BUSH turned 30 on July 30, 1988. She spent the day volunteering as a shop assistant at Blazer’s boutique in London to raise money, alongside scores of other celebrities, for an AIDS charity (which was in itself significant; the disease was soon to have a direct impact on her life and music), looking relaxed and happy as she posed for the inevitable photo op in front of the equally inevitable cake. There was no sign of the additional weight around her face and body which had been so apparent when she appeared at The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball in April 1987 and was even more evident when she descended from the heavens to sing ‘Don’t Give Up’ with Peter Gabriel at Earls Court that summer, and which brought with it tabloid rumours – cheap shots in all but name – that she was pregnant.
Nothing quite so dramatic was happening, just another recurrence of an imbalance in the work-diet-exercise dynamic. To rectify the situation, Stewart Avon Arnold was called in to put together a programme designed to get her back into shape. “Once or twice a week I’d go over to her house and give her a work out,” he says. “It was very regimented, it had to be. There was no, ‘Right, that’s enough, you can relax now if you want to.’ No, no, no! I did it as though it were a professional class. She came out totally sweating and exhausted, otherwise there’s no point. It was a pure 90 minutes work out, physical training and dancing. We would sit around and have a cup of tea and a chat afterwards, that was something to look forward to.”
Like the gaining and shedding of a few pounds, on the surface the changes taking place in Bush’s life were almost comically fractional. She tried to cut down on her smoking and switched from Benson & Hedges to the milder Silk Cut; she was spotted at the odd show, including those by Dave Gilmour’s Pink Floyd, her new friend Nigel Kennedy and old collaborator Davey Spillane, all of whom would appear on the next album; she added fish to her diet, at the same time as lending her name to the Vegetarian Society’s campaign to stop excessively cruel practices within the meat production industry.
There were, as ever, no great personal extravagances or jaunts to far flung sunny climes – “I’d rather stay at home,”1 she shrugged – although she did find time for a short break in France with her family. Off duty she was usually dressed down in jeans, jumpers, boots or trainers and, as ever, chose to relax by watching films and television and, increasingly, gardening. She appeared on BBC 2’s Rough Guide To Europe in August 1988 to select her favourite sights in London, and seemed reconciled with the city; she was once again based mostly at Court Road in Eltham.
And yet, while hardly a gravely tolling bell, her thirtieth birthday provides a useful point of reference. In the years and songs that immediately follow, a shadow slowly falls across Bush’s work. Not the metaphysical phantoms, demons and ghosts that have always lurked in the psyche of her songs, to be called up and dismissed when the need arises, but something less easy to negotiate: the deeper, longer shadows of death, disenchantment, broken relationships and ageing arrive on her doorstep and – often clumsily and uncomfortably, as though she really has no choice – inveigle their way into the heart of her music.
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She was already up to her hips in the next album, which for the first time involved a close collaboration with other female singers. Bush first heard the extraordinary diaphonic siren call of the Trio Bulgarka in 1985, towards the end of the Hounds Of Love sessions. It hit her with a physical force, demanding her attention, though it would be three years before their paths finally converged.
The Trio consisted of Yanka Rupkina, Eva Georgieva and Stoyanka Boneva, three middle-aged women who had been singing traditional Bulgarian music both together and apart for a couple of decades and had contributed to the semi-legendary compilation Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares, first released by a Swiss label in 1975 and later reissued, in 1986, on Britain’s hip indie imprint 4AD. Bulgarian folk had already exerted a small but appreciable influence on western popular music. In the mid- to late-Sixties, the State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir’s album, Music Of Bulgaria, The Ensemble Of The Bulgarian Republic, was released on the Nonesuch label and reached the likes of David Crosby and Graham Nash, soaking up the vibes a world away in the blissed-out, false idyll of Laurel Canyon. They were stunned by its otherworldly sound.
“Those women sing rings around everybody in the world,” said Crosby many years later. “They make the Beach Boys sound loose. They did things that no one else has ever done. Repeatedly. And they were a huge influence on Nash and myself both. We listened to that album probably a couple of hundred times. There is no question they influenced me, strongly. I thought that was the best part singing I have ever heard in my life.”2
Almost 20 years later, it was Paddy (but of course) who first introduced Bush to this astonishing music. She was “devastated”3 by its emotional purity, likening their voices to those of angels, although there was nothing sweet or mellifluous about it. Singing from the throat rather than the chest, the trio employed diaphonic stylings, the lead vocalist singing the melody while the others sustained a single drone note, creating an effect much like that of a bagpipe. Punctuating the dissonant, brittle harmonies in sevenths and ninths with strange whoops, trills and yelps, the results were raw and powerful, utterly alien to western ears and yet touching the receptive listener at a profoundly deep level.
