FEATURE:
I’m Gonna Dance the Dream
Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes at Thirty-Two
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THIS is the sole feature I will write…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993
about the upcoming thirty-second anniversary of Kate Bush’s seventh studio album, The Red Shoes. Fans will be aware of the background. Released on 1st November, 1993, The Red Shoes followed 1989’s The Sensual World. Think about her trajectory and changes from 1985’s Hounds of Love to 1993’s The Red Shoes. Hounds of Love being this incredibly ambitious and phenomenal album that was both of the 1980s but ahead of its time. The Sensual World was not to repeat that. Coming at the end of the decade, instead, this was Kate Bush composing music that was more feminine. Hounds of Love had a lot of primal and masculine energy. So too did 1982’s The Dreaming. The Sensual World is more autumnal and sensuous. Not as percussive or epic as Hounds of Love. Perhaps more personal and coming from the perspective of a woman entering her thirties – Bush turned thirty in 1988; the year before The Sensual World was released -, her only album of the 1990s perhaps struggled to find its feet. The production could not quite be how it was on previous albums. Trying to fit into the times and also be distinctly Kate Bush, there were questions about its sound and quality. Whether Bush’s heart and head were committed. Even though she experienced loss and separation just before the album came out and around the time, when writing most of the songs, these events had not happened. Even so, taking on a lot at a time when she could feel strains and tragedy looming or at least showing their first signs, The Red Shoes is not viewed as one of Kate Bush’s best albums. Regardless, I still think it is a lot better than people give it credit for. There is a lot to love about it. Even though this was the first album where Kate Bush did not appear – she has not since appeared on an album cover – and we only see a pair of feet. Granted, they are Bush’s feet. In a photograph taken by her brother, John Carder Bush, that slightly mystery or disappearing out of frame was a sign of what was to come.
After The Red Shoes was released in 1993, Bush started to retreat from the public eye. I often feel, as The Red Shoes is inspired by the film of the 1948 same name, that the album cover was like a film poster. Honing in on the focal point of the title. Also, having been exposed and very much on a promotional treadmill since 1978, Bush did not necessarily want to be at the centre of things. The cover is great. The sequencing is a letdown and means that we have an album that is top and middle-heavy. In terms of the tracks, a few of her very best numbers are on The Red Shoes. Including the title track, Lily, Moments of Pleasure and Eat the Music, there are very few weak cuts. Also, despite the fact The Red Shoes does not sound like anything else released in 1993 and it does not try to fit in, I think that works in its favour. Kate Bush did strip down and rework some of the songs from The Red Shoes for 2011’s Director’s Cut. I would like to see The Red Shoes’ songs in their original state, though with a different sound. Maybe stripped down and remixed, just so that these incredible songs are not as compressed, tinny and a product of 1990s production. That would be interesting. There are precious few features or retrospectives concerning The Red Shoes. Given the somewhat muted and lacklustre reaction in 1993 from critics, maybe that is not a shock. The Red Shoes did reach number two in the U.K. and an impressive twenty-eight in the U.S. In April 2024, Eat the Music was re-released on a 10" vinyl record for Record Store Day, featuring B-sides Lily and Big Stripey Lie from the original album. The Red Shoes has perhaps the broadest and most eclectic collection of featured guests. From Lenny Henry, Prince, the Trio Bulgarka, Lily Cornford, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Nigel Kennedy, it is clear that it is a lot more crowded than most of her albums. Perhaps a few too many featured artists and contributors. Does Kate Bush’s voice and singularity shine through enough?!
