FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Symphony in Blue at Forty-Six
Inside One of Her Most Underrated Singles
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A reason why…
it is an underrated single as it was only released in Japan and Canada. However, I wanted to mark the forty-sixth anniversary of Symphony in Blue. The opening tracks of her second studio album, Lionheart, this was one of a few tracks newly written for that album. The remainder were older songs that were brought into the studio. One of the greatest tragedies of Kate Bush’s career is how a second album was rushed. How different things could have been if she was given more time and support in that respect. After the huge success of The Kick Inside, Bush was charged with releasing her second album. Both came out in 1978. It was an unreasonable to expect something as good as her first. However, Lionheart contains quite a few gems. Wow, the second single from the album, among them. The highlight of the album for me is Symphony in Blue. A song I have written about before when celebrating its anniversary, I will try and approach it from a different perspective this time around. One of Bush’s best singles, I think it deserves a worldwide release. Wow and Hammer Horror were released in the U.K. but I always wonder why Symphony in Blue was seen as a good single for Japan and Canada but not anywhere else?! It is weird how there used to be this thing of releasing different songs as singles in different countries. A masterpiece that is not really talked about much, I will come to an excellent article that explores this song. Even if Kate Bush said the song was inspired by Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies, this source says “The descriptions of God, sex and the colour blue seem to be inspired by reading about Wilhelm Reich’s theory in A Book Of Dreams”.
Symphony in Blue was performed during her tour of 1979. It also featured in her Christmas special at the end of that year. Whereas Hammer Horror was the B-side of the Canadian release, in Japan Fullhouse was the B-side. There is so much that I love about Symphony in Blue. In terms of the personnel on the record, musicians that played with Kate Bush on The Kick Inside. Most notable is Ian Bairnson’s electric guitar. The song also features some of her most thought-provoking lyrics. One of my favourite verses is this: “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”. I can’t recall hearing Symphony in Blue on the radio. Whereas other deep cuts have been given an airing, why has Symphony in Blue been ignored? Most of the Lionheart gets overlooked. I have heard Wow, Fullhouse, Kashka from Baghdad and Hammer Horror played on the radio. However, nobody really talks about Symphony in Blue. Such a mature song from a teenager. How Bush discusses God, love, sex, reincarnation, changing moods and a range of emotions. Consider these lines: “Blue on the walls, blue out of my mouth/The sort of blue between clouds, when the sun comes out/The sort of blue in those eyes you get hung up about”. I always think Bush wrote this song with every intention of ensuring it opened Lionheart. A newly-written song had to open that album. However, I also think she had this track in mind as a single. It is far too strong to be left as a Japanese and Canadian single. I have not even mentioned the release dates yet! Symphony in Blue came out in Japan on 5th May, 1979. It was released on 1st June in Canada.
I am going to end with part of a feature from Dreams of Orgonon. Some interesting perspective on one of Kate Bush’s greatest songs. A single that didn’t do much in Canada and Japan yet could have been a success in the U.K. A fantastic video would have accompanied it I am sure. If you have never heard this track then go and listen to it and the Lionheart album:
“To Bush, blue is “the color of my room and my mood.” It’s a ubiquitous color for her, present on the walls, in the sky, “out of my mouth” (a possible pun), and “the sort of blue in those eyes you get hung up about,” perhaps an allusion to the ever-growing canon of songs about blue eyes. Bush is making a world of blue, one where external hue, metaphor, and internal state collide in a musical act of mise-en-scène. “Symphony in Blue” is a dive into introspection wherein the act of introspection becomes the entirety of Bush’s world. Bush’s fixation on blue largely rises from dissatisfaction, remaining in a state where all you can grasp is the banal details of your immediate environment.
The second half of the first verse fixates on the thoughts that arise when “that feeling of meaninglessness sets in,” ones that pertain to “blowing my mind on God.” This part of the verse is mostly a list of idioms describing God, from the basically metaphorical (“the light in the dark”) to the scriptural (“the meek He seeks/the beast He calms”) to the bureaucratic (“the head of the good soul department”). Bush’s God always occupies the role of the enigmatic man in Bush’s songs, more an amalgam of resonances and qualities than an identifiable person. He is a presence, but a largely offstage one used by Bush to hurl her anxieties at.
