FEATURE:
Kate Bush: The Tour of Life
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005 in a promotional photo for Aerial/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
The Divine and Beautiful A Coral Room
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I have written about…
this song from Aerial before. Kate Bush’s 2005 double album, I am compelled to revisit the track as I have been reading Tom Doyle’s Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. It is a perfect Christmas gift for the Kate Bush fan in your life. There is a section on A Coral Room, so it gives me an excuse to write about it once more. People do discuss Aerial, though it is one of those albums that is not as exposed and investigated as others from Kate Bush. If we think of Aerial being this epic and sweeping album with lots of layers and all these musicians coming together, there are moments that are quite sparse or more stripped. I think Hounds of Love has more in the way of consistent layers. Not too many songs that are bare. I guess And Dream of Sheep and Mother Stands for Comfort, though this is an album where most of the songs have a lot of detail and are cinematic. Aerial is cinematic too, yet there are these songs that are perhaps less busy or dense as some on Hounds of Love. Mrs. Bartolozzi is Bush at the piano. It does feel like a live recording in a way. Although Michael Wood provides a solo vocal on A Coral Room, for the most part, it is Kate Bush and the piano. I love how we have songs like this that sit alongside these fuller epics such as Aerial, Nocturn, or even How to Be Invisible. The more I think of Aerial, the more I notice how it is this album that is huge and expansive, and yet quite a few songs are impactful and huge because of the power of the vocal and piano, rather than there being a lot of instrumental elements. Such is the case with A Coral Room. Tom Doyle writes in his book how some of Bush’s greatest recordings were completed in a single take. Wuthering Heights – her 1978 debut single – among them. A Coral Room is another. Before moving on, I am turning to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia and interview archive where Kate Bush talked about A Coral Room:
“There was a little brown jug actually, yeah. The song is really about the passing of time. I like the idea of coming from this big expansive, outside world of sea and cities into, again, this very small space where, er, it’s talking about a memory of my mother and this little brown jug. I always remember hearing years ago this thing about a sort of Zen approach to life, where, you would hold something in your hand, knowing that, at some point, it would break, it would no longer be there.
As Tom Doyle notes, A Coral Room was a track Bush almost didn’t release and include on Aerial, as she felt it too personal. Those without intimate knowledge of Aerial will not necessarily understand the significance of A Coral Room. So little written about this song. Even if there are bigger ideas and non-personal themes explores, Bush’s late mother is at the heart. Hannah Bush died in 1992. Even so, over a decade after her death, Kate Bush very much had her in her heart. I think Aerial signalled a return to how Bush used to work early in her career. Rather than build tracks from beats and keyboards and sort of layering as she goes, a lot of Aerial was Bush working alone at the piano. I think Aerial is very much one of Bush’s most intimate and personal albums. I have said before how family past and present are featured through Aerial. Bush’s then-young son Bertie the focus of more than one song. You do get a sense of the past affecting some of the musical moments. In the same way Bush sung about her mother on The Red Shoes’ Moments of Pleasure, at a time when she was ill and would not live too much longer, on A Coral Room, there is this sense of immersing herself in her childhood home. I have stood outside of East Wickham Farm more than once. Where Bush lived as a child. A Coral Room seems to place itself back there, maybe in the 1960s, when Kate Bush was very young. She would have been referred to as Cathy or Catherine then. I can understand why Bush was a little hesitant about putting A Coral Room out into the world. Warm and Soothing, as Doyle writes, is another song that is set at East Wickham Farm. That is the B-side of her 1980 Christmas single, December Will Be Magic Again. Unintentionally, as Bush told Doyle when he interviewed her in 2005, featuring similar scenes in both songs was by accident. A Coral Room’s larger theme and vision is about a cataclysmic event. A submerged city. A vision of the world centuries on. It makes me think of the cover of Donald Fagen’s 2012 album, Sunken Condos. Submerged houses. Kate Bush is a fan of Steely Dan, Fagen’s band, so maybe that is why I connect the two.
