FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s The Sensual World at Thirty-Seven
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Why Rework Some of Its Gems for Director’s Cut?
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I have written another feature…
about Kate Bush’s six studio album, The Sensual World. It was released on 16th October, 1989. I did want to bring in reviews of the album in 1989 and a more recent one. Although it is not praised as highly as 1985’s Hounds of Love, The Sensual World is one of Kate Bush’s best. I do love the production throughout the album. It does confuse me why Bush decided to rework tracks from the album for 2011’s Director’s Cut. You can understand why a few tracks from The Red Shoes (1993) were reworked. The production on that album not great. A bit edge or compacted. However, I feel that the production throughout The Sensual World is tremendous. You can hear that genius through The Fog, Heads We’re Dancing and This Woman’s Work particularly. Kate Bush one of the greatest producers ever. I will expand on that later. I do want to start out with an interview from Intentional Musician that was published in December 1989. An interesting discussion around the album:
“Sitting comfortably in the high tech surround of Abbey road studios, Kate Bush, that most English of English roses, is trying to define exactly what English music really is.
"I think lyrically there's a lot that defines English music, and I suppose a certain approach to sounds," she considers emotively. "There are very definite American approaches to sound - guitar sounds, approaches to songs, the Fender Rhodes; as soon as you hear that it's America. But to actually define African, or American."
Which may go some way to explain why her new album, The Sensual World, is so mixed in its influences and so far removed from anything we may immediately consider to be English. A swirling mass of eastern European rhythms, Bulgarian singing, Irish fiddling and that unique vocal and lyrical quality that belongs to Kate Bush. But then Kate Bush isn't the type to be influenced by day time radio; not for her hours spent tuned in to the inane ramblings of Gary Davies and co.
"I don't spend much time listening to radio, and when I do it tends to be Radio 4. I guess we spend so much time listening to music in a very sensitised way, in recreational terms, that you need relief for the ears. I tend to listen to more when I just finish an album, rather than during, which is stupid.
"A good example of this is that when I finished the last album, I heard this Bulgarian music. (Les Voix de Bulgare, the extraordinary close-harmony choir whose two Les Mystere albums were surprise hits for 4AD). I thought 'Shit, I wish I'd have heard this while I was working on the album.' I think it was good in one way because I had a lot of time to think about the possibility of doing something with them. The thing that would worry me a bit is that if you like something you are influenced by it, and I'd probably try and connect to other people's music of that time. it takes me such a long time to make an album that it would be drastically out of date."
This is, perhaps, something of an underestimate. It's been nearly four years since we had the opportunity to discuss her then current album, Hounds of Love. Surely she hasn't been working on The Sensual World since then?
"I was saying to Del (Palmer - boyfriend/ bass player/ programmer/ mixer) that I think my tapes wouldn't know what to do if they weren't left sitting around for years. I think they'd have a nervous breakdown - they go through a fermenting process. Like wine, or something. I don't do anything to the songs, I just sit and let the tapes mature.
"I think in real terms it's been about two and a half years, and it's been done in bits. We started and then took quite a few months off to do a few things at home, and also it was the only way I could cope with this album - to keep taking breaks. It's quite an intense process - especially Del and I working together so isolated. We had to take a lot of breaks to think about stuff. A lot of time with this album was spent thinking. Not actually doing, but just thinking."
Home is where the Art is
As with Hounds of Love, The Sensual World was recorded mainly in Kate's home studio, with orchestral parts added at Abbey Road, Irish extras in Windmill Lane, Dublin, and the Bulgarian women recorded at Angel studios. The result is as diverse as it is interesting, and on first listening much more complex than her other albums.
"Some of them are really bizarre - I worry about my sanity sometimes, really. All of the tracks have taken such completely different processes."
Including the opening track, also the first single, which didn't quite end up as Kate imagined it initially would.