In its second verse, “Symphony” explores red, a more fatal, dramatic, and alarming color than blue. “I associate love with red/the color of my heart when she’s dead.” Bush invokes a sense of viscera, with thoughts of death coming to mind as she ruminates in her room. For a second it looks like she might not survive the song. The rest of the verse is more straightforwardly physical, with Bush delivering the astonishing line “the more I think about sex, the better it gets.” As the song navigates its way out of emotional traps by listing potentials ways out, sex is inevitably going to come up.
The best way for Bush to articulate her ennui is visually: she will compare her mood to something visible. Blue is of course the color of many songs — in many ways, it’s the most musical color. One of the foundational genres of popular music is the blues. Blue is used as a synonym for sadness, a catalyst for innumerable amounts of music. Lord knows there’s no shortage of songs about blue — an even slightly comprehensive list would take up several blog posts. “Symphony in Blue” obviously apes its title from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” yet kicks things up a notch by moving the color up from a mere rhapsody to a whole symphony. Perhaps the most relevant song to “Symphony in Blue” for our purposes is David Bowie’s contemporaneous and relatively similar “Sound and Vision.” From its title to its repetition of “blue, blue, electric blue,” the songs are similar in a way that’s difficult to nail down as a total coincidence (although it is entirely possible Bowie’s influence on Bush in this case was subconscious). Both use the surroundings of blue rooms as reflections of internal dissatisfaction. Crucially, both songs unify sight and sound into a single phenomenon. Bush’s chorus begins with “I see myself suddenly on the piano as a melody,” wherein melody is both a reflection of self and a visual reflection. Bush’s favorite theme of music’s tangibility has reached its apotheosis. Lionheart is paying off a debt to The Kick Inside via one of its fullest realizations of its ideas.
Musically, “Symphony in Blue” references more artists than just 20th century ones such as Gershwin and Bowie. The song deliberately gestures at 19th century French composer Erik Satie’s most famous piano compositions, the Gymnopédies. Like “Symphony in Blue,” Gymnopédie No. 1 is in ¾ and begins with a G major 7th chord. Both pieces are airy and chromatic (a trend in 19th century music to be found in the work of, for example, Debussy, another favorite composer of Bush’s), and Bush’s drifts slowly through G major, often falling onto 7th chords or flattening 6ths. There’s a jazz-influenced airiness to “Symphony” which is also inherited from the Gymnopédies and is clearly evidenced by its use of F7sus4, a true mind-fuck of a chord. The resemblance is intentional — “Symphony in Blue” is a pop song, as its reliance on Iain Bairnson’s electric guitar demonstrates, but it’s outright smuggling classical music into the charts. In Bush’s Christmas special, she begins “Symphony in Blue” by playing Gymnopédie No. 1, dutifully playing the song in G before pivoting on a D minor chord to “Symphony.” Bush is playing the cultural creator, collecting influences and displaying them for posterity. When she draws on tradition, it’s not merely to recreate visions of the past, but to find new directions for preexisting ideas. Bush spends a lot of her time looking at blue, so there was no chance she’d blue it”.
On 5th May, it will be forty-six years since Symphony in Blue was released in Japan. A county that embraced Kate Bush’s music early on, she previously released Moving and Them Heavy People (titled Rolling the Ball for the Japanese release) – both from The Kick Inside – in Japan. They were more successful and lauded. However, we should not overlook Symphony in Blue. It deserves to be written about more as it is without doubt one of Kate Bush’s greatest recordings. Stunning lyrics and a beautiful vocal performance, an overlooked gem that should get a lot more focus, love and attention. Kate Bush’s gorgeous blue symphony is a song that sparkles in gold. It is a treasure that….
MORE people should know about.