Tom Doyle writes how A Coral Room is a sequel to Moments of Pleasure. That song is lush and orchestral. It is this stirring and grand song that remembers a lot of Bush’s friends and collaborators no longer with us. It is a sad and beautiful song. That idea of yearning for those gone. The spirits and images of these people are with her in spirit, yet they have passed. Bush loved the idea in A Coral Room of someone being in a boat and putting their hand into the water and being able to touch the top of a city. Maybe a nightmarish vision of the climate crisis and what could be. Not that Bush cited a particular book, though several have written about sunken civilisations and cities. H.P. Lovecraft’s 1936 book, The Shadow over Innsmouth, is a Horror novella about a decaying Massachusetts seaport connected to a hybrid fish-humanoid cult and a submerged or amphibious deep-sea mythos. Also, in Moments of Pleasure, the video (directed by Kate Bush) ends with her twirling whilst there is a blizzard. These figures she sings about twirling but barely visible. Being buried and obscured by weather. If there is the drama and heaviness of snow separating Bush from these departed loved ones in Moments of Pleasure, the stillness and drama of floods and masses of water can be found of A Coral Room. I am also fascinated in how Hannah Bush speaks or has a part in both songs. Kate Bush sings “And I can hear my mother saying/"Every old sock meets an old shoe". Bush wrote this song when her mother was still alive. She said that lyrics to her and she found it hilarious. Hannah Bush represented by Kate Bush and Michael Wood reciting the drinking ditty, Little Brown Jug. Written in 1869 by Joseph Eastburn Winner. A song about alcoholism, as Tom Doyle observes, becoming something more childlike. A song that may well have featured in the Bush household. The jug that was in her mother’s hand falls in slow-motion and shatters.
It is a heartbreaking scene and one that Bush sees ion Zen-like terms. She likened it to the Zen idea of broken glass. At some point everything breaks. It is the inevitability of life. Nothing can remain unbroken and in its original state. Even humans. We all die at some point. The little spider that crawls out of the broken jug is this spider of time. Maybe it crawled into the jug when it was in the Bush household and then left. Forward a bit and to the broken jug, the spider returns and crawls out. The years go by and the house is submerged and overrun by coral. This idea of not being able to live in the past. Even though these moments remain in the memory, their actual physical form is gone. Replaced and sunken. The spiritual side of Kate Bush. Appreciating what you have now as it will be gone one day. It would have been great to see a video for this song. An animated video that would have been beautiful. I do love the connection between this Aerial song and Moments of Pleasure. Tom Doyle wrote how this spider is like the spider of time. It connects the past and present. This spider moving through time and keeps on moving as this house and childhood memories is replaced by ocean and coral. In Moments of Pleasure, we have this thought: “Every old sock meets an old shoe/Here come the Hills of Time”. The Spider of Time and the Hills of Time. A Coral Room is about a city submerged. In Moments of Pleasure, a huge U.S. city is blanketed in snow: “The buildings of New York/Look just like mountains through the snow”. Bush in the 1990s thinking of her ailing mother and those in her life who are gone. “And these moments given/Are a gift from time/Just let us try/To give these moments back”. A Coral Room sees Bush with her new son. I have sourced this when article from The Guardian before. In 2023, Darren Hayes (Savage Garden) explained why A Coral Room is perfect and provided a roadmap for his own life: “It just speaks to me about how precious time is, and how precious the tiny moments are that we have with each other. I think so much about my own mother who I’m very close to – she lives in Brisbane and I live in Los Angeles – and I see my own life in A Coral Room’s cinematic vignettes. A Coral Room is one of many songs on Aerial where Kate really looks at motherhood – both her relationship to her own mother and her experience of having her child, Bertie, and how that changed her. It profoundly touches me”. Reading back through Tom Doyle’s wonderful Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. His take on A Coral Room and what Bush said about it when he interviewed her around the release of Aerial in 2005. That connection with a 1993 song. Both tracks feature Bush’s mother. In different situations and with different perspectives, it is right that A Coral Room is the sequel to Moments of Pleasure. A fascinating thought that shines a light on a pearl from Aerial. An evocative and cinematic vision of sunken cities and the tenderness and intimacy of a little brown jug and the Bush household. A typical work of genius from…
THE staggering Kate Bush.