FEATURE:
The Inessential World
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a shot from The Sensual World cover shoot/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush in the Late-1980s and a Move from the Innovative to the Personal
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THERE is debate as to…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Cummins
whether there was a period where Kate Bush’s albums stopped evolving. What I mean is, one can see a clear leap and progression from 1980’s Never for Ever, 1982’s The Dreaming and 1985’s Hounds of Love. All very different albums, there was definitely this move towards the more cinematic and ambitious I feel. It can be argued that 1989’s The Sensual World saw Kate Bush move more to the personal. I am picking up from something Graeme Thomson notes in his book, Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush. I have picked up on this before. Through the 1980s – and the late-1970s – there was nobody quite like Kate Bush. She was in her own lane and, because of that, her music stood out. One of the things critics could get their head around is the lack of context and likeminded artists. As Kate Bush was distinct, they either didn’t get her or ridiculed her. Those who understood and bonded with her music were much kinder. You wonder whether the work and effort needed to create a masterpiece like Hounds of Love was a turning point. Maybe Bush did not want to release another album with that same scope and detail. I can imagine there were periods producing that album that were tough. Making these huge songs come together. She possibly could have written something like Hounds of Love for her next album, though one suspects that she was keen to do something entirely new. The fact it took four years to follow that 1985 album probably impacted critical perception and public lustre as much as anything. Such a commercial success, eyes would have been on Kate Bush to put out a sixth studio album maybe in 1987 at the latest. The longest wait between albums up until that point has been between The Dreaming and Hounds of Love (three years). Considering the brilliance of Hounds of Love, three years was not a huge wait. By 1989, the world around Kate Bush had changed.
There is a whole other feature when we think about the particular year and how Kate Bush fitted in. In 1985, the sound she was producing was definitely fitting in to what was around it. However, this being Kate Bush, there was something head and shoulders above her peers. By 1989, the music scene had shifted. She could not repeat herself. Nor did that hold any interest. There were a host of other artists emerging that were being compared to Kate Bush. Among them were Enya, Jane Siberry and Sinéad O'Connor. If Hounds of Love and its Fairlight-led brilliance was innovative and forward-thinking, maybe there was something out of step with a British music climate where Rave and Madchester were in vogue. Bush working with a Bulgarian vocal ensemble in the form of the Trio Bulgarka. I love The Sensual World and feel it is wildly underrated, under-played and pushed aside by some – maybe wanting something closer to Hounds of Love. Bush could have created her own Dance album or fit in to the Pop factory and mainstream scene of 1989 that saw the likes of Kylie Minogue ruling. However, she wanted to take her music in a new direction. I don’t think that there was a massive dip in quality or ambition. However, part of Kate Bush’s innovative and always-changing mindset meant she was never going to do what people expected. However, many note that The Sensual World and its lyrical themes and sounds clashed with the more uplifting, euphoric Rave and Dance; different to what was popular in the charts. If her previous few albums were pioneering and moving towards this apex, Graeme Thomson feels The Sensual World was a moment when there was not this notable move forward.
If some feel the production is over-compressed and her vocals are squeezed and do not fit right in the mix, I don’t think we can blame Kate Bush entirely. Maybe there are fewer genius songs than we hear on Hounds of Love. However, anyone who feels The Sensual World is a disappointment need to revisit the album. Something I have noted before is how personal and beautiful the album sounds. I think The Sensual World sounds like it does because maybe Bush felt that the latter years of 1989 were seeing music decline. The quality going down. In terms of what was popular and what music was saying. Because of that, rather than trying to fit in with a scene she deemed inferior, she took things back. You can say that the production is not perfect and a bit muddled. However, I think that what Bush does on the album and the sounds she mixes works incredibly well. I do hear something personal on The Sensual World. Bush was in her thirties when the album came out. Like The Kick Inside in 1978, this was a very female and feminine album. An older artist (Bush was a teen when recording The Kick Inside), songs like Between a Man and a Woman, Reaching Out and Love and Anger similar to songs such as Hounds of Love and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), in the sense that they came from a personal place but had universal relevance and meaning. This feeling that maybe The Sensual World was a deliberate attempt from Kate Bush to go against what was trendy and commercial when she was making the album. Songs that maybe didn’t have as much depth or substance as you’d hope. I will wrap things up soon. I want to bring in a part of this interview from The Guardian that was published on 12th October, 1989:
“Kate is only a little less reluctant to meet the press than she is to go on tour, and she is facing the hacks this time in order to shed some light on her latest album, The Sensual World.
To her surprise and delight, people have finally stopped asking her about her 1978 hit Wuthering Heights and about her sexuality, and instead have been asking "much deeper things". Perhaps, with the charts stuffed with House, Kylie or heavy metal, her real worth has become clear.
