FEATURE:
So Many Moments of Pleasure
The Gems and Underrated Appeal of Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes
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I will end…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: John Stoddart
with a review or two of The Red Shoes. This is the album that fell between 1989’s The Sensual Word and 2005’s Aerial. Both hugely acclaimed, The Red Shoes is seen as weaker or less essential. When it comes to polls of her music, as I will show later, The Red Shoes comes last or near the bottom. It turns thirty-three on 1st November, I did want to sort of defend the album. I am also going to include an interview with Kate Bush from 1993. There are gems on this album that get overlooked. I feel the overall quality is higher than The Sensual World. The issue is with the production. Perhaps too layered/tinny or not warm-sounding, I feel if the original album was reworked so that the production sound was more similar to The Sensual World, then there would be more love towards the songs. Why Should I Love You? suffers from too many musical layers. Prince taking it away and ruining it. Moments of Pleasure perhaps the standout song from The Red Shoes. Though I feel there is so much to recommend. Big Stripey Lie is Kate Bush being Grunge-influenced. The first time she plays electric guitar on record. There is extraordinary range throughout. Eat the Music and The Red Shoes have this great energy. Even You’re the One, which is a song I have been unfair to, is actually wonderful. One of the issues might be the tracklisting. I think You’re the One shouldn’t be the final track. Maybe the title track could sit there.
The running order and production do sort of take away from an album that is fair stronger than people give it credit for. The Song of Solomon so intriguing. In terms of the lyrics, there are some great standout lines. “Comfort me with apples/For I am sick of love/His left hand is under my head/And his right hand/Doth embrace me”. Top of the City is another brilliant track. One that came to life in 2014 for Before the Dawn. I do really love that track. The lyrics throughout The Red Shoes is magnificent. Not written about enough. The fruit-based imagery on Eat the Music. The brilliant Lily. “Lily, oh lily I'm so afraid/I fear I am walking in the veil of darkness/And she said/Child, take what I say”. Constellation of the Heart would benefit from being stripped back. Bush did do this for Director’s Cut, though she re-recorded the song for the most part. I feel taking the original album and just doing something with the composition and production would make it such a strong album. The more I listen to The Red Shoes, the more I find its strengths. What is interesting is how The Red Shoes has raised in terms of polls and features. It always used to come bottom or near the bottom. There have been some fairly recent pieces where The Red Shoes has fared better. Though I have seen a couple place 2011’s 50 Words for Snow last, which is a travesty! In 2023, The Red Shoes was placed seventh by Rough Trade:
“Another nod to her love of film, The Red Shoes is recorded during a turbulent time for Kate. The end of her relationship with Del Palmer, the death of close-friend and guitarist Alan Murphy and of her mother, Hannah, all in a relatively short period of time. It feels like an album torn between two worlds, one of grief and one of marching on with a no-time-to-dwell, British stiff-upper-lip attitude. The latter is evident in bangers such as Rubberband Girl, the Naked-era Talking Heads groove of Eat The Music and the Prince-featuring and co-penned Why Should I Love You?
These numbers are placed amongst the more reflective - most evident on Moments of Pleasure, where Kate gives ode to the aforementioned Alan Murphy, Micheal Powell (of Powell & Pressburger, who in turn gave us the film The Red Shoes), dancer Gary Hurst and Bill Duffield, who died tragically during Kate’s 1979 tour (which was up until 2014’s Before The Dawn her only ever tour). But it’s the reminiscing of her mother that packs the most punch - “And I can hear my mother saying… "Every old sock meets an old shoe"... Ain't that a great saying?... "Every old sock meets an old shoe"... Here come the hills of time”.
MOJO put it seventh in their feature from July. It is nice that The Red Shoes is not at the bottom, though I feel people still don’t discuss it. Because it is thirty-three on 1st November, I did want to show it some love and appreciation:
“Its inner sleeve image of juicy fruit with seeds spilling out points to what came next (ie motherhood), but The Red Shoes is half future hope, half immediate pain (her mother and other bereavements, her break-up with bassist Del Palmer). Dry eyes are impossible while Moments Of Pleasure mourns the people, and You’re The One mourns the love. But Eat The Music and Rubberband Girl come bouncing back. Bush may have retrospectively voiced her unhappiness at how these songs turned out, returning to them on The Director’s Cut, but it’s easily up there with her greatest work”.
I want to get to some reviews of The Red Shoes. Though it is important to bring in an interview from 1993. We get an idea of where she was and what was being asked. I think it was a point where Kate Bush was tired of promotion and the whole cycle. It was an exhausting time. She did not want to make another album right away after The Red Shoes. He plan was to take a year out. After that, she wanted to extend that. Bush felt that The Red Shoes was too long. She wanted to give people value for money in the C.D. age. Aerial was more an album for vinyl. Though a double, she did not want to repeat mistakes.