I want to go to a couple of promotional interviews from 1993. In a decade of lad and ladette culture, and with Britpop starting to show shoots in that year, how did they react to an artist like Kate Bush? A mainstay who started making music in the 1970s, I still don’t think she was afforded the sort of respect that she had earned at this point. Rock Compact Disc spoke with Kate Bush in 1993:
“Del's enthusiasm for his musical partner's work is infectious. In contrast, Bush herself is reserved when it comes to anything except her music. Ask her about the technicalities of recording using her Fairlight computer system and she'll tell you exactly about how her songs come about. When it comes to explaining the stories behind the songs, however, or talking about Kate Bush, the person, she is uniquely retiring. But when it comes to her music, Bush has spent many years developing a skill for getting what she wants - a skill that she's developed into a fine art. She speaks gently and slowly, picking her words carefully, looking almost frail and innocent as her expressive wide eyes stare in wonderment. But her delicate looks and tiny frame belie her drive and power - not many artists of any stature get to be so creatively in control as Kate Bush. For her, though, it is and always has been the number one priority. 'I think creative control is so incredibly important,' she says. 'If you don't have that control your work will be interfered with until it's gone out of your hands. I was always aware that things wouldn't be how I wanted them unless I was willing to fight.
Kate's involvement in what was known as the KT Bush Band was always going to be shortlived, as Del and his other musical collaborators realised, but they were happy to support her until that moment EMI were ready to whisk her off to fame and fortune. 'Right at the end of that period of playing the pub gigs in that band, we did a session for EMI at the White Elephant on the River,' he recalls, 'which was her first major showcase for the whole record company. It was quite nerve-racking for the rest of us, but Kate just breezed on and sang it. She breezed through the whole thing - it was really quite amazing.
'She always had this total self-belief in what she was going to do - there was never going to be any problem for her, from her own point of view. It was like an obsessive passion that she just had to go through. And in a lot of ways she's still like it now.' Of course, after that it was never quite the same for the KT Bush band without Katy Bush, and Del and Co were left stranded in temporary musical limbo while Kate was studio-bound. At that stage, Kate was too young and inexperienced to insist they play on her debut - 'she had to toe the party line a little,' says Del - so the producer bought his own players in to provide the necessary backing. However, even then Bush knew what she wanted and how to get it across. He may not have played on her debut LP, but Kate made sure Del got to design the artwork for the back of the sleeve, and that LP number two would have his name somewhere on the playing credits. 'She really wanted us to play on that album, but politically it wasn't right/he says. 'But when the second album came along in '78, we were able to do a few tracks - she really stuck out for us. I'm really grateful for that she's given me, personally, so many breaks.'
Bush is reluctant to go into details on her relationship with her uniquely understanding record comapany. Although obviously appreciative of the artistic freedom she's gained over the years she also observes: 'You have to fight for everything you want. Struggle is important. It's how you grow and how you change.'
Caught up in the first flush of success, Kate's early days were a flurry of activity and creative release. In 1978, both The Kick Inside and Lionheart albums were released, and in 1979 she embarked on her first and only, and now fairly legendary, live tour. 'As I remember it, it was very hard work,' says Del of the tour. 'I've never worked so hard as a musician before. We rehearsed for six months. In the morning she was coming up to town for dance lessons and learning dance routines, then in the afternoon we'd rehearse the band for six hours, then in the evening we were going back for production meetings. And she's still doing that kind of thing now with this film she's doing. She's a complete workaholic and a fanatic where her music's concerned.' Did she enjoy the tour? 'She really enjoyed it. It's a common fallacy that she didn't and that it was a bad experience for her, but she really enjoyed doing it. But I think what happened was, it took so much out of her, that it also took a little bit of her self-confidence. She then got into the studio immediately after that tour ended, in late '79, to start the third album, and she then got into producing. She co-produced it with the engineer she was working with at the time, and got completely into it. She thought, this is it, I really need to work in the studio for a few years and develop my own production techniques and music as a studio musician.' And Kate realised too that she'd have to distance herself from outside pressures to achieve what she wanted to achieve.
'I've always been tenacious when it comes to my work,' she says. 'And I became quickly aware of the outside pressures of being famous affecting my work. It seemed ironic that I was expected to do interviews and television work which took me away from the thing that had put me into that situation. It was no longer relevant that I wrote songs. I could see my work becoming something that had no thought in it, becoming a personality, which is never what I wanted. All I wanted was the creative process.' 'She's the most unlikely star,' adds Del. 'She does not like being famous, she really does not like it. She wants to be an ordinary person, but she wants to make music. She likes the idea of people getting something from what she does, but she doesn't want the fame aspect. She's not the sort of person who will ever go out clubbing. She just works, stays at home, goes to the theatre, goes to see films, and when she can she goes off on holiday. But that's very rare.'