Pop's comings and goings don't interest her much.
"There's some really bad stuff happening in pop music, isn't there?" she murmurs, like somebody discussing a newspaper report of a small, distant war. "everyone's been wearing black for the last five or six years in the music business, and I see it as a real state of mourning for good music.."
She admires artists like Peter Gabriel and Pink Floyd, whom she sees as perfectionists who work at their own pace. She gets cross with people who dismiss middle-aged rockers as unsightly relics of a bygone era, pointing out that artists in any other medium rarely reach a peak before they're 40.
The Sensual World isn't much like the stuff they play on daytime Radio 1, though the title track received bags of airplay as a single. The album contains 10 songs - 11 on the CD - and if it takes a while before you feel you know your way around it, it eventually dawns on you that it is magnificent.
Ms Bush has nimbly drawn a thread of continuity through music patched together from any number of sources.
Folk melodies rub shoulder with jolting funk rhythms. Simple chord progressions are transformed by audacious instrumental voicings and tone colours. Lyrics which look flat or oddly naive on paper get up and dance when Kate sings them.
Sometimes, maybe in Deeper Understanding or Rocket's Tail, you find yourself ambushed and overwhelmed by great rushes of emotion, about love or childhood or the way things keep changing even though you want them to stay the same forever.
"It's stupid really," she says, "the amount of time that's gone into writing 10 songs. They're just 10 songs, it's not like some cathedral or something.
Technology is all moving very fast, and I think that's very good if you can keep the balance between technology and compassion, which is the human element where really the work comes in. I think maybe what gets more difficult each time is writing material, finding something to say that feels worth saying - something new that hasn't beens aid on the last album”.
I have a lot of love for The Sensual World. However, the late-1980s was a very different landscape to the one five or ten years previous. I don’t think Kate Bush took too long to make the album or failed to advance her music and make something worthwhile. Instead, she was trying to create something that was different to what was in the mainstream. A move from what she had done before. I know that there was this unhappiness with the album. The reason for 2011’s Director’s Cut was to address production or mix issues (where she reworked songs from The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes). Take the songs apart and rework them. However, I am not alone in feeling there is more than meets the eye regarding The Sensual World. An album with sublime songs, phenomenal production moments, heart-stopping beauty and these incredible moments of passion – together with flights of fantasy and numbers that are historical and also futuristic. This article from 2022 argues the case for The Sensual World:
“During the creation of The Sensual World, Kate Bush turned 30, reaching a milestone that inspired an evolving approach to her work. In 1989, she told NME that the album represented a newfound understanding of her own music, a shift away from the concentrated expressions of power that she associated with the “male energy” she sought to display in releases like The Dreaming and Hounds of Love. The Sensual World is comparatively more subdued than its predecessors, although definitely not without its own sense of bombast, but one that is allowed to launch forth after indulging in its own grounded spectacles, rather than existing solely to build upon itself. Her lyricism is much more centered, too—instead of yearning for an opportunity to run up that hill that is just out of reach, her poetry embraces intimacy and renders it equally as stirring as her more exclamatory aspirations.
What encompasses all of these songs, no matter their specific subject, is the prominence of passion as a motivating force in their stories, the conflict that drives every single narrator. This idea is most literally introduced in the title track, of course, as the word “passion” already has a visceral connotation that is innately sexual in nature, again placing such a powerful force within the primal desires of the human body. “The Fog,” through its elegiac usage of a string symphony that’s almost cinematic, envisions its titular phenomenon as the periphery a love interest occupies when its narrator cannot form a tangible grasp on romance”.
I will write another feature where I chart the decades Kate Bush’s albums were released in and how it fitted with what was around it. At a moment in British music when other scenes were holding attention, some were disappointed by The Sensual World. Rather than Bush pushing technology and repeating herself, she was in a stage of her life where she wanted to be more personal or explore sensuality and womanhood. The Sensual World seeming more human and rooted compared to a lot of Hounds of Love and The Dreaming. In Pitchfork’s 2019 retrospective of The Sensual World, they ended with this: “She didn’t need to prove her own steeliness to anyone, especially the male journalists who patronized her and harped on her childishness as a way of cutting her down to size. Instead, The Sensual World is the sound of someone deciding for themselves what growing up and grown-up pop should be, without being beholden to anyone else’s tedious definitions. It gave her a new template for the next two decades, inspiring both the smooth, stylish art-rock of 1993’s The Red Shoes and the picturesque beauty of 2005’s Aerial. Like Molly Bloom, Bush had set herself free into a world that wasn’t mundane, but alive with new, fertile possibility”. An album that many people feel is inferior and not a career progression from Kate Bush really need to listen again and see The Sensual World…
IN a new light.