FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes at Thirty-Two
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush whilst filming The Line, the Cross and the Curve in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Three Prime Cuts from an Underrated Album
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IN the second and final…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: John Stoddart
anniversary feature for Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes, I am concentrating on three tracks that are particular standouts. I have talked about Moments of Pleasure before, so I am not going to repeat myself. However, there are three extraordinary songs that show the range and brilliance of The Red Shoes. An album that always gets a hard time and is never really given love, it turns thirty-two on 1st November. I am going to look at Eat the Music, Lily and The Red Shoes. Even though Rubberband Girl is my favourite song on the album, I have written about that enough. I was going to look at Big Stripey Lie, as this is a track where Kate Bush played electric guitar. However, the three songs I am concentrating on are remarkable. Before getting there, I actually want to drop in parts of a promotional interview for The Red Shoes from 1993. Vox spoke with Kate Bush for their chat that was published in November 1993:
“Qualities such as ambition and competitiveness are, supposedly, traditionally male ones, but do you possess either?
"I hate both words intensely I suppose that's because, in a lot of ways, they represent to me an incredibly driven male energy that offends my feminine energy. But I do think I'm driven, and I don't know about this thing of ambition. I don't know because I think my ambition is creative I don't think I'm ambitious to conquer the world, but I am ambitious to try out ideas and push things, to see if you can make it better. I'm certainly very driven in my work. I do think that for a lot of women, their creativity is quite masculinely driven--it's quite a masculine trait to speed forward, I suppose."
How much time have you spent working on The Red Shoes?
"Well, 1 haven't spent that long. It went on over a long period of time-about two years of solid work amongst three-and-a-half to four years."
Each album seems to take you longer to make than the last Is this because you are a true perfectionist?
"I think 'perfect' is... I have used that word in the past, and used it wrongly because, in a way, what you are trying to do is make something that is basically imperfect as best as you can in the time you've got with the knowledge you have".
You don't normally release material unless you're totally satisfied...
"That's right. That doesn't necessarily mean 'perfect', but it's to the best of my ability. I've tried to say what needed to be said through the songs, the right structure, the shape, the sounds, the vocal performance--that is, the best I could do at the time."
When you've worked hard for something, you obviously don't want somebody interfering with it. In your cuttings, you've been described as the shyest megalomaniac on the planet, so how do yout work out the balance between that and being an incredibly quiet, private person?
"I think it's quite true that most people are extreme contradictions. It's like this paradox that exists, and I think that on a lot of levels, I'm quiet and shy, and a quiet soul.
I like simple things in my life...I like gardening and things like that, but when it comes to my work, I am a creative megalomaniac again. I'm not after money or power but the creative power. I just love playing with ideas and watching them come together, or what you learn from something not coming together.
I'm fascinated by the whole creative process--I think you could probably say I was obsessed I'm not as bad as I used to be, I'm a little more balanced now."
What's calmed you down?
"Just life, I think... Life gets to you, doesn't it? I also think there's a part of me that's got fed up with working. I've worked so much that I'm starting to feel... I felt I needed to rebalance, which I think I did a bit, just to get a little bit more emphasis on me and my life."
Where did you get the idea of 'Rubberband Girl"?
"Well, it's playing with the idea of how putting up resistance... um... doesn't do any good, really. The whole thing is to sort of go with the flow."
What about the sexual content--'He can be a woman at heart, and not only women bleed?
"It's not really sexual, it's more to do with the whole idea of opening people up - not sexually, just revealing themselves. It's taking a man who is on the outside, very macho, and you open him up and he has this beautiful feminine heart."
Have you found many of those?
"I think I've seen a lot of them, yeah. I think there are a lot of men who are fantastically sensitive and gentle, and I think they are really scared to show it."
A father image often comes out in your work. Is that because you're particularly close to your father or does it merely represent somebody or something you respect?
"I think they're very archetypal images: the parents, the mother and the father... it's immediately symbolic of so many things. I'm very lucky to have had an extremely positive, loving and encouraging relationship with both my parents. And you know I feel very grateful... I feel very honoured, actually."
Who is the Douglas Fairbanks character in 'Moments Of Pleasure '?
'Ah... In a lot of ways that song, er.. well it's going back to that thing of paying homage to people who aren't with us any more. I was very lucky to get to meet Michael (Powell, the film-maker who directed the original The Red Shoes) in New York before he died, and he and his wife were extreme;y kind. I'd had few conversations with him and I'd been dying to meet him. As we came out of the lift, he was standing outside with his walking stick and he was pretending to be someone like Douglas Fairbanks. He was completely adorable and just the most beautiful spirit, and it was a very profound experience for me. It had quite an inspirational effect on a couple of the songs.
"There's a song called 'The Red Shoes'. It's not really to do with his film but rather the story from which he took his film. You have these red shoes that just want to dance and don't want to stop, and the story that I'm aware of is that there's this girl who goes to sleep in the fairy story and they can't work out why she's so tired. Every morning, she's more pale and tired, so they follow her one night and what's happening is these shoes... she's putting these shoes on at night before she goes to bed and they whisk her off to dance with the fairies”.
There are a few reasons why I want to spend time with these three songs. Eat the Music is a very special one. It got mixed reception when it was released as a single in 1993. It is a joyous and hypnotic track where Kate Bush goes deep. In terms of emotions, though also with the imagery. “Split me open/With devotion/You put your hands in/And rip my heart out/Eat the music/Does he conceal/What he really feels?/He’s a woman at heart/And I love him for that/Let’s split him open”. Before quoting more of the lyrics, I want to come to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia and some information from them about Eat the Music:
“‘Eat The Music’ is a song written by Kate Bush. It was originally released as the lead single for The Red Shoes in the USA on 7 September 1993, while everywhere else in the world Rubberband Girl was released. In the UK, a small handful of extremely rare 7″ and promotional CD-singles were produced, but were recalled by EMI Records at the last minute. A commercial release followed in the Summer of 1994 in the Netherlands and Australia, along with a handful of other countries. The song’s lyrics are about opening up in relationships to reveal who we really are inside.