The three women had been involved in the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir and, like all its members, came from the more remote, rural regions of Bulgaria. Together they sang the preserved music of a lost world. “[Bulgaria] was under the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, and the part of the population that wasn’t slaughtered went into hiding in the mountains,” says Borimira Nedeva, a Bulgarian musicologist, composer and translator who, in the Eighties, was executive manager in the copyright agency of the country’s state music department and worked closely with Bush on her sessions with the Trio. “They made nests of culture that couldn’t be reached, and they preserved language, [identity], songs. It was absolutely isolated for 500 years, and these songs are sung in [that] old style.”
The influence of Irish folk music had steadily become more pronounced in Bush’s music, and in making an atavistic connection with Bulgarian peasant music she perhaps subconsciously recognised a link with the musical heritage of her mother. “Irish (and Scottish) folk music and Bulgarian folk music have so much in common, that one wonders how it jumped through the whole of Europe,” says Nedeva. “There are so many things that I just can’t explain: bagpipes, tartan, the folk stories, the stamping of the feet in the dances. When I see Riverdance I think, this is a Bulgarian folk dance! But they have sharp differences as well, which is why a lot of people can’t make the parallel. The style of singing is totally different.”
After hearing the Trio, Bush resolved to use the women’s voices in some capacity, but it took her nearly three years to develop the thought and also to pluck up the courage. Faced with the purest of folk sources, she worried that mere pop music was perhaps an unbecoming home for such deep reserves of raw beauty and unadorned emotion. She was concerned that the Trio would be “belittled”4 by her music, but it wasn’t as big as leap as it might have first appeared: it was simply her boldest attempt yet at unifying musical worlds.
Eventually, she phoned producer Joe Boyd. A genuine pioneer in the development of folk-rock and much else besides, Boyd had worked with everyone from Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and the Incredible String Band to John Martyn, Billy Bragg and R.E.M., and had first become involved with the Trio Bulgarka in 1986, when he visited Bulgaria to put together the all-star folk group Balkana, of which the Trio were a part. He subsequently signed them to his Hannibal label and released their album The Forest Is Crying in 1988.
“The phone rang in my office and my assistant looked at me funny as she pressed the hold button,” recalls Boyd. “‘It’s Kate Bush for you,’ she said. Kate told me that she had heard – from Danny Thompson, I believe – that I was the man to talk to about Bulgarian music. She said she wanted to have Bulgarian harmonies on a couple of tracks on her new album. I told her the best way to accomplish that would be to go to Sofia and work out the arrangements there. She hates to fly, but agreed to go next time I went, which was a month or so after our conversation.”
In October 1988 Bush duly flew to Sofia, a giant leap out of her physical comfort zone and, even for an artist as fearless as she, a bold step into unknown musical territory. She stayed in the capital for a weekend, meeting the Trio and attempting to find some common ground between her songs and their culture. The following week all four women were back in London for several more days’ intense work on three songs; within the space of a fortnight they were done, and Bush had radically altered the landscape of her new album. When it comes to her music, she often resembles a chess Grand Master: she can spend an inordinate amount of time plotting her next move, but she can certainly move fast enough when it’s time to strike.
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The Bulgarian sessions gave fresh impetus to a project that had been stuttering a little, struggling to find its identity. With much of 1986 given over to publicity and feeling for a new musical direction, it was early 1987 before Bush turned seriously to the new record. She was given a push from the outside. One of her most accessible, enduringly beautiful songs, ‘This Woman’s Work’ was written in the spring of that year for the romantic comedy She’s Having A Baby. It was a bespoke creation, commissioned by the film’s American director John Hughes and designed specifically to match the scene in which an expectant father (Kevin Bacon) sits in a hospital waiting room and silently faces up to his considerable shortcomings as a husband and a man while his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) struggles to deliver a breach baby. The song was a perfect fit, and in truth the power of Bush’s voice, unadorned piano and carefully crafted words gave the scene an emotional punch the rest of the movie failed to sustain or arguably even deserved.
‘This Woman’s Work’ touches on familiar Bush concerns. Its urgings that we make the most of life and its regret at words and acts of love left unexpressed (“All the things I should’ve given but I didn’t”) echo ‘All The Love’, but the sense of it being almost a sequel to ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ (time, finally, for this overgrown boy to stop being a kid) ensures that it also looks forwards, neatly teasing out some of the themes that would become central to her next two albums: growing up, breaking apart, facing adversity, female strength – above all, a putting away of childish things.
