male ones, but do you possess either?
"I hate both words intensely I suppose that's because, in a lot of ways, they represent to me an incredibly driven male energy that offends my feminine energy. But I do think I'm driven, and I don't know about this thing of ambition. I don't know because I think my ambition is creative I don't think I'm ambitious to conquer the world, but I am ambitious to try out ideas and push things, to see if you can make it better. I'm certainly very driven in my work. I do think that for a lot of women, their creativlty is quite masculinely driven--it's quite a masculine trait to speed forward, I suppose."
How much time have you spent working on The Red Shoes?
"Well, 1 haven't spent that long. It went on over a long period of time-about two years of solid work amongst three-and-a-half to four years."
Each album seems to take you longer to make than the last Is this because you are a true perfectionist?
"I think 'perfect' is... I have used that word in the past, and used it wrongly because, in a way, what you are trying to do is make something that is basically imperfect as best as you can in the time you've got with the knowledge you have"
You don't normally release material unless you're totally satisfied...
"That's right. That doesn't necessarilly mean'perfect', but it's to the best of my ability. I've tried to say what needed to be said through the songs, the right structure, the shape, the sounds, the vocal performance--that is, the best I could do at the time."
When you've worked hard for something, you obviously don't want somebody interfering with it. In your cuttings, you've been described as the shyest megalomaniac on the planet, so how do yout work out the balance between that and being an incredibly quiet, private person?
"I think it's quite true that most people are extreme contradictions. It's like this paradox that exists, and I think that on a lot of levels, I'm quiet and shy, and a quiet soul.
I like simple things in my life...I like gardening and things like that, but when it comes to my work, I am a creative megalomaniac again. I'm not after money or power but the creative power. I just love playing with ideas and watching them come together, or what you learn from something not coming together.
I'm fascinated by the whole creative process--I think you could probably say I was obsessed I'm not as bad as I used to be, I'm a little more balanced now."
What's calmed you down?
"Just life, I think... Life gets to you, doesn't it? I also think there's a part of me that's got fed up with working. I've worked so much that I'm starting to feel... I felt I needed to rebalance, which I think I did a bit, just to get a little bit more emphasis on me and my life."
Where did you get the idea of 'Rubberband Girl"?
"Well, it's playing with the idea of how putting up resistance... um... doesn't do any good, really. The whole thing is to sort of go with the flow."
What about the sexual content--'He can be a woman at heart, and not only women bleed?
"It's not really sexual, it's more to do with the whole idea of opening people up - not sexually, just revealing themselves. It's taking a man who is on the outside, very macho, and you open him up and he has this beautiful feminine heart."
Have you found many of those?
"I think I've seen a lot of them, yeah. I think there are a lot of men who are fantastically sensitive and gentle, and I think they are really scared to show it."
A father image often comes out in your work. Is that because you're particularly close to your father or does it merely represent somebody or something you respect?
"I think they're very archetypal images: the parents, the mother and the father... it's immediately symbolic of so many things. I'm very lucky to have had an extremely positive, loving and encouraging relationship with both my parents. And you know I feel very grateful... I feel very honoured, actually."
Who is the Douglas Fairbanks character in 'Moments Of Pleasure '?
'Ah... In a lot of ways that song, er.. well it's going back to that thing of paying homage to people who aren't with us any more. I was very lucky to get to meet Michael (Powell, the film-maker who directed the original The Red Shoes) in New York before he died, and he and his wife were extreme;y kind. I'd had few conversations with him and I'd been dying to meet him. As we came out of the lift, he was standing outside with his walking stick and he was pretending to be someone like Douglas Fairbanks. He was completely adorable and just the most beautiful spirit, and it was a very profound experience for me. It had quite an inspirational effect on a couple of the songs.
"There's a song called 'The Red Shoes'. It's not really to do with his film but rather the story from which he took his film. You have these red shoes that just want to dance and don't want to stop, and the story that I'm aware of is that there's this girl who goes to sleep in the fairy story and they can't work out why she's so tired. Every morning, she's more pale and tired, so they follow her one night and what's happening is these shoes... she's putting these shoes on at night before she goes to bed and they whisk her off to dance with the fairies."
Are you still as involved in dancing as you were?
"I've had a lot of periods off, unfortunately, because my music is so demanding and I went through a phase where I just had no desire to dance. The last couple of years, it really came back, and it's been very interesting working in an older body. Your brain seems better at dealing with certain kinds of information. And I think there's something about trying too hard which takes the dynamics out of everything.
I think I've become less conscious through dancing, because it's very confrontational in a positive way - standing in front of a mirror and looking at something that basically looks like a piece of you, and you've got to do something with it”.
I am going to wrap up now. On 5th April, it will be thirty-one years since The Red Shoes was released as a single. Included in the film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, it is a track I have a lot of love for. Its lyrics are amazing and vivid. Its first verse is extraordinary and sets the scene: “Oh she move like the Diva do/I said “I’d love to dance like you.”/She said “just take off my red shoes/Put them on and your dream’ll come true/With no words, with no song/You can dance the dream with your body on/And this curve, is your smile/And this cross, is your heart/And this line, is your path”. The Red Shoes stands tall…
IN a phenomenal catalogue.