"Now that was a really complicated process for a track to come together. It started off with a song - no words. I'd had this idea for about two years to use the words from Molly Blooms' speech at the end of Ulysses, which I think is the most superb piece of writing ever, to a piece of music. So Del had done a Fairlight pattern, and I'd done a DX riff over the top of it, and I was listening to it at home, and the words fitted absolutely perfectly. I thought God this is just ridiculous, just how well it's come together.
"We then approached the relevant people for permission to use the lyrics, and they just would not let me use them. No way. I tried everything. So I thought if we're really getting nowhere with this, let's take a different approach to the song. I heard this piece of music which a fan sent in about two years earlier, and we put the tune in the choruses in place of what we had. So that went in, and all the lyrics I had to change.
"To try and keep the sense of the original words, but something that would be original, I came up with this idea of Molly Bloom stepping out of this speech into the real world. And in the book she's such a sensual woman - womanly, very physical, it just seemed that she would be completely taken by the fact that this 2D character could actually go around touching. So that's what it turned into. The fact that they didn't let me use the lyrics turned the song into something very different. It was such a complicated process, and really quite painful to actually let it go".
I am going to end by seeing where The Sensual World sits when critics rank her album. After Hounds of Love, there would have been this sense she would follow it with an album that was very similar. Instead, The Sensual World is very different. In terms of its lyrical themes and production sound. Let’s come to some 1989 reviews for The Sensual World:
“A strange and remarkable record which has very little to do with anything else musical, a fair bit to do with the real world of sex, love, and introversion, and everything to do with uniqueness. Kate Bush remains alone, ahead, and a genius.
David Quantick, NME, 1989
Bush’s strongest point has always been her ability to acutely sum up female sensuality without ever crossing the line between erotic and crass… this is some of the most intriguing ethereal music she has written.
Billboard (USA), 1989
Calm, expansive and serene, it’s a womanist record… acknowledging rather than challenging. She’s most effective when going deep inside to investigate something more focused pliant and tangible.
Lucy O’Brien, City Limits, 19 October 1989
With the lyrical ‘Sensual World’ Kate has created her most personal record yet. She has turned her back on the mainstream and created a very intimate album… the exciting thing about this record is the new sounds Kate brings into her very British universe… hypnotic and alluring.
Lars Schwandler, MM (Denmark), October/November 1989
A song cycle as rich and deep as this takes years to mature. Her original use of rhyme and metre, the wide frame of reference she draws on as a composer, and her inventive and fearless approach to singing fall into perfect sync on nearly every song.
Kristine McKenna, Musician (USA), December 1989”.
There is so much love and praise for The Sensual World. I am going to come to a 2022 piece. One that argues The Sensual World is Kate Bush’s greatest work. An album where she documented the highs and lows of passion. When promoting Director’s Cut in 2011, Kate Bush did say that the songs she selected from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes could benefit from having new life breathed into them. A sense of dissatisfaction with the albums. I listen to The Sensual World and cannot see any downsides or lack of life. It is one of the most alive and enduring Kate Bush albums. I think that Graeme Thomson wrote in his biography, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush, how the songs burn at a lower heat than Hounds of Love. Everything a little bit tepid. I would disagree. Each song blossoms into life. Pitchfork used words ‘lush’ and ‘mature’ when reviewing it. It is a subtle and insular work, but one that is beautifully produced and arranged. I am interested in this Substack piece. It ends like this: “If there is a better observation of her spirited, blooming Romanticism than an investigation of the very feeling that spurs it, for all of its costs and rewards, I’ve yet to hear a work that reaches these soaring, magnificent heights”. It does make me wonder why Kate Bush felt unease or displeased with The Sensual World. Or at least some of its tracks:
