FEATURE:
Through the Fog
Kate Bush’s Magnificent and Ethereal The Sensual World
__________
AS Kate Bush’s…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
sixth studio, The Sensual World, is thirty-three on 17th October, I am going to do a run of features about it. November is busy with album anniversaries, and the only studio album marking its birthday in October is The Sensual World. To start, I want to do a general feature. A couple promotional interviews Bush conducted around the release of The Sensual World in 1989, a look at where critics and music publications rank the album (compared to the rest of her catalogue), and a rounding up from me. Before that, a little bit of detail about its chart position – and some words from Kate Bush about The Sensual World. Reaching number two in the U.K., this album features three tracks on the album feature backing vocals by the Trio Bulgarka. I think they add so much. It was the first time that Bush had worked with the Bulgarian vocal ensemble. She would do so again for 1993’s The Red Shoes. After releasing her most successful and popular album, Hounds of Love, in 1985, there would have been this huge anticipation and excitement four years later. The Sensual World’s title track came out in September, so the public got a taste of the album and Bush’s new direction before the album arrived. Recording largely at her home studio (the same one that was used for Hounds of Love), there was also some recording at Windmill Lane (Dublin, Ireland). I love the fact Bush kept at home – and, as she travelled to Ireland to record bits of Hounds of Love – and did not rely too much on machines and technology this time.
Perhaps less busy and layered in terms of compositions, Bush felt a bit overwhelmed by the machines around her and she wanted to focus more on the songs. The Sensual World was originally released on L.P., C.D., tape, and MiniDisc. In 2011, the album was released on the Fish People label. I do hope that The Sensual World comes back out on cassette. I have it on vinyl, and I think it is one of these albums I will keep forever. I might pop in a review of the album when rounding up. Here is how Kate Bush felt about the album when asked in a couple of different interviews:
“Other people have said to me that they think this album is very dark, although for me I think it's my happiest album really. I find some of the tracks quite funny where other people say they find them scary. Although I have a dark sense of humour, maybe it is a subconscious thing that just goes into my music, because I think when I was writing this album that was perhaps something I was feeling a little - a sense of being a bit scared. Maybe it comes out in the music. I do think it's a very big self- therapy thing now - the more I work on an album the more I think it's almost a process for me to try and heal myself, have a look at myself.
Do you know what I mean? Actually a very selfish thing in a way, but I think art is. I do think what artistic people are trying to do is work through their problems through their art - look at themselves, confront all these things. (...) It's not that the album is written about me, not that it is autobiographical, but it is the most direct process I've used for an album. It's in my own studio and I had a lot of time so as not to be under pressure by outside forces. I've recorded the whole album with Del so it's just myself and Del in a very close relationship working together very intensely and it was hard for me to write this album. To actually write the songs was very difficult, and for the first time really, I went through a patch where I just couldn't write - I didn't know what I wanted to say. (...) Everything seemed like rubbish - you know? It seemed to have no meaning whatsoever. Somehow I managed to get a sense of some meaningfulness, and that's why (...) to me now, albums are perhaps a way of helping myself, but maybe helping other people too. To work through my problems maybe will help other people too. To work through my problems maybe will help other people to work through their problems. Maybe the meaningfulness of art is that once you've got over your selfish work within it, you can give it to other people and hopefully it might at least make them smile or something. (Roger Scott, Interview. Radio 1 (UK), 14 October 1989)
I think this album for me, unlike the last album, say, Hounds of Love, where I saw that as two sides - one side being conceptual - this album is very much like short stories for me. Ten short stories that are just saying something different in each one and it was a bit like trying to paint the pictures accordingly. Each song has a different personality and so they each a need little bit of something here, a little bit of that there - just like people, you know, some people you can't walk up to because you know they're a bit edgy first thing in the morning. So you have to come up sideways to them, you know, and it's kind of like how the songs are too. They have their own little personalities, and if it doesn't want you to do it, it won't let you. (The VH-1 interview, January 1990)”.
I won’t say too much before each interview, other than to say there were a few things from each that I loved. The first, from Melody Maker in October 1989, is great. Bush spoke with Steve Sutherland. I have selected some parts of the interview that I found especially interesting:
“It took Kate Bush four years to make The Sensual World, and we've been given an hour to talk about it. Great.
