FEATURE:
The Red Shoes at Twenty-Nine
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: John Stoddart
Constellations of Her Heart: A More Affected, Emotional and Reflective Kate Bush
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THE album reached number two in the U.K…
and it did get some positive reviews. 1989’s The Sensual World is a remarkable album and was well received. There was passion, curiosity, searching and beauty throughout, but there was loss and darker themes. I think that there was a sense of change and loss that permeated The Red Shoes in 1993. Bush herself ‘warned’ people that her new album might be a bit different:
“I've been very affected by these last two years. They've been incredibly intense years for me. Maybe not on a work level, but a lot has happened to me. I feel I've learnt a lot – and, yes, I think [my next album] is going to be quite different… I hope the people that are waiting for it feel it's worth the wait. (BBC Radio 1 interview, 14 December 1991)”
Aside from (in my view) the tracks being sequenced in the wrong order, I think that The Red Shoes is an album that is undervalued and deserves a lot more love. Maybe it is still viewed in the way many saw it in 1993. It was a year when Bush was facing a lot of struggle and personal loss. In terms of the production and sound, it is much more suited to the burgeoning C.D. market of the time. Maybe a bit too long and compacted/less natural-sounding, some bemoaned the overall sound. There are a couple of weaker songs but, when you think about the best songs on the album – The Red Shoes, Moments of Pleasure, And So Is Love, Eat the Music, and Lily -, and this is one of Bush’s underappreciated albums that offers a lot of brilliance. I am going to write a couple of other features about The Red Shoes before it turns twenty-nine on 2nd November. There are particular songs on the album that point at a more affected and hurt-afflicted songwriter. I shall come to that.
I want to bring in a couple of reviews for the superb The Red Shoes. This is what Pitchfork said about Bush’s seventh studio album when they sat down with it in 2019:
“In Hans Christian Andersen’s short story “The Red Shoes,” a woman slips on some shiny footwear and suddenly can’t stop dancing. It’s all a bit of fun until she’s prancing across graveyards in the middle of the night, panicked enough to force an executioner to chop off her crimson-clad feet in hopes of breaking the spell. British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger took that story and made it into a meta masterpiece with their 1948 movie The Red Shoes. It centers around a phantasmagoric ballet that translates Andersen’s tale, but the film also depicts the backstage plight of its principal dancer. “You cannot have it both ways,” a mad genius ballet director tells her. “A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer.” In the end, forced to choose between great passions, she puts on those ruby slippers one more time—and jumps in front of a moving train. The Red Shoes, in all its beauty and tragedy, in its impossible decisions concerning art and life, is one of Kate Bush’s favorite films. She named her seventh album after it.
When Bush’s The Red Shoes was released in November 1993, the 35-year-old singer was reeling. Her mother had passed the previous year. Her romantic relationship with close musical collaborator Del Palmer, who had known her since she was a teenager, was ending. And after spending her entire adult life obsessively cultivating her fantasies into reality through sound and image, she was wary of being swept away by her work. “I’m feeling very tired,” she said at the time. “I’m going on a holiday. I’m really looking forward to not pleasing anyone but myself.” This was no idle threat. Her next album would not arrive for another 12 years.
But The Red Shoes has her once again doing everything: singing and dancing, writing and producing. The record was presented alongside a 45-minute short film called The Line, the Cross & the Curve that Bush directed, wrote, and starred in. It’s a little much: The Line is woefully underdeveloped as it stitches together a string of repetitive music videos via a cockamamie plot inspired by Powell’s The Red Shoes but without a trace of that movie’s lush panache. (In 2005, Bush herself called the chintzy visual “a load of bollocks.”)
The album fares better. It doesn’t rank among Bush’s finest—it sounds more prototypically ’80s than some of the records she actually released that decade, marked by big snares and a brittle sound that a recent remaster can’t properly remedy. It’s an outlier, but hardly a disaster. The Red Shoes finds an effortless perfectionist pushing very hard to locate her next great idea.
The album’s musical unwieldiness is set against Bush’s relatively diaristic songwriting.The Red Shoes is the most confessional album by an artist not known for, or especially interested in, confession. Bush has always taken advantage of the elusive space between art and reality, conjuring characters, rarely doing interviews, always aware of getting burned by a lingering spotlight. “That’s what all art’s about—a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can’t, in real life,” she said around the time of The Red Shoes. “It’s all make believe, really.” The album falters when she falls short of this magical realism. When it comes to her songwriting, Kate Bush’s stories are almost always more engrossing than Kate Bush.
The record’s personal themes of loss, perseverance, and memory coalesce on “Moments of Pleasure,” one of Bush’s most affecting ballads. She sings of the small memories of life—laughing at dumb jokes, snowy evenings high above New York City, a piece of wisdom from her mother—as Oscar-nominated composer Michael Kamen builds these quiet moments into monuments with a heroic string arrangement. Bush ends the song with a series of mini eulogies: for her aunt, her longtime guitarist, her dance partner. “Just being alive, it can really hurt,” she belts at the center of the track, stating the obvious with such conviction that it sounds revelatory”.
I am not going to mention The Red Shoes in relation to the short film Bush made, The album was accompanied by Kate's short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. Pensive and mysterious in places, there is no doubt that The Red Shoes is among Bush’s most personal albums ever. Some would say The Sensual World is more personal, but I think Bush was more open and less oblique on The Red Shoes. This is what Backseat Mafia observed about The Red Shoes:
“Oddly unappreciated by all but her most devoted her fans, and seemingly Kate Bush herself, I find The Red Shoes to be one of her most fascinating albums. Having established herself as a phenomenally creative spirit over her first four albums, in which she rapidly transitioned from exciting debut, to consolidation, to pop experimentalism, to general weirdness, Bush gained the level of creative freedom that she craved with Hounds of Love. The stately The Sensual World had followed Hounds of Love, underlining the fact that she was now creating music on no one else’s terms but her own.