With additional orchestral overdubs, recorded much later with Michael Kamen at Abbey Road, ‘This Woman’s Work’ appeared on The Sensual World over a year after it graced She’s Having A Baby, essentially unchanged. She recalled the writing of it as “quick and easy, because the song had to be about [the scene]. It couldn’t be about anything else. I think that helps tremendously. The big problem with songwriting [is] the blank page; you can start anywhere.”5
There is some evidence that the ‘blank page’, and increasingly the enormity of choice that the studio afforded her, were causing some problems. She and Del had upgraded the farm studio, adding an SSL console and many new tricks and technical treats, and she felt “overwhelmed by the amount of equipment around me. It was quite stifling, and I made a conscious effort to move away from that, and treat the song as the song.”6
In the end The Sensual World turned out to be a songwriter’s album filtered – not always successfully – through the available technology, neither terribly elaborate in design nor particularly conceptual in its ambitions. Working primarily with her Fairlight III and the DX7 synth to form demo-masters, Bush wrote quickly but then took a break of several months while she struggled to find her direction. “I wrote a few songs but it didn’t take me long to realise I wasn’t happy with them,” she said. “I went through a period where I couldn’t write at all. I thought I’d lost it. Didn’t have anything to say and I didn’t want to go out … I went back to it bit by bit and eventually worked it through.”7
She proposed a record of “10 short stories”8, flitting between distinct moods and textures. Once again writing and recording dissolved into one long process. Her working methods had become even more refined since Hounds Of Love and the time frame was loose. Del was now her principal engineer and often they worked alone; they could go home for the day if things weren’t working out, or indeed take an extended break to allow her to evaluate where they were. A friendly face such as Haydn Bendall appeared now and again to add experience and expertise, and of course the family were constantly around, providing tea, sandwiches and exotic instrumentation – this time, folks, say hi to the valiha (a Madagascan bamboo tube zither) and the tupan (a Balkan drum) – on tap.
Periodically, musicians were also invited in to add a splash of paint to the canvas. Bush called upon her usual retinue of drummers, bassists and guitar players, augmented by some exceptional craftsman in their chosen fields, such as Celtic harpist Alan Stivell, or Nigel Kennedy, the brash, somewhat contrived enfant terrible of modern British classical music. They each performed alone to the existing backing track, and even then usually a composite of several different takes would be used.
The sense was of a musical jigsaw being slowly and rather painfully assembled. The first track written, ‘Love And Anger’, was still being laboriously manipulated into shape over two years later, and even after the record’s release Bush still didn’t regard it as finished, nor indeed have much idea what it supposed to be about. The title song also underwent a long and troubled birth. Written with a DX7 and built on a sparse rhythm track, much of the musical texture was added during sessions at Windmill Lane in Dublin, where Irish instrumentation was also added to ‘The Fog’ and ‘Never Be Mine’, and where Davey Spillane’s piped Macedonian air accentuated Bush’s vaguely Eastern melody on one of her most seductive compositions.
Bush had been inspired to write ‘The Sensual World’ after hearing the celebrated Irish actress Siobhan McKenna read the torrential closing soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses, where the character Molly Bloom recalls – in lovely, liquid detail – her earliest sexual experience, the moment she gave herself, in body and mind, to husband-to-be Leopold Bloom. As a piece of writing it’s a rolling monument to unashamed female desire, a celebration of a purely physical life-force. Ulysses was first published in its entirety in 1922 and Bush, believing that the novel was now out of copyright, simply lifted parts of Molly’s speech and sang them over the soft, swaying backing track, astonished at how well the words fitted. Those who heard the track in this original incarnation regard it as one of her greatest pieces of work. Presumably, in style and structure this song closely mirrored the version of ‘Flower Of The Mountain’ eventually released on Director’s Cut.
“Jeez, it was a stunning record,” says Jimmy Murakami, director of the animated classics The Snowman and When The Wind Blows and, later, Bush’s 2005 video for ‘King Of The Mountain’. “Kate came to me in the late Eighties when I had a commercial studio in Dublin. She wanted me to do a video promo on this song, this beautiful music for James Joyce’s lines for Molly Bloom. I went over to her house in England and she played this track and it was absolutely fantastic. It was done. She said she thought it was PD [Public Domain] but I told her I wasn’t so sure, because the Joyce relative who lives in Paris [Joyce’s grandson, Stephen James Joyce] owns it. She got nervous about that and she called up and found out that it was true.”
The Joyce estate refused to release the words. Bush, not used to having her creativity stifled by pettifogging red tape, spent over a year trying to gain permission before accepting defeat. “Obviously, I was very disappointed,” she said. “It was completely their prerogative, you know, they don’t have to give their permission, but it was very difficult for me, then, to re-approach the song. In some ways I wanted to just leave it off the album, but we’d put a lot of work into it.”9 It would take over 20 years for her to finally persuade the Joyce estate to relent.