I think about telling Kate how surprised I am she's so small, or how shocked I am she smokes, but time is not on my side so I decide, instead, to tell her how delighted I am that she's come to the conclusion that the past and the future aren't beyond changing. The album sounds so optimistic in an era when absolutely everything appears to be falling apart.
<Kate naturally loves this interpretation, but the fact is that the album is certainly as loaded with dark and pessimistic images and ideas as it is with optimistic ones. In IED's opinion Sutherland has swotted up on what Kate has been saying recently, and is now rephrasing a lot of her own preferences in conversation with her, as though they were his own ideas rather than borrowed ones, precisely in order to ingratiate Kate. It works, and it may even be a good idea, since the other methods of engaging her in conversation have seldom produced great publishable material.>
"Oh, thank you! Thank you so much! That's really how I wanted it to be but, talking to a lot of friends and that, they feel it's a dark album."
I didn't think that at all...
"Oh, great."
...I thought some of the situations were dark, but the way they're resolved is optimistic. <What about the way Heads, We're Dancing is "resolved"? What about the way Deeper Understanding is "resolved"? What about the way Never Be Mine is "resolved"?>
"Oh, that's great. Thank you. Yes. That's really great. I'm so pleased you heard it like that. You see, for a lot of people it's so complicated to listen to, and that worries me, because I like the idea of people being able to listen to it easily and...uh...I don't want to confuse people but, for some people, it's very hard for them to even take it in, let alone sort of get anything out of it.
"I do think art should be simple, you see. It shouldn't be complicated, and I think, in some ways, this has come across a bit complicated." <This is one of Kate's "new" ideas--opinions which she has not really made prior to 1989, but which she has been repeating in multiple interviews since the release of the new album. IED finds it highly intriguing, because it is so vague and so patently at odds with the way her own art has always been--and continues to be--made.>
Maybe that's because, for me, the album's about relationships--the relationship between language and emotion, the relationship between language and music, the relationship between emotion and music and how all this expresses, or more crucially fails to express, the relationship between people. And relationships, as we all know, are never ever easy.
"How interesting. Could you give me an example?"
Well, in Love and Anger you say, "It's so deep I don't think that I can speak about it," as if language betrays your aims, and then you go on to say, "We could be like two strings beating/Speaking in sympathy," which suggests that music, rather than language, comes closest to expressing our emotions.
"Yeah! Actually, Love and Anger was an incredibly difficult song for me to write and, when people ask me what it's about, I have to say I don't know because it's not really a thought-out thing. It was so difficult for me to write that: in some ways, I think, <it's> about the process of writing the song: I can't find the words; I don't know what to say. This thing of a big, blank page, you know: it's so big...It's like it doesn't have edges around it, you could just start anywhere."
She studies her socks for a moment.
"Yes...um...I don't think I was consious of it, but it's something I'm aware of when writing songs. <Has IED missed something here, or did Kate just contradict the first half of this sentence in the second half?> There's such a lot you need to say through words. And it's a beautiful thing, language: actually being able to put words together and say something...maybe say two things in one line. But, like you say, it misses the mark so often."
You created your own language, too, don't you? It seems when you're at your most sexual, your most emotional, you emit...the only word I can find for it is noises, but that sounds too crude. Your "Mmh yes" on The Sensual World (the most heavenly sound ever on Top of the Pops ) and your "Do-do-do-do-do" in Heads, We're Dancing are like cries that language has deserted you or, more positively, an attempt on your behalf to merge words and music, to create a new emotional language from a combination of meaning and sound. I remember you used to go "Wow!" when words failed you. It shivers me. It's thrilling.
"Well, I think that's a lovely thing to say...Yes, often words are sounds for me. I get a sound and I throw it in a song and I can't turn it into a word later because it's actually stated itself too strongly as a sound. Like, in Love and Anger, the bit that goes 'Mmh, mmh, mmh' was there instantly and, in itself, it's really about not being able to express it differently. Do you know what I mean?"
Indeed I do. Liz of the Cocteau Twins does it all the time. She never sings a lyric as such, it's all noises. <Actually this is not true. Fraser has admitted that she picks real words and names from dictionaries, but simply throws them together without a narrative foundation.> But somehow, the way you burst language, the tension that leads to the victory of sound over sense whips your music into another dimension. It's the frustration that gives your songs dynamic, and the way you remedy it that makes them attractive. Most of the Sensual World LP seems to be saying, " This can be worked out ." <IED does not agree. Fully half the songs on the album simply do not bear this claim out.>
Between a Man and a Woman is almost a soap opera situation, with you trying to drive off any external interference which might ruin the chances of a relationship's natural growth. It's like you're saying we live in a fast culture--fast food, fast-edit TV, disposable pop, disposable sex--and, if we don't get instant gratification, we're not interested. You seem angry and determined.