It's hard to imagine Kate Bush padding around the house with her slippers on, but even superstars have to recharge their batteries. 'She really just lets herself go. I don't mean she puts on 30 stone. It's like "I'm not working any more, so I'm not going to let any of this stuff get into my head". She potters in the garden - she does gardening now - she watches TV, goes to the theatre, eats... And takes in a little music too... 'She doesn't like to listen to anything when she's working, but when she's resting she listens to lots of stuff. At the moment, she's really into Talk Talk - she finds a real affinity with them. And we had a whole period of getting into this Bulgarian music, and in the early days it was Irish music. Generally, there's not many modern bands she's into, though she likes the Utah Saints. They did a track with a piece of her vocal in it: they were really good about it, went through all the proper channels, asked if they could use it, gave her a royalty, and she thought it was great. She thought it was absolutely fantastic the way they'd actually used it. In fact, one time she thought it would be great to do something with them. It never came to pass, though...'
What did happen was the extended period of inactivity that lead to a four year gap between the last album 'The Sensual World, and the release of The Red Shoes. Beset by personal tragedy - the loss of many friends, the death of her mother and the breakdown of her personal, if not professional, relationship with Del- the creative process simply stopped. 'I just couldn't work,' she says. 'Singng is such a deeply personal thing to do, I couldn't manage it.' 'There's been a lot of upset,' adds Del, 'When her mother died, she really couldn't work for the best part of a year. But she soon got the urge to get back in there again. She has to work.' And when Bush works, she really works. Not content with producing just another LP, she's timed its release with the simultaneous release of an accompanying 50-minute film 'We've taken six tracks from the album and made a story line up from the title track.'
'It's about how Kate's a dancer and gets tricked into wearing a pair of red shoes, which are possessed and can't stop dancing,' adds Del, 'it's a bit like the old film, 'The Red Shoes (the 1948 British classic about a young ballerina torn between two lovers - one a struggling composer the other an autocratic dance impresario). It's her own interpretation of the idea. There's lots of dialogue, and Miranda Richardson and Lindsay Kemp are in it too. Kate's been busy writing the storyline and getting it organised.'
'It's something like Magical Mystery Tour,' Kate adds, 'But it's not like it at all. It's not finished I hate talking about anything until it's there. like talking to you about the album if you haven't heard the tracks. Completely ridiculous.'
Never one to explain herself when a well-turned musical phrase will do, Kate Bush remains something of an enigma; intensely private, guarded to the point of introversion, but always fantastically unique”.
There are horrendous interviews like this from Chrissie Iley from The Sunday London Times, which shows you what Kate Bush had to endure! It is no wonder she waited twelve more years to follow The Red Shoes given the sort of promotion she had to endure! People who didn’t really listen to the music or were completely uninterested and insulting. The second interview I want to include, again, shows the kind of inane and rather insulting questions and lines of query. Nick Coleman chatted with Kate Bush for Time Out:
“The Red Shoes' is a ballet film made by Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1948, telling the story of a dancer who is torn between the demands of a great impresario, who can help her to become an artist of destiny, and those of her composer/husband, who can bring her happiness. The story elides an old fairy tale and a take on the power struggle that raged between the dancer Nijinsky and Diaghilev, first director of the Ballet Russe. Bush says the song evolved out of a feeling she had one day at the piano of music running away with itself. The image in her mind 'was like horses galloping and running away, with the horses turned into running feet, and then shoes galloping away with themselves'. Which corresponded, conveniently enough, with the key fairy-tale element in the Powell film: the red pumps worn by the tragic ballerina, which are imbued with a magic that carries their wearer off in a terrible outpouring of expressiveness.
Bush contacted Powell shortly before he died, 'to see whether he'd be interested in working with me. He was the most charming man, so charming. He wanted to hear my music, so I sent him some cassettes and we exchanged letters occasionally, and I got a chance to meet him not so long before he died. He left a really strong impression on me, as much as a person as for his work. He was just one of those very special spirits, almost magical in a way. Left me with a big influence.'