I have used this Time Out 1993 interview. I wanted to bring it in again. There were not a tonne of print interviews in 1993. Though you do get a sense of how people perceived her. That idea that she was a bit mad, reclusive or strange. Though, as interviewers discovered, she is unique, charming and down to earth. I think these myths about her still present in 1993:
“She pours tea and places herself on the edge of her chair. She is small, not minute, and erect. One booted leg crosses the other and bumps gently up and down. She cocks her head and waits. She is courteous, cool and suspicious.
My friend Catherine has never opened any post addressed to Kate Bush. There was, however, a letter that came addressed merely to 'Catherine '. So Catherine opened it. Inside was a lot of stream-of-consciousness stuff about dreams, and about how the writer was watching Catherine. So Catherine snorted, noted the postmark and forgot about it. Then another letter arrived, identically addressed, from the same postal region; then another, and another, each of them increasingly weird and disturbing. Sometimes three would arrive in a day. And it so happened that on the day that Catherine decided to go to the police, a letter arrived that included a reference to Catherine's poetry and music, neither of which are big with Catherine. Also, the letter included the appellation Kate.'
'It's so nice to talk about my work for once,' she says. By this she means she's glad we've started by talking about the great film director Michael Powell and his influence on her, which is signally manifest in the title track of her new album 'The Red Shoes'.
'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 did want to end with The Quietus and their feature from 2018. Marking twenty-five years of The Red Shoes. Rather than it being a misstep or an average album – a lot of the reviews I have seen are quite negative -, it is filled with many moments of pleasure. It most definitely is:
“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.”
As heart-rending as those two tracks are, the simplicity of The Red Shoes can be endearingly playful. In 2o11, Bush called the happy-go-lucky ‘Rubberband Girl’, with its twanging guitars and parping trombones and trumpets, a “silly pop song”: she’s right, and the reason it spreads so much contagious joy is because you can tell she and her band are having such a ball, especially when she wails “rub-a-dub-dub” and makes her voice wobble and vibrate like a boinging bungee cord. The calypso-flavoured ‘Eat The Music’, which features Malagasy musician Justin Vali on the valiha and the kabosy, is equally fun, as Bush puts a new spin on the idea of getting fruity with a lover. “Let’s split him open, like a pomegranate,” she chants. “Insides out/ All is revealed.” “I wanted it to feel joyous and sunny, both qualities are rife in Justin as a person,” said Bush, who met Vali through her brother Paddy. “I just had to provide the fruit.”
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.”
And if Bush has dabbled with the gothic and supernatural ever since ‘Wuthering Heights’, there’s more magick on the moody, witch-rock of ‘Lily’, a tribute to her friend and spiritual healer, Lily Cornford. “I said ‘Lily, oh Lily, I’m so afraid,’” trembles Bush. “I fear I am walking in the vale of darkness.” She banishes the evil spirits with fire and the help of four angels, although Gabriel, Raphael, Michael and Uriel couldn’t save The Line, The Cross And The Curve, the Bush-directed film-meets-visual-album which included videos for ‘Lily’ and five of the LP’s other songs. Inspired by Powell’s original movie, the singer is tricked by Miranda Richardson into wearing the cursed ballet slippers, and must free herself from the curse under the tutelage of Lindsay Kemp. It was, Bush later claimed, a “load of old bollocks”.
It’s easy enough to find the common thread running through The Red Shoes: time and time again she returns to being brave, to being strong, to being open, to having to decide between holding on or letting go, and still trusting you’ll come out OK on the other side. There is, admittedly, less of a sonic coherence, especially in its latter stages. ‘Constellation Of The Heart’ is a colourful swirl of funky guitars, organs and saxophone, while ‘Big Stripey Lie’ is built upon Nigel Kennedy’s gorgeous violin but is undercut by bitty guitars and discordant squiggles of noise, its scorched beauty hinting at violent chaos as Bush frets: “Oh my god, it’s a jungle in here.”
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”.
Thirty-three years old on 1st November, I did want to speak about The Red Shoes. Two singles were released before the album came out. Rubberband Girl on 6th September, 1993. Eat the Music came out as a U.S. single. Moments of Pleasure arrived on 15th November. I have celebrated Rubberband Girl in a separate feature. In terms of The Red Shoes, go and listen to it, as there are some many highlights. I know the production sound is not great. However, focus on the lyrics and vocals. Those interesting songs you may have overlooked, such as Big Stripey Lie and Constellation of the Heart. The Red Shoes clearly is…
AN incredible album.