"Well, that's nice, because when people ask me about this song, in terms of having to talk about it, it's rubbish. But yes, I think you're right, it is perhaps about how you actually have that choice sometimes, whether to interfere or not. <This was not Sutherland's idea at all, but Kate's.> You know, there's this tendency to want to leap in and take over and control: 'Oh, I know best!'; when I think a relationship is a very delicate balance: it's very easily tipped, and then needs to be refound again”.
I will round up with an interview for an album that many fans (though not critics) to be outside of her top five. A different album to Hounds of Love when it comes to sound and lyrics, maybe some fans wanted something more similar to Hounds of Love. The Sensual World is magnificent. Bush spoke with Q’s Phil Sutcliffe in November 1989. Here are some extracts:
“This time round, apart from dancing and running, the panacea was the garden at the house she and Del moved into three years ago in Eltham, Southeast London (brother Jay and family live next door; her parents' home still only half an hour away). "I sometimes I think I might as well just be a brain and a big pair of ears on legs, stuck in front of a mixing desk," she says. "But when I took that break from The Sensual World I really got into gardening. I mean, it's literally a very down-to-earth thing, isn't it? Real air. Away from the artificial light. Very therapeutic."
Another renewable source of inspiration has been exotic instrumentation, usually provided by a visit to Dublin and various members of the staunchly traditional folk troupe, The Chieftains, or by turning to brother Paddy (who specialised in making medieval instruments at the London College of Furniture and will knock out the odd koto or strumento de porco as and when). But for The Sensual World she's leavened the Celtic skirl with a bit of Balkan. She first heard the Trio Bulgarka in '86 and was suitably astonished. A year later it dawned on her that their full-throated harmonies might suit her songs. Connections were made through Joe Boyd of Hannibal Records, their UK label, and Kate flew out to Sofia for an entrancing experience of world music.
"They couldn't speak a word of English and I couldn't speak a word of Bulgarian," she says. "Everything went through translators and it didn't matter at all. Lovely working with women, and especially them, they're very affectionate. We tended to communicate through cuddles rather than words. In fact, we could get on perfectly well without the translators. At one point we were talking away in the studio when the translator walked in and we all shut up because she'd suddenly made us self-conscious about what we were doing." The Trio can be heard on three tracks, including the strikingly unlikely setting of Deeper Understanding, a very modern-world song about an alienated woman and her relationship with her computer.
"This is definitely my most personal, honest album," she says. "And I think it's my most *feminine* album, in that I feel maybe I'm not trying to prove something in terms of a woman in a man's world -- God, here we go!" She seems to be wary of provoking a heavy debate about feminism. "On The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love, particularly from a production standpoint, I wanted to get a lot more weight and power, which I felt was a very male attitude. In some cases it worked very well, but.. . perhaps this time I felt braver as a woman, not trying to do the things that men do in music."
The Fog is a brave song. It co-stars Kate's dad on spoken vocals intoning with fatherly/doctorly reassurance, "Just put your feet down child/'Cos you're all grown-up now".
"I started with the idea of a relationship in deep water and thought I could parallel that with learning to swim, the moment of letting go," she says. "When my dad was teaching me to swim he'd hold both my hands, then say, Now, let go. So I would, then he'd take two paces back and say, Right, swim to me, and I'd be, Oo-er, blub, blub, blerb. But I though it was such a beautiful image of the father and child, all wrapped up in the idea of really loving someone, but letting them go, because that's a part of real love, don't you think, the letting go?"
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
So it's personal about Kate and her father then. It sounds as though it might be personal about her and Del too.
"Yes, it does, doesn't it?" She laughs, really amused by her professionally evasive reply. "Have you ever watched Woody Allen being interviewed? Obviously his films are very personal and when the interviewer asks him the 'Has this happened to you then?' question, he's all.. ." She cowers back into her chair, crosses and uncrosses her legs, thrashes about like a speared fish. "Then he'll say, Uh, well, no, I'm just acting out a role. It's ironic, but it's much easier to speak about very personal things to lots of people through a song, a poem or a film than it is to confront the world with them through someone asking questions. Maybe you worry because it's going to be indirectly reported."