The fact that Bush was already in discussions about making a video for the song (she eventually co-directed the promo clip with the Comic Strip’s Peter Richardson) indicates how far down the line she was before she had to change tack. In the end she kept the backing track and simply “re-approached the words”,10 painting a scenario where Molly, the sensualist in excelsis, steps out of the two-dimensional confines of the page (and out of the clutches of a male author, albeit one with a genius for female dialogue) to experience the joys of the real world.
Bush’s rewrite – painstaking as it was – is remarkably effective, and preserves the giddy sexuality of the original text as well as invoking Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ (“my arrows of desire rewrite the speech”) to provide a decidedly post-modern comment on her own struggles to complete the song. ‘The Sensual World’ is the ultimate hymn of affirmation. The bells at the beginning are celebratory, a marriage or a rebirth is being announced, while the recurring echo of Molly’s long, languorous ‘Yesssss’ – which Joyce referred to as ‘the female word’* – is the perfect expression of Bush’s ability to be directly erotic without being either crass or coy. With its talk of “wearing a sunset” and exalting the down of a peach (in Ulysses Molly describes the female sexual organs as ‘soft like a peach’), the track is a stunning insight into the way Bush seeks to melt into the world of the senses. Art is fine, but nothing is quite as electrifying as simply being. And all this in a four-minute pop song.
The mood music surrounding the new material was obviously feminine. Now in her late twenties and having recognised some of the missteps of her past, Bush felt she had finally gained “power o’er a woman’s body” and began to see the album as “a strong expression of positive female energy.”11 The lyrical themes followed suit: she said frequently that the album was “all about relationships.” This is the very loosest of loose definitions, but true in the sense that, if The Sensual World has any unifying theme, it is the intrinsic human need to connect to something or someone. The album consistently comes back to our desire for contact, which brings moments of joy, warmth and ecstasy, but also loneliness, uncertainty, sadness, pain, unresolved emotions and a striving for all the things we can never have. The need to touch and hold comes, inevitably, with a corresponding awareness of the transience of everything. “The older I get, the more I feel that this is what life is about,” she said. “Letting go of all these things that you get caught up in.”12
It was a bittersweet calling card. ‘The Fog’ swirls between childhood recollection and a very adult dilemma, a song about having the courage to leave the nest and swim alone into deep water, taking solace in the notion that pushing out from safe ground is usually far worse in thought than reality. On the beautiful ‘Never Be Mine’ she examines the perennial fight between dream and fantasy: the battle between reason and instinct, what we know to be true and what we feel, “the thrill and the hurting”, is a recurring motif on the record. Bush is so good at this, capturing the way in which we are entrapped as well as set free – as on the title track – by the things we can’t help but want to feel. And how vividly she conjures up the association of memory, the inescapable conspiracy of the senses which ensure that “the smell of burning fields will now mean you and here.”
‘Heads We’re Dancing’ is a dark little song about the masks we all wear and also place upon the faces of others, marking the distance between who we are and who we appear to be. Inspired by a family friend who had once – unknowingly – sat next to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atomic bomb, and been charmed by this anonymous dinner guest, it told the (highly implausible, it must be said) story of a girl who had waltzed with Hitler in 1939 and found him perfectly alluring until she discovered in the next day’s newspaper that she had effectively been dancing with the devil.
On ‘Reaching Out’ the child not only grasps for the hand that holds, but also the hand that scolds, and also the fire that burns. Every act has a consequence. The song also touches on one of her passions – gardening. “See how the flower leans instinctively towards the light,” she sings. In her mind, music and horticulture seemed to share certain core characteristics. “I’ve planted a flower bed; you have to be very patient,” she said. “And it’s a good thing for me to work with, because making an album, you have to be very patient, and this flower bed helped me tremendously, to watch how things have to fight for space. You have to get the weeds out, a little bit of water every day, every day a little something.”13
Patience was indeed required by all parties who claimed a stake in the album. Even compared to the more leisurely pace of music-making in the mid-to-late Eighties, The Sensual World took its time; the diehard loyalists at the Kate Bush Club Newsletter ceased trading as a point of protest until a new album was forthcoming, but still she would not be rushed. By the summer of 1988 most of the 10 tracks had been mixed by Julian Mendelssohn. EMI badly wanted product and suggested semi-publicly that the album might be released that autumn – a presumption which angered Bush, who knew that it wasn’t ready. She had become so wrapped up in the largely isolated process of recording that in the summer of 1988 she called in Kevin Killen, the Irish engineer she had worked with previously at Windmill Lane and on ‘Don’t Give Up’, and invited him to come and hear some of the mixes. She needed a fresh pair of ears.