“During the creation of The Sensual World, Kate Bush turned 30, reaching a milestone that inspired an evolving approach to her work. In 1989, she told NME that the album represented a newfound understanding of her own music, a shift away from the concentrated expressions of power that she associated with the “male energy” she sought to display in releases like The Dreaming and Hounds of Love. The Sensual World is comparatively more subdued than its predecessors, although definitely not without its own sense of bombast, but one that is allowed to launch forth after indulging in its own grounded spectacles, rather than existing solely to build upon itself. Her lyricism is much more centered, too—instead of yearning for an opportunity to run up that hill that is just out of reach, her poetry embraces intimacy and renders it equally as stirring as her more exclamatory aspirations.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the title track that opens the album, lead single “The Sensual World.” For this song, Kate Bush famously wanted permission to adapt James Joyce’s Ulysses, but she couldn’t acquire the rights, resolving to write her own lyrics that more so interpolate the original passage than outright quote it. The song contains several of her signature touches, drawing special attention to the natural details that appear throughout the album. Even then, these images take on a specifically evocative quality here, as Bush’s sultry murmurs imbue each reference to fruit and fauna with an especially florid, textured resplendence, making the song unapologetically sexy without ever fully giving away its hand. No doubt it’s intended to be a sex song: the continued incorporation of Bush purring “mmh, yes” only further immerses the listener into its narrator’s orgasmic state. Yet that state resembles more of a trance than raging fire, as exemplified by the temperance of the instrumental arrangement, which mirrors the lyrical references to “where the water and the earth caress” as a popping keyboard line, bass guitar, and even a whip provide the foundation over which a gorgeous line of Uilleann pipes (a form of bagpipes) glides.
That Bush managed to implement bagpipes into a song in a way that sounds genuinely erotic is in of itself a testament to her immense talent as a composer, but the role of the Uilleann pipes serves as an interesting component in the establishing the album as a whole. Whereas a song like the aforementioned “Jig of Life” from Hounds of Love was intended as pure tribute, calling back to her ancestry as a dare to keep moving forward, in “The Sensual World,” the pipes are woven into the mix, acting as the babbling brooks that glisten atop the greater arrangement’s various crevices. It’s a fitting choice for a song that is very clearly grounded in sex while also being about so much more: the chorus refrain of “stepping out of the page” catalyzes a sense of beginning that resembles the birth of its very own album, its instrumentation reaching back into the histories of the people who made Kate Bush who she is in order to forge her own conception with the tools she already has.
Indeed, on The Sensual World, nature is shown not only as a creative muse, but as a primeval force of will, too, two modes of being that feed into each other. “Reaching Out,” arguably the song that speaks in the broadest language, compares a sunflower stretching towards light to the image of a man extending himself for a romance he can never truly attain, quite literally establishing that humanity can never find itself proven superior to nature, but can only complicate its fundamental patterns. Yet Bush’s delivery isn’t apathetic or snide in its judgment; quite the opposite, in fact, as what the song lacks in detail it redeems in bombast, as Bush commands her words with an sustained belting that seems to voice the souls of her subjects themselves, even at their most archetypal.
The Sensual World compresses and expands its perspective to fit each individual narrative at hand, some of which are focused on one particular story, while some are more content to observe a pattern, and others to capture an essence of a relationship while leaving the contours to audience interpretation. Kate Bush intended this album’s structural component to resemble a collection of vignettes, and this serves the complete picture well; the songs are bound by a common sense of vigor rather than a linear narrative structure, which allows each individual track to crest and swell which as much grandeur as needed while never losing momentum. This choice is appropriate, as the impressionistic quality of the album means that the narrative structure becomes more fluid from song to song, relying on a common theme rather than a sense of escalation to bind these stories.
When people discuss the works of art with which they wish they could interact again for the first time, film and literature tend to be prioritized as the mediums of choice for such conversations. Albums tend to be so embedded within our psyches so much that they move with us as our lives grow and change, not in the least because they’re easily the shortest art form of the three I have just listed. Regardless, when I think of an album I would love to hear for the first time again, one of the few selections I could even seriously consider is The Sensual World. I remember what it felt like when I first heard the uproarious “Love and Anger” and realized that my affection for this album spanned far beyond the reaches of its title track. After having been somewhat disappointed in prior albums that had been acclaimed as hallmarks of Kate Bush’s catalog, hearing The Sensual World for the first time felt like an epiphany, one that was so special because it didn’t stop; its profundity was everlasting.