Which makes some kind of sense. Powell's super-rich three-strip Technicolor, his English-ness, his 'expressiveness', his interest in the shadows cast by daylight; even, you could argue, his thematic preoccupation with islands, solitary souls and the unconfined spirit; these are some of Bush's favourite things.
'His work is just so... so beautiful,' says Kate, in her tiniest voice.
Meaning what, exactly?
'Well, there's such heart in his films. The way he portrayed women... that was particularly good and very interesting. His women are strong and they're treated as people...'
That's one kind of beauty.
'The heart, I think, is the main beauty. This human quality he has. Although there's clever shots in his films, they're not really used for effect, to be clever. They're used for an emotional effect. I'd call that a human quality. Like vulnerability. Also, I like the emotional qualities of the characters. I suppose in one way they're very English ...'
To combine her interest in Powell with her lust for new directions, and perhaps to solve one or two promotional problems, Bush has directed a 40-minute film interpreting six songs from the excellent 'Red Shoes' album. It will be premiered at the London Film Festival.
'I'll be very interested to see what people make of it. To see whether they regard it as a long promo video or as a short film,' she says.
Where do your stories come from?
'Oh, all kinds of sources but generally they come down to people. People's ideas or works. Films, books, they all lead back to someone else's ideas, which in turn lead back to someone's else's ideas...'
I've always assumed you must be a bit of an Angela Carter fan.
'Um, no. I don't think I know her stuff.'
She wrote 'Company Of Wolves' and was big, I believe, on pomegranates, the predatory nature of nature, the heat of female sexuality; that sort of thing.
'Oh, yes.' Bush smiles, and her dimple disappears.
Other post addressed to Kate Bush arrived which went unopened. Then one day a letter came for the attention of Catherine Earnshaw. This being ambiguous, Catherine opened it just to make sure. Inside was a note from a Harley Street doctor indicating that Catherine was fit as a fiddle. This was good news. Unfortunately, Catherine had not been to see a Harley Street doctor. She hastily sent the letter on to Bush's record company, blushing at her daftness in not remembering immediately that Catherine Earnshaw is the name of the storm-tossed tragic heroine of 'Wuthering Heights '.
You're 35 and you've been doing this since you were a teenager. How have you changed?
'I think I've changed quite a lot. Essentially I'm still the same person but I suppose I've grown up a lot, and learned a lot.'
What's made you grow up the most?
'You get lots of disappointments. I'm not sure that they make you grow up but they make you question intentions.' She pauses. 'But life is what makes you grow up.'
That's a fantastically evasive answer.
'It is quite evasive but I think it's true.' Still no dimple. 'It's hard to say... when I was young I was very idealistic, and I don't really think I am any more. I think I'm more... realistic. I think it's good to change. I think I'd be unhappy if I didn't change. It would mean I hadn't learnt anything.'
Do you ever get curious about living another way?
'I do. But so far I'm extremely lucky to be doing what I'm doing. I feel extremely lucky to have the opportunity to do it.’”.
I would advise any Kate Bush fan to buy The Red Shoes. It is an album that does not get the love it deserves. In 2018, Ben Hewitt wrote a feature for The Quietus marking twenty-five years of The Red Shoes. Often maligned and discussed, this album, as he writes, has so much to recommend. Some incredible music that needs to be reassessed and addressed. A fascinating chapter in Kate Bush’s career:
“The most powerful moments on The Red Shoes are its most intimate and personal. ‘Moments Of Pleasure’ starts with piano so soft and gentle it feels like it might vanish if you breathe too hard, before it’s swept up in Michael Kamen’s elegantly soul-stirring orchestral arrangement. Bush’s voice goes through a similar transformation, too, growing from a gentle flutter to something stronger, which makes her heartfelt cry on the chorus sound like a defiant refusal to be swallowed by grief: “Just being alive/ It can really hurt/ And these moments/ Are a gift from time.” Its outro remembers some of Bush’s lost friends – including guitarist Alan Murphy, producer John Barrett and lighting director Bill Duffield – and plays out like the closing credits of an old-fashioned weepy. Even more devastating is an old conversation she recalls with her mother, Hannah, who was ill while Bush was writing the song and who passed away before the album was released. “I can hear my mother saying ‘Every old sock needs an old shoe,’” remembers Bush warmly. “Isn’t that a great saying?” It is, even if it sticks a tennis ball-sized lump in your throat.