They agreed that the mixes were technically excellent but also concurred that the songs and performances weren’t yet finished. Therefore, a full 18 months into the recording of the album, a second wave of studio work started: lifting up the bonnet and getting into the nuts and bolts of the songs, adding, taking away, changing textures and tones, generally seeing what could be improved upon. Bush recorded some new vocals; David Gilmour came in with his box of tricks and added explosive guitar to ‘Love And Anger’ and ‘Rocket’s Tail’; John Giblin added his distinctive bass parts. By far the most radical addition to the album’s overall sound palette, however, was the Trio Bulgarka.
Bush had already written ‘Rocket’s Tail’ for them, a track built almost entirely around the voice and one for which she had conducted a dummy run in her studio, with some friends providing a block of shrieks and gargles to get a sense of “vocal intensity”.14 Ahead of her October trip to Sofia she faxed through the lyrics to the song, a preview which caused understandable bafflement within traditional Bulgarian musical circles. ‘Rocket’s Tail’ describes a couple watching a firework display from Waterloo Bridge, one wishing that they were up there in the sky, experiencing a true, dangerous connection with the world, while the other at first sees only a “stick on fire, alone on its journey”, but then changes her mind and – armed with a witch’s hat, a silver suit, Size 5 boots and a gunpowder pack strapped to her back – transforms herself into a human rocket, “tail on fire”.
Although named in good humour in honour of one of Bush’s three new kittens (the others were Torchy and Sparky), brought into the fold after the death in 1987 of her beloved Zoodle, it was really a deeply symbolic song underscoring the necessity of taking risks, of being able to transcend the constraining pressures of both self and society to live in the moment of dangerous impulse and inspiration. It was an appropriately fearless song to send to Sofia as a statement of intent. If it summed up the spirit of the risky collaboration, it also worked as a standard bearer for Bush’s general artistic ethos: don’t be afraid to crash the rocket.
With this suitably eccentric warning flare lighting her path Bush, accompanied by Joe Boyd, flew to Bulgaria for a weekend in October 1988. It was an eventful few days. She was invited to dinner with the Trio on the first night and watched in astonishment as Eva picked up the phone in order to take her pitch from the dial tone, before the three women began to sing in perfect unison around the kitchen table. Not for the first time, she was almost immediately moved to tears.
But there was much hard work to be done. Translator and musician Borimira Nedeva drove Bush and Boyd around the city to various rendezvous in her tiny little car – at one point it broke down and Bush had to get out and push. It was another apt metaphor for an uphill struggle. The structure of Bush’s songs and their detailed backing tracks could not be changed at this late stage. Meanwhile, the Trio’s harmonies – though they might have appeared raw and spontaneous – were formal and meticulously planned. Between the Trio, Nedeva, arranger Dmitir Penev and Rumyana Tzintzarska, an ethnologist from the state radio station, it was a process of trial and error to find which of these centuries old melodies might best fit Bush’s new songs, a case of trying to bend history, tradition and clashing cultures to suit a shared purpose.
“They spent two days in a school room with Kate and her beat box and a tape of the tracks,” says Joe Boyd. “The ethnographer would suggest a folk melody that might work with a line of Kate’s song, the arranger would come up with a harmony for it and Kate would say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. All those harmonies are arranged, not spontaneous folk harmonies. They couldn’t just play a part on the piano and sing it – the women could only perform if they could fit it into their experience of Bulgarian traditional music. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to sing in the ‘open throat’ style that Kate wanted.”
At the end of the weekend little had been resolved in practical terms. “We didn’t have any idea how we were going to do it!” laughs Nedeva. “The conclusion was that we were going to do it, that was probably the only certain thing.” Bush had already booked time at Angel Studios, and the next step was to move the ensemble to London for recording. Bulgaria was still a Communist country (free elections did not take place until June 1990) with all the restraints that implies, and Boyd had already encountered difficulties in previous trips travelling to the remote villages in order to access music, because they were close to the border and required a special pass; he often had to keep quiet and pretend to be asleep as they approached. Getting the Trio and their entourage back to London at such short notice required similar acts of jiggery-pokery.
“At that time it wasn’t easy to arrange things for foreigners in Bulgaria,” says Nedeva. “The political climate was extremely difficult but I was in a very good position because my father was a high party member, and I managed to open a lot of closed doors. There weren’t any [plane] tickets, and Kate had already booked a studio in London. I had some connections and I went to the main computer and put them in the list of the passengers, which obviously led to the plane being overloaded. They didn’t know how this happened and they put on a second plane. It was crazy times, there was no other way but to go around the circumstances and do what you had to do. They all went on this plane, but I didn’t because I got arrested! I went three days later, which wasn’t too late, fortunately. Music is my life, and I was absolutely convinced that it was a group project that was going to work and deserved to be supported, so I would risk anything.”