It’s that sustained desire to interact with this album with fresh eyes again, though, that makes me understand just how valuable it is that I have the privilege of returning to its charms again and again. I truly could have written so much more for this essay than I did; I have so many thoughts on each individual track that I had to limit myself to observations that accentuated the central points of my overall thesis. The very qualities that have made me adore this album are those that make me want to relive the serendipitous moment of discovery all over again, and yet make me ever so grateful that I reveal new details of its construction with each passing listen”.
I can appreciate Bush wanted to rework songs from albums where she was not happy with. I do feel that the new versions of the songs she took from The Sensual World are inferior to the originals. Flower of the Mountain is The Sensual World. Bush got permission from the James Joyce estate to use Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses. I do prefer her original lyrics and the production on the 1989 song. Deeper Understanding, about the grip and impact on computers and how, even in the 1980s, Bush could see how they would dominate people’s lives, is not as radical in 2011. Also, the version on The Sensual World is warmer and better. Never Be Mine is also superior on The Sensual World. Not that Director’s Cut took anything away from the 1989 album. It does appear odd that she would be unhappy with anything on it. I love The Sensual World, and it is up there with her best work. The production throughout is superb. Those who say that many of the songs are mainstream or conventional are incorrect. As Bush entered her thirties, on this album, we hear psychological growth and, as Classic Album Sundays wrote, “emotional maturity, acoustic textures, and grounded human storytelling”. They also say that, “As a whole, The Sensual World captured just how far Bush had come by detailing the momentous transition from her youthful 20s into the emotional maturity of her 30s – a process she herself described as a “mental puberty”. But the album proved that she didn’t need to sacrifice the wide-eyed excitability of her earlier material in order to explore the increasingly complex contours of her recording personality”.
I do want to end with this article from Rough Trade from 2023. When ranking Kate Bush’s albums, they placed The Sensual World third. I do hope that the album gets some new articles written about it as it approaches its thirty-seventh anniversary:
“On Kate’s sixth album, you’ll discover old friend David Gilmour shredding on the underrated Love And Anger, Michael Nyman arranging the (fantastic) Balanescu Quartet on Reaching Out, whilst the Bulgarian vocal ensemble, Trio Bulgarka, lend backing vocals to several tracks. The Fog features fiddler-for-hire Nigel Kennedy and Kate’s father’s dulcet tones, whilst her brother, Paddy, plays swishing fishing rod(!) on the title track. Heads We’re Dancing has Japan’s Mick Karn doing what he does best with a fretless bass, whilst Kate reflects on the fate of being asked to dance by Hitler, completely unaware of just how big a shit he is.
This Woman’s Work brings the album to a close, a song which contains an introduction so exquisitely heartfelt it could indeed produce blood from a stone. Written from a male point-of-view and specifically for the scene in John Hughes’ 1988 film, She’s Having A Baby, where Kevin Bacon’s character learns that the lives of his wife and their unborn child are in danger. The song still resonates with a timeless air and has been used countless times on other films, TV shows and adverts - a weapon to cut through any static, to simply deliver the cry of a woman, hurting. The hidden gem within is Never Be Mine a song besotted by the fine line of fate and inner turmoil to let go of it. “I want you as the dream, not the reality”, Kate reflects, knowing that fantasy will always arouse more than the truth, but never the twain shall meet. Much akin to a 13 year old penning The Man With The Child In His Eyes, it’s an astonishingly mature work for a 30 year old, produced sumptuously”.
All of this does make me think that the unhappiness Kate Bush felt about some of The Sensual World’s songs is misplaced. What could she have heard in Deeper Understanding or Never Be Mine that compelled her to rerecord them?! The album is a gem. It turns thirty-seven on 16th October, so I did want to publish another feature. I do really think that The Sensual World is…
A true masterpiece.