There’s emotional heft on ‘Top Of The City’, too, which takes a similar premise to ‘And So Is Love’ but adds higher stakes: Bush sits up in the skies, looking down at the lonely city below and hoping to find an answer. “I don’t know if I’m closer to Heaven, but it looks like Hell down there,” she declares, caught between exhilaration, melancholy and desperation: the moments of quiet calm are both beautiful and unsettling, with eerie pockets of silence hanging between delicate piano notes, until there’s a big, dramatic burst of violins and celestial backing vocals. “I don’t know if you’ll love me for it,” she yells wildly, forcing the moment to its crisis. “But I don’t think we should suffer for this/ There’s just one thing we can do about it.”
Hearing her equate emotional intimacy with scoffing mangoes and plums might suggest that The Red Shoes still has plenty of idiosyncrasies. There’s certainly something quintessentially Bushian about some of its songs, including the title cut, which soundtracks the fate of a girl who puts on a pair of red leather ballet shoes and dances a frantic Irish jig: it combines her fondness for Celtic sounds, old stories and classic film (The Red Shoes was written by Hans Christian Andersen and later adapted into a 1948 film directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the former of whom Bush salutes on ‘Moments Of Pleasure’), and her shrill, possessed vocal makes it sound like a feverish fairytale. The steamy ‘The Song Of Solomon’, meanwhile, mixes a literary text and desire in the same way that ‘The Sensual World’ let Ulysses’ Molly Boom step off the page and experience physical pleasure. This time, there was no-one stopping Bush lifting lines from her chosen book, the Hebrew Bible, although the erotic charge of the chorus is all hers: “Don’t want your bullshit, yeah/ Just want your sexuality.”
That’s then followed by the absurdity of ‘Why Should I Love You?’ Bush had originally asked Prince to record backing vocals for the track, but he decided to take it apart and add guitars, keyboards and brass, too. Conventional wisdom is that great collaborations are the result of a shared vision, but ‘Why Should I Love You?’ is great even though there’s absolutely no shared vision whatsoever: for the first 60-odd seconds it’s built around Bush’s hushed vocal, until Prince’s huge rush of ecstatic, kaleidoscopic sound steamrolls everything in its path. It’s less the meeting of two minds and more the smashing together of two completely different styles, the most special of cut-and-shunt hybrids. (And somewhere, among all the hullabaloo, you’ll also hear backing vocals from Lenny Henry).
There’s another cameo on the closing song, the fantastically histrionic breakup ballad ‘You’re The One’, on which Jeff Beck’s dizzying, drawn-out guitar solo pushes Bush to an exhausting catharsis. Like so much of The Red Shoes, it finds her preparing to leave a lover to save herself, although this time she’s less bullish, more prone to tying herself in knots. “I’m going to stay with my friend/ Mmm, yes, he’s very good-looking,” she admits. “The only trouble is, he’s not you.” By the song’s end, she’s so frazzled by frustration and anguish that she lets rip a larynx-tearing shriek: “Just forget it, alright!” Bush, who had spoken of feeling emotionally burnt-out years before the album was released, was ready to withdraw, too: she vanished for 12 years until Aerial, and then went on hiatus for another six before returning with Director’s Cut. “I think there’s always a long, lingering dissatisfaction with everything I’ve done,” she said in 2011, glad to have the chance to right some of the wrongs that had been bothering her for 20-odd years. For me, though, the original album has always been enough: it might have its flaws, and there might be a handsome alternative, but just like Bush on ‘You’re The One’, I still want to keep going back”.
On 1st November, it will be thirty-two years since The Red Shoes was released. I have a lot of time for the album and love so many of the tracks. I doubt it will have anything written about it until maybe 2028, when it turns thirty-five. That is a pity. It is an album that I can come back to…
TIME and time again.