Having fought so hard to establish your commercial and creative freedom, what do you do once you’ve actually achieved it? In Kate Bush’s case, whatever she liked really. Like its predecessor, The Red Shoes sounds like an album where Kate Bush took advantage of the fact she had free reign to follow her muse. It’s an album where Bush sounds both defiant, yet somewhat haunted at the same time, as the previous few years had seen her juggle her music career with a traumatic period of her life away from the industry.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: John Stoddart
The album itself kicks of with “Rubberband Girl”, one of her more upbeat offerings, but not one that seems to be generally well thought of. I like it though, after the mature and straight faced Sensual World, it’s great to hear Bush sound like she’s having some fun. Where the previous album sounds like a lot of effort had gone in to it sounding like a cohesive work, The Red Shoes is a much more wayward offering, willing to spring surprises on the listener and keep us on our toes. Where some would equate such an approach to being a bit patchy, it’s one I appreciate, as I feel there’s a lot more going on and that we as the listeners should respect her enough to just go with wherever Ms Bush’s head was at at the time of recording.
While each of Kate Bush’s albums has something unique to offer (even the much maligned Lionheart), I feel The Red Shoes is one that’s not so much over shadowed by better work, as misunderstood. If it had been an album by anyone else, I’m sure that same audience would hail it as a masterpiece, but because it’s Kate Bush, and her fans seemingly see her above dabbling with pop structures that flirt too closely with the mainstream, or relying too heavily on special guests, it’s unfairly dismissed as a lesser work.
Quite why Ms Bush herself isn’t fond of The Red Shoes is perhaps a more complicated matter. Maybe it’s an album that holds too many personal memories for her, or perhaps she feels in retrospect that some of the material is maybe a touch too personal? Maybe she just doesn’t like the way that The Red Shoes sounds, as in recent years she has confessed her dissatisfaction with the fact that the album was recorded digitally instead of analogue, and has even re-recorded some of the material as part of her Directors Cut album from 2011. Then again, maybe, just maybe, she just gets the vibe that her fans see it a lesser work and that has coloured her own opinions a little in the intervening years?”.
And So Is Love, Moments of Pleasure, Constellation of the Heart, Why Should I Love You? and You’re the One are songs that, in some ways, hint at someone who was exposing her soul and heart more. There are more oblique and fictional songs through The Red Shoes but, even though Bush’s losses and tragedies didn’t occur until most of the songs from the album were written – the death of her mother, the break-up of a long-term relationship-, it is undeniable that she was feeling a burden and a certain weight. In fact, minor tracks like You’re the One and Constellation of the Heart are the most revealing and interesting. The latter’s lyrics describes telescopes being turned inside out and pointed towards the heart and “away from the big sky". This is a referenced to the Hounds of Love track, The Big Sky, and seemingly a disavowal of old subjects. On previous albums, Bush wrote about love and desire in very interesting and new ways. Poetic, sensual, explicit, and tantalising, her lyrics are extraordinary. Looking at the lyrics to You’re the One, and this is Bush at her most frank and most unguarded: “It's alright I know where I'm going/I'm going to stay with my friend/Mmm, yes, he is very good looking/The only trouble is/He's not you/He can't do what you do/He can't make me laugh and cry/At the same time/Let's change things/Let's danger it up/We're crazy enough/I just can't take it”. Take away all the layers of music and guest vocalists – including Lenny Henry and Prince -, the beating heart of The Red Shoes is its revelation and soulfulness. It is honest and brave. Maybe there isn’t quite the same quality of songs as on The Sensual World or Hounds of Love, but I think The Red Shoes should be commended and re-examined because it is Bush baring her soul.
Before 1993, many accused Bush of being distant when it came to honesty. Maybe hiding behind fantasy, literature, films, and metaphor, they wanted her to be more direct and personal with her music. When The Red Shoes came along, many critics were a bit mixed. There was actually a lot of plaudit and commendation too. One big reason was because Bush was accessible and more straightforward. The Red Shoes is an album the listeners can relate to. Pulling along with Bush and willing her to find happiness and peace, many did not know what was to come regarding her career – she took a break and would return with 2005’s Aerial. You can feel someone in her thirties suffering heartbreak and looking for change and moving on. In retrospect, many have picked The Red Shoes apart when it comes to lyrics and titles. Bush would retreat and step away from the limelight. I am not sure why the album has not gained more credit and appreciation given that. The fact that the songs are very personal and allowed Bush to clarify what she wanted and reflect and take stock. Of course, Aerial found her in a more comfortable and happier space. The Red Shoes’ sound and production is not that great, but I think the songs are excellent! I love The Red Shoes because it is very affected and reflective at the same time. Not angry or wallowing, Bush can be sad and revealing without being downbeat and morbid. Perhaps that change of direction took some fans and critics by surprise. As it is twenty-nine on 2nd November, I would urge people to listen to The Red Shoes and see it in a new light. Alongside the more optimistic songs like Rubberband Girl and Rocket’s Tail, together with the rush and bursts you get from Eat the Music and Why Should I Love You?, there is something moodier and cracked. That is what makes The Red Shoes so rich, deep, and fascinating. On 1993’s The Red Shoes, we got a deep and impactful look into the…
THE constellations of her heart.