It was another example of the extraordinary loyalty Kate Bush and her music inspires, even among those who have only just met her. In this case, it was the establishing of a close human bond between the two sides that enabled the sessions to work. The party which finally arrived in London included the three singers, arranger Penev, and an official translator – Nelli Svetkova – who was effectively there as a state chaperone to ensure the women didn’t defect; no one heard her speak a word of English throughout the entire trip. It was Nedeva, when she arrived, who had the task of translating not just words but also musical ideas, emotions, delicate shifts of emphasis. She felt, she said, “like a live electric wire, high voltage currents running back and forth. I had to shoot words back and forth and see how they react and try to see what’s good and try to promote it. Because sometimes Kate didn’t know what she wanted.”
Fortunately, Bush and the Trio immediately formed a sisterly bond (“She’s modest, with a very big heart,” said Yanka15) and recognised a shared instinct for what they were doing, communicating largely through the use of smiles, hugs and sign language. “They were so emotionally on the same wavelength, there wasn’t much need for words except where there was a specific thing that Kate wanted them to do,” says Nedeva. Bush defined the experience as “extraordinary. They didn’t speak a word of English and we didn’t speak any Bulgarian, but we could communicate through music, so that absolutely transcended barriers. There were things we needed to translate but, generally, we communicated emotionally, and I just loved that…. They’ll just come up and touch you and cuddle you, and you can go up and give them a big cuddle, and I really enjoyed that kind of communication, it felt very real and direct to me.”16
Nonetheless, the few days of sessions at Angel Studios were long and hard, typically stretching from late morning until almost midnight. On Boyd’s advice Bush placed the Trio around a single ambient microphone and, having only scratched the surface in Sofia, most of the experimenting was done in the studio, Penev suggesting arrangements of folk tunes and Bush either agreeing or hinting that they might try something else. For ‘Rocket’s Tail’, the most complex track, Penev’s prepared arrangement combining several traditional ‘Shop’ songs rather miraculously succeeded in fitting Bush’s densely layered opus. Towards the end, however, something extraordinary occurred. Yanka, the de facto leader and a strong, glamorous, imposing presence, reacted to a translated suggestion from Bush by improvising a hair-raising polyphonic solo – i-i-iiiiii – which mimics the explosion and flight of the rocket, triggered by David Gilmour’s solo.
It worked purely on emotion: the Trio didn’t know what any of the songs were about, and the words they sang (“Darling Mando, beautiful girl”) were in no way connected to Bush’s lyrics, but the effect was stunning. Such a freewheeling approach to Bulgarian traditional music was very unusual, and the approach to ‘Rocket’s Tail’ shifted the emphasis of the session. “After Yanka’s solo everything else was mostly improvisations,” says Nedeva. “We found out that this is a better way of working, even though it takes a lot of studio time. When you have a good leader like Yanka, and she starts singing something they don’t know, they can just start singing along and they make perfect harmony. They have this feeling for each other, they are tuned to each other, it’s some amazing inner feeling.”
The next track, ‘Deeper Understanding’, was an astonishingly prescient pre-internet tale of how obsessive computer love engenders a breakdown of communities and families, leading the protagonist to an isolated state where she turns to a machine for solace and interaction. It’s both desperately poignant and yet strangely touching, that amidst such a bleak and lonely existence she still craves emotional connection. “I suppose I liked the idea of deep, spiritual communication … coming from the last place you’d expect it to, the coldest piece of machinery,” she said. “And yet I do feel there is a link. I do feel that, in some ways, computers could take us into a level of looking at ourselves that we’ve never seen before.”17
This was crystal ball stuff. She had toyed with using vocoders and other synthetic special FX to vocalise the computer, but the idea of using instead the raw, human voices of the Trio was inspired, imbuing a song about emotional estrangement with a spiritual, otherworldly dimension. The lack of literal understanding between the two groups – the Trio were simply told to communicate a feeling of despair, while Bush had no idea what they were singing – works perfectly in the context of a song where humans and machines don’t understand each other yet can still find an underlying connection and, improbably, salvage some comfort.