Kate Bush leads a quiet, fairly limited life so her options on subject matter my be relatively restricted. Although she has ventured into political issues with Breathing (nuclear war) and The Dreaming (Aborigine rights), she generally declares her own ignorance and refrains from writing songs that would only prove it. But she will often borrow a story and make it her own -- from books (Wuthering Heights, obviously, and Cloudbusting, from Peter Reich's memoir of his father called A Book Of Dreams), TV (Pull Out The Pin was inspired by a documentary about the Viet Cong), or films (the idea for Get Out Of My House came from The Shining).
However, it was a story told by an older friend that sowed the seeds for Heads We're Dancing, a near-disco piece about a night out with Hitler. "Years ago this friend of mine went to a dinner and spent the whole evening chatting to this fascinating guy, incredibly charming, witty, well-read, but never found out his name," she says. "The next day he asked someone else who'd been there who it was. 'Oh, didn't you know? That's Oppenheimer, the man who invented the atomic bomb.' My friend was horrified because he thought he should have given the guy hell, attacked him, he didn't know what.
"But the point was one moment this person is charming, then when you find out who he is, he's completely different. So I thought, Who's the worst person you could possibly meet in those circumstances? Hitler! And the story developed. A woman at a dance before the war and this guy comes up to her tossing a coin with this cocky chat-up line, Heads we're dancing. She doesn't recognise him until she sees his face in the paper later on and then she's devastated. She thinks that if she'd known she might have been able to *get* him and change the course of history. But he was a person who fooled a tremendous number of people and I don't think they can be blamed. It worries me a bit that this song could be received wrongly, though."
It could well be that the musically extended family and extended home of Kate Bush even embrace her feelings for her songs themselves. She has an intimacy with them, a distinctive candour about sensuality and sexuality to which her present album title track is something of a natural conclusion.
It passed more or less unnoticed in her early days that she was casually breaking taboos in every other song. Tricky items on her agenda included incest (brother and sister in The Kick Inside, woman and young boy in The Infant Kiss), homosexuality (Wow, Kashka From Baghdad) and period pains (Strange Phenomena, Kites [sic]). Her sympathetic, non-judgmental approach was probably one of the less obvious reasons why she appealed so strongly to both sexes, but she would occasionally remark that she was grateful the tabloids didn't read lyric sheets. Otherwise she could have been up to her neck in bishops and Mrs. Whitehouse demanding that the nation's children be protected from this filth.
In fact, the moment anyone other than a fan thinks they've spotted a hint of sex in her songs she becomes very hesitant. Once, when she was working on Breathing, an EMI executive walked in to be greeted by the hypnotic "out-in, out-in, out-in" chant. Taking a firm hold on the wrong end of the stick, he asked her how she could even dream of releasing this pornography. The possibility of such gross misunderstandings shakes her faith in the "purity" -- a favourite word -- of what she's doing. But not enough to make her back off.
"Don't you think Art is a tremendous sensual-sexual expression? I feel that energy often.. . the driving force is probably not the right way to put it," she says, still trying to skirt the fnaarr-fnaarr potential of the topic.
Whether or not her speculation about the nature of Art is on the money, she made her own experience of the creative process quite clear with the cover of Never For Ever. A cornucopia of fantastic and real, beautiful and vile creatures -- the products of her imagination -- is shown swirling our from beneath her skirt. At the time, thinking about this and the steamy, masturbatory atmosphere of many of the songs she wrote in her teens such as The Man With The Child In His Eyes and Saxophone Song, she said: "It's not such an open thing for women to be physically attracted to the male body and fantasise about it. I can't understand that because to me the male body is absolutely beautiful.. . Physical masturbation, it's a feeling so bottled up you have to relieve it, as if you were crying."
The Sensual World is a song that translates the old ache to a different level -- with the invaluable help of James Joyce. "I had a rhythm idea with a synth line I took home to work on one night," she says. "While I was playing it this repeated *Yes* came to me and made me think of Molly Bloom's speech right at the end of Ulysses -- which I *have* actually read all through! I went downstairs and read it again, this unending sentence punctuated with 'yeses', fantastic stuff, and it was uncanny, it fitted the rhythm of my song." (The last lines of Molly Bloom's great stream of consciousness read: "then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.")
Although to Kate "it felt like it was meant to happen", when she applied through "official channels" (presumably the Joyce estate) for permission to use it, she was refused. But she wasn't to be deflected. "I tried to write it like Joyce," she says, smiling in self-mockery. "The rhythm at least I wanted to keep. Obviously I couldn't do his style. It became a song about Molly Bloom, the character, stepping out of the page -- black and white, two-dimensional, you see -- and into the real world, the sensual world. Touching things." She declaims exaggeratedly. "The grass underfoot! The mountain air! I know it sounds corny, but it's about the whole sensual experience, this wonderfully human thing. . ."
And lines like "his spark took life in my hand"?
"Yes, it is rather saucy. But not nearly as sexy as James Joyce." She looks concerned again. "I'd be really worried -- there's nothing I can do about it now because it's all part of the process -- but I would be worried if people felt this ambiguity between sensual and sexual.
"I definitely *became* a person when I left school and suddenly took control of my life," she says. "I felt like that was the first time I'd really been there. Do you.. .? It was the beginning of my life really.
"Now I think I get a tremendous amount of security from my work, through being able to write songs. Though perhaps I'm very insecure except when I'm working. There again I work so much.. . I'll have to think about this. I'll be thinking about it all day now. What I'm looking out for is to let go of being so damned obesessive about work that I just get sucked into it. It's important for me now for there to be some kind of, er, *lightness* about it.
"You know, it's only an album. That is what I keep saying to myself”.
SPIN actually ranked The Sensual World fourth in their feature from earlier in the year. NME placed it third in 2019. Although most critics would place The Sensual World in the top three or four Kate Bush albums, I have seen many fans online place it lower – feeling it is inferior to her very best work. It is a shame a lot of the reviews published in 1989 have not been archived or are unavailable to view. Most critics were very much on board with The Sensual World. Not repeating herself, Bush roved herself to be in a different league (as David Quantick wrote for NME in 1989: “A strange and remarkable record which has very little to do with anything else musical, a fair bit to do with the real world of sex, love, and introversion, and everything to do with uniqueness. Kate Bush remains alone, ahead, and a genius”). This is what AllMusic said in their review in 2011:
“An enchanting songstress, Kate Bush reflects the most heavenly views of love on the aptly titled The Sensual World. The follow-up to Hounds of Love features Bush unafraid to be a temptress, vocally and lyrically. She's a romantic, frolicking over lust and love, but also a lover of life and its spirituality. The album's title track exudes the most sensually abrasive side of Bush, but she is also one to remain emotionally intact with her heart and head. The majority of The Sensual World beams with a carefree spirit of strength and independence. "Love and Anger," which features blistering riffs by Bush's mentor and cohort David Gilmour, thrives on self-analysis -- typically cathartic of Bush. Michael Nyman's delicate string arrangements allow the melodic "Reaching Out" to simply arrive, freely floating with Bush's lush declaration ("reaching out for the star/reaching out for the star that explodes") for she's always searching for a common peace, a commonality to make comfort.
What makes this artist so intriguing is her look toward the future -- she appears to look beyond what's present and find a peculiar celestial atmosphere in which human beings do exist. She's conscious of technology on "Deeper Understanding" and of a greater life on the glam rock experimental "Rocket's Tail (For Rocket)," yet she's still intrinsic to the reality of an individual's heart. "Between a Man and a Woman" depicts pressure and heartbreak, but it's the beauty of "This Woman's Work" that makes The Sensual World the outstanding piece of work that it is. She possesses maternal warmth that's surely inviting, and it's something that's made her one of the most prolific female singer/songwriters to emerge during the 1980s. She's never belonged to a core scene. Bush's intelligence, both as an artist and as a woman, undoubtedly casts her in a league of her own”.
In future features, I will explore particular songs. I want to talk about the videos for the singles, The Sensual World, This Woman’s Work and Love and Anger. With some incredible direction from Bush on the videos, The Sensual World was less singles-packed as was the case with Hounds of Love’s first side. Regardless, the title track reached twelve in the U.K. This Woman’s Work reached twenty-five here, whereas Love and Anger reached thirty-eight. Ahead of its thirty-third anniversary next month, I am keen to spend time with The Sensual World. Following up Hounds of Love is daunting for any artist. Bush showed no need to top it or release something similar. Instead, what we have is a remarkable album that stands on its own and ended her incredible 1980s output with one of her best works. I first heard The Sensual World when I was a child in the 1990s. All these years later and I am…
HELPLESSLY seduced by it.