Del Palmer about ‘Eat The Music’
It uses a small guitar called a ‘caboss‘ which is one of the instruments Paddy (Bush, Kate’s brother) discovered and brought back with him. He’s very into ethnic music of all kinds and has always contributed a lot of ideas to the albums – he helped bring in some authentic players and the track started off with bass guitar which was then replaced by an acoustic bass – but that sounded a bit too Latin. The horn section’s real, of course.
I do love the fruit imagery. This banquet of goodies that makes the erotic with the everyday. It is the staple of Kate Bush’s music. “Take a papaya/You like a guava?/Grab a banana/And a sultana/Rip them to pieces/With sticky fingers/Split the banana/Crush the sultana”. It is an original and colourful song where all these scents and smells come to the fore! One of the issues with The Red Shoes is the sequencing. In terms of the dynamics and balance. Rubberband Girl opens with spirit and twang. Then things down right down with And So Is Love, before coming to a peak with Eat the Music and then back down again with Moments of Pleasure. I always think Eat the Music should have come right after Rubberband Girl, or else come in the final third, as that is the weakest. There is that imbalance. However, Eat the Music is a gem of a song that is often dismissed.
Lily is another song from The Red Shoes that should have been a single. I think that about The Red Shoes too. Lily is the song that opened proceedings for Kate Bush’s 2014 residency, Before the Dawn. It is this solemn prayer and almost sacred reading. A song that is tender but powerful. Another one of these brilliant songs that is not talked about. I was trying to find anything on Lily, like a review of feature, but there is precious little! Lily is the song from The Red Shoes that has the most incarnations I feel. Maybe Top of the City too, as both of these songs appeared in Before the Dawn but also featured on her 2011 album, Director’s Cut. The live version is terrific, though I love the version on The Red Shoes. Again, I am going to come to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for a little bit more context:
“‘Lily’ is a song written by Kate Bush. It was originally released on her seventh album The Red Shoes. The song is devoted to Lily Cornford, a noted spiritual healer in London with whom Bush became close friends in the 1990s.
“She was one of those very rare people who are intelligent, intuitive and kind,” Kate has said of Cornford, who believed in mental colour healing—a process whereby patients would be restored to health by seeing various hues. “I was really moved by Lily and impressed with her strength and knowledge, so it led to a song – which she thought was hilarious”.
I wish more was written about Lily. It is one of Kate Bush’s best tracks. It does not appear in lists of her best songs. I know there is only so much room on those things, though something as wonderful as Lily warrants a place there! It is a reason why The Red Shoes is criminally overlooked. I agree that the sequencing is wrong and the album lags from the end of the second third. However, there are some amazing Kate Bush tracks on the album. Lily is among the best of the bunch.
Also, The Red Shoes is one of the best. This song was released as a single. It reached number twenty-one in the U.K. Like Eat the Music and Lily, this song was part of Kate Bush’s short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. Arguably the first visual album ever released. Now, they are quite commonplace. Before getting to some critical feedback for The Red Shoes, it is to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for a final visit:
“‘The Red Shoes’ was released in the UK as a 7″ single, a cassette single and two different CD-singles. The 7″ single and cassette single feature the B-side track You Want Alchemy. CD-single 1 added ‘Cloudbusting (Video Mix)’ and This Woman’s Work, and CD-single 2, released one week after the other formats, features Shoedance (see below), together with the single remix of The Big Sky and the 12″ version of Running Up That Hill”.
The Red Shoes was an album that did get some negative press. Critics not that kind towards its singles. As magnificent as the title track is, there was still those poking at it. Making fun of Kate Bush and writing her off. Among the more muted feedback was a bit of love for The Red Shoes. However, even some of the compliments were not as effusive and explicit as they should have been:
“Chris Roberts from Melody Maker said, "'The Red Shoes' meets its jigging ambition and sticks a flag on top, making her dance till her legs fall off." Another Melody Maker editor, Peter Paphides, commented, "Only as a grown-up will I be able to fully apprehend the texture and allegorical resonance of the themes dealt with in 'The Red Shoes'. Until then, I'll content myself with Tori Amos and Edie Brickell.” Alan Jones from Music Week gave it a score of four out of five, adding, "The third single from the album of the same name is not one of Bush's more commercial 45s. Although both rhythmic and literate, it is not the stuff of which Top 10 singles are made." Parry Gettelman from Orlando Sentinel wrote, "The mandola, the whistles and various curious instruments on the driving title track really recall the fever-dream quality of the 1948 ballet film The Red Shoes, the album's namesake." Mark Sutherland from Smash Hits gave it two out of five, adding that "loads of spooky 'ethnic' noises and tribal beats make for a very weird single, but not a very good one”.
I am going to finish there. On 1st November, The Red Shoes turns thirty-two. Despite the fact it has not received a lot of respect and positivity through the years, I think that it warrants a salute. Kate Bush did revisited a few of the tracks for Director’s Cut. Maybe not overly happy with her production in 1993. I wanted to highlight three exceptional songs from the album. That can stand alongside Moments of Pleasure and Rubberband Girl as prime Kate Bush. In spite of a few missteps, The Red Shoes still has…
PLENTY of glitter and shine.