On the third song, ‘Never Be Mine’, the clashing styles and harmonies underscored the divergence of purpose and conflicted feelings at the heart of the lyric. However, by now the newly liberated Trio were also poking a little good-natured fun at their esteemed arranger. When Bush sings “This is what I want to be, this is where I want to be”, the Bulgarians are singing “Mite, Mite, I am not going to ask you”. It was a sly declaration of artistic freedom: ‘Mite’ was Penev’s nickname. While Bush gained much from the collaboration, it was a mutually nourishing relationship – she in turn freed something in the Trio. “It had a great impact on Yanka,” says Nedeva. “Before that she was more confined to the normal ways of doing things, but she took in this creative spark. I think the arranger was a bit put out that his final input maybe wasn’t as much as he wanted. He expressed disappointment about that in a private conversation. He was sulking a bit!” In truth, Penev did a fine job in exceptional circumstances, and Bush had nothing but praise for all his efforts.
It was a highly charged few days, exhausting, emotionally draining and yet hugely rewarding. To compound the pressure, a BBC crew popped in to interview Bush and film her singing with the Trio – a brief piece of film which captures beautifully the bond between the four women – for the Rhythms Of The World series on global music, which aired in March 1989. But nobody forgot the deep, shared love of music that had brought this improbable ensemble together in the first place. During a rare break towards the end of the session, sitting around the studio in a semi-circle, the Trio instinctively broke into a series of ancient Bulgarian love songs. Everyone present – Bush, Paddy, engineer Kevin Killen – promptly burst into tears. Again.
In the end the Trio’s contribution was by far the most discussed and lauded aspect of the record. It added a thrilling extra dimension, although those with a close affinity to Bulgarian music – including Nedeva and Boyd – felt that at times, particularly on ‘Rocket’s Tail’, there may have been too much going on to convey the music at its best. “Kate got to realise her vision,” says Boyd. “Personally, I like to hear those harmonies in a big, open a cappella space, so they sound a bit smaller than I’m used to when blended with a modern mix with lots of instruments. But I was pleased with the project and full of admiration for Kate’s skill as a producer.”
* * *
Editing and mixing continued until May 1989, including a session recording string overdubs with Michael Kamen at Abbey Road. To accommodate the CD and cassette market, a bonus track was added right at the end of the process. ‘Walk Straight Down The Middle’ sprung to life from an old backing track, originally intended as a B-side, which was rapidly dusted down for action. Bush wrote the lyrics and recorded the vocals and synth overdubs in a single day, using the next day for final overdubs and mixing. The track, finished in just over 24 hours, put the seal on a gruelling four year process.
The Sensual World was released on October 16, 1989, just as the leaves were turning gold, preceded by the title track as a single, which entered the charts at number 12.*
‘The Sensual World’ was a marvellous song but it was no ‘Running Up That Hill’, not the kind of track that demanded radio play and propelled the album forwards. The single, highly praised, dropped immediately down the charts, while the following pair – ‘This Woman’s Work’ and ‘Love And Anger’ – barely scraped into the Top 30 and 40 respectively. The album quickly reached number two on the UK album charts and sold well, achieving Gold status (over 500,000 sales) in the US and multiplatinum status (over a million sales) in the UK, but success is about more than facts and figures; it is also about perception.
The album reviews were generally strong, though many contained a ghostly subtext of minor disappointment, a lurking sense of feeling somewhat underwhelmed which was given full vent when the later single releases attracted some highly uncomplimentary comments, as if many of these songs sounded unconvincing stripped from their context – a harsh but not unreasonable viewpoint. Bush dramatically scaled down her promotional activities. TV performances were scarce, there were no personal appearances at all and interviews were generally conducted at discreetly plush London hotels or recording studios. The media were kept at arm’s length and given little access to her world, while almost every interview followed a well travelled path; guarded and measured to the point of dullness, which presumably was the point.
She held round table briefings at a hotel in Kent with 40 overseas journalists, at which 15 paltry minutes were parcelled out to each party with Del hovering in the background, but eventually she relented to a brief promotional visit to US in January 1990. She had signed to Columbia in America, something which EMI’s Brian Southall “never understood – she should have gone to somewhere like Geffen. Small, bespoke. [With CBS] she was just another act signed to a big record company.” In the end, the switch made little material difference to her Stateside fortunes. ‘Love And Anger’ was a college radio hit, achieved a degree of MTV interest and reached number one on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, while the album peaked at 43 on the Billboard chart and received a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Album. Respectable showings, but by no means a breakthrough. She had not escaped her niche as an alternative, marginal act. There’s no suggestion that she ever really wanted to.
In the UK, radio exposure was muted. One of the problems of taking so long to make a record was that world moved on inexorably. Bush emerged from the studio to find a host of ‘new Kate Bushes’ – Sinead O’Connor, Bjork, Enya, Suzanne Vega, Jane Siberry – making ‘quirky’ music; Bulgarian folk had become this year’s hip world music hobby horse while, at a time when the Madchester scene, house music and rave were at the vanguard and people were making highly sophisticated sounding records with the most basic of equipment, she was certainly no longer working at the cutting edge of technology. In a world where U2’s unsubtle Americana shtick ruled the earth, and where Stock, Aitken & Waterman’s pop factory ruled the charts, Bush was listening to Jeff Beck and John Lydon and declared herself largely “in mourning” for good new music.18
She was now a thirty-something member of the art-rock establishment, rather than a thrusting young pop star. She had never been one for following trends, or even being aware of them, but with The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love she had established herself as a pioneer. The Sensual World did little to advance that reputation. It is a fine album, with several moments of breathtaking beauty which tend to obscure some of its failings, but it lacks the imprimatur of wild, unbridled adventurousness that marks out her finest music. It smoulders at a much lower heat than the fireworks of Hounds Of Love and the musical colours are generally more muted, decidedly autumnal, deliberately avoiding the elemental power of her previous album. “[It] had a male energy, but I didn’t want to do that on this album,” she said.19 Rhythm was far less emphasised – even on a song like ‘Heads We’re Dancing’, which is heavily in thrall to the Prince of Parade and Sign O’ The Times, the rhythm track is sparse and mechanical, in no way overpowering.
The downside of this approach was that, aside from the riotous invention of ‘Rocket’s Tail’, there was a certain reined-in conventionality about the musical settings, a uniformity of pace, less leaps through time and space in her lyrics, and the occasional sense of someone trying to bully good-but-not-great material into shape. ‘Between A Man And A Woman’ expresses a fateful view of romantic relationships – “let the pendulum swing” – and holds to a course that outside interference in these matters can be destructive. Hardly an original thought, and one that makes for a remarkably dull song. ‘Heads We’re Dancing’ is an interesting idea, but clunkily told over an unappealing melody. ‘Love And Anger’ sounds like a rather less successful version of ‘The Big Sky’, that other troublesome album track, starting small and ending in a riot of clattering rhythm.
There’s a distinct lack of clarity to the production – overly compressed, the voice in particular sounding uncomfortably squeezed. Bush later came to this realisation herself, returning to four of the songs for Director’s Cut with the intention of cracking them open and allowing them to breathe more easily. She called it her most honest, most personal album, but it frequently sounded cold and a little remote. It’s not the most tactile record. Ironically, aside from the title track, another unimpeachable highlight, the sensuality of The Sensual World largely has to be imagined rather than felt.
* * *
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that something fundamental changed with Bush’s sixth album. There is an audible slackening of intensity which betrayed a conscious re-ordering of her priorities. Henceforth, quality of life would take precedence. “It’s not everything now,” she said of her music shortly after it came out. “I think at some point it was – my work was everything because it had such a sense of importance about it. That’s so stupid, so blown out of proportion, and if you’re not careful that spiralling effect can make you believe what you’re doing is the most important thing in the world! Ha! When it’s absolutely not at all.”20
Of course, she had blazed through her twenties in the manner of someone who very firmly did believe that her work was all-consuming and of primary importance in her life, even if the attention it brought her was usually entirely unwelcome. Now, she was forced by a series of tragic events into recognising that music couldn’t always come first.
The period between The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, and for a spell thereafter, was by far the most challenging of her life. The first portent arrived almost immediately: on October 19, 1989, just days after the new album was released, her guitarist of ten years, Alan Murphy, died of pneumonia in Westminster City Hospital, fatally weakened by the AIDS virus. He was just 35 and, though visibly ailing, had kept the nature and seriousness of his disease largely secret. “I cried my eyes out,” says Brian Bath. “I read it on the front of the Daily Mirror: ‘Kate Bush guitarist…’ I phoned up Paddy, it was such a shock. What a player.”
As he had on Bush’s previous three records, Murphy had added his guitar to The Sensual World, although the last ever song he played on was her cover of ‘Rocket Man’, recorded just after the album was finished in June 1989 for an album called Two Rooms, a tribute to the work of Elton John and Bernie Taupin. John was one of Bush’s favourite artists from her teenage years – “When I asked to be involved in this project and was given the choice of a track it was like being asked ‘Would you like to fulfil a dream?’” she said21 – and she took due care over ‘Rocket Man’, giving it a lilting treatment which divided opinion (the group St Etienne, reviewing it collectively for NME, declared that it made them want to vomit; in 2007 the Observer Music Monthly voted it the best cover version of all time) but was both bold and quietly moving, somehow combining uillean pipes and a reggae beat without scaring the horses. The public vote hoisted it to number 12 in the charts when it was issued as single in late 1991 to coincide with the release of Two Rooms, with her unremarkable, indeed rather cloying, version of ‘Candle In The Wind’ on the B-side.
Bush performed ‘Rocket