FEATURE:
Kate Bush: Something Like a Song
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: John Stoddart
Moments of Pleasure (The Red Shoes)
__________
I talked about this track…
not that long ago. However, I have not really given a proper spotlight to one of Kate Bush’s best and most underrated tracks. Featuring on The Red Shoes – though it sounds like it should have been on The Sensual World -, maybe people forget about it because it is on one of her less-loved albums. Moments of Pleasure was released as a single on 15th November, 1993. It reached twenty-six in the U.K. Bush to reapproach this song for 2011’s Director’s Cut. Instead, this version features the chorus without lyrics. Some prefer the later version. However, there is something evocative about the original. I am going to get to some words from Bush regarding this song. Before that, I am pinching wholesale from Wikipedia where they collate critical reviews for Moments of Pleasure:
“In his review of the song, Ben Thompson from The Independent remarked, "A smile and a tear from the Welling siren." Chris Roberts of Melody Maker said, "'Moments of Pleasure' is The Big Literary Effort, Kate at her very tremble-inducing, vocal-range-like-the-Pyrenees best." Alan Jones from Music Week gave the song four out of five and named it Pick of the Week, writing, "Beautiful and traditional Bush fare with expansive orchestrations, poignant vocals and off-her-trolley lyrics. As subtle as 'Rubberband Girl' was direct, and probably as big a hit." Pan-European magazine Music & Media noted, "For most singers a ballad is just a slow song, but for Bush it seems like it has to be an emotional confrontation which classic composers would like to be credited for." Terry Staunton from NME commented, "Her personal exorcisms reach new heights on 'Moments of Pleasure', a deceptively simple ballad with a swooping chorus and a coda where she namechecks the people who've been important to her over years. It's a song that may baffle the world at large, but it wasn't written for us; Kate's just decided to share it”.
This is a classic Kate Bush song that doesn’t get talked about enough. I am going to pull in some information that I have sourced before. Important that we get some background to this song. One of her most beautiful music videos, I think Moments of Pleasure warranted a higher chart position. Before moving on, I am going to come to an interview Bush gave in 2011, where she discussed some misconceptions around the meaning of Moments of Pleasure:
“I think the problem is that during [the recording of] that album there were a lot of unhappy things going on in my life, but when the songs were written none of that had really happened yet. I think a lot of people presume that particularly that song was written after my mother had died for instance, which wasn’t so at all. There’s a line in there that mentions a phrase that she used to say, ‘every old sock meets an old shoe’, and when I recorded it and played it to her she just thought it was hilarious! She couldn’t stop laughing, she just thought it was so funny that I’d put it into this song. So I don’t see it as a sad song. I think there’s a sort of reflective quality, but I guess I think of it more as a celebration of life.
Interview with Ken Bruce, BBC Radio 2, 9 May 2011”.
It is clear there were some unhappy times during recording of the song. However, Bush was not reacting to tragedy. Instead, she was at a stage in her life where she was thinking about family, her own situation and age. Growing up and getting more wistful and philosophical. It is one of most remarkably deep and revealing songs. Why do people not discuss songs like this more?! You do hear it played on the radio, though most go for other tracks. There is not the same joy or catchy vibe as some Kate Bush songs. One of the standouts from The Red Shoes, I approached the song last October. About eight months later, I thought it worthy coming back to it. Rather than cover the exact same ground, this is about shining a light on a beautiful piece of work.
I want to bring in this article from 2014. Arriving in the world at a time when Britpop was starting and there was not really any other artist like Kate Bush around, one wonders what impact Moments of Pleasure would had if it were released years before. I do think that this song could have easily slotted on an album like Hounds of Love (1985) or The Sensual World (1989):
“In 1993 I was listening to a lot of new music. From the first stirrings of Britpop still fizzing with youthful energy (that would change), to indie disco sounds, lo-fi rock, British neo-soul and Weegie dance beats.
The albums I kept going back to that year - Suede's eponymous debut, the sophomore effort by Saint Etienne, One Dove's Morning Dove White (my enraptured exposure to Dot Allison's voice) and, best of all, the post-Sugarcubes solo debut of Bjork (spoiler alert: we may be hearing more of Ms Guðmundsdóttir in this space anon). All of them shiny new sounds.
And yet.
And yet the singles I loved that year were from familiar voices, doing things they'd done before; but maybe doing them better or more affectingly than before.
Two in particular. If I hadn't gotten into terrible trouble from the Not Fade Away Standards and Ethics Committee for my 1982 Not Fade Away choice I'd be tempted to cheat and say I couldn't decide between my two favourites again.
But a man can only bear so many Chinese Burns, and so I have to decide. Between New Order's Regret and Kate Bush's Moments of Pleasure. On one hand I have my favourite song from one of my favourite bands. On the other, the most personal and most potent track of Kate Bush's career (IMHO and all that).You already know which way I've gone by the picture on top of the page but genuinely as I write this I haven't come down definitively on one side or the other.
Just being alive, it can really hurt ...
I'm not sure when I stopped listening closely to Kate Bush. Some time around The Sensual World, I guess. Loved the single but for the first time didn't feel the need to buy the accompanying album. Maybe the thought of contributions from Eric Clapton and Lenny Henry didn't stir me much (nor even a contribution from Prince). Maybe I felt that she was something of a teenage obsession for me and I'd now grown up a bit (a pretty poorly thought-through reason if it was true). I don't know.
All I know is that I wasn't playing her records much at the start of the nineties. And yet when one of her singles came on the radio I'd always turn it up.
So it was with Moments of Pleasure. From the minor key melancholy of those opening piano chords and the accompanying shiver of strings to the breathy shimmer of that familiar voice, it catches me every time I hear it (and not just because I get to hear Kate Bush say my first name near the end). I loved it at the time and as the years pass it has grown to be my favourite song from her catalogue.
It's a mournful thing, a catalogue of loss replete, as her biographer Graeme Thomson says of its parent album The Red Shoes, with "all the ache of letting go". A song full of ghosts. Her Auntie Maureen, guitarist Alan Murphy, lighting engineer Bill Duffield. It was only years later that I learnt that the man in the lift in the second verse was in fact an account of her meeting with the film director Michael Powell in a snowy New York not long before he died, a tribute to a peculiarly English artist by another.
The music is lovely, a beautiful swell of sound on which her voice - which travels back and forth between breathy intimacy and high drama - settles into. But it's the words that get me every time”.
A wonderful song from Kate Bush, it is one of my favourites. This series is about focusing on individual tracks that you need to listen to. In the next part, I may come to one from an album like Never for Ever (1980). However, as The Red Shoes gets overlooked, I wanted to discuss one of its gems. The sublime and gorgeous Moments of Pleasure is a Kate Bush work of brilliance that…
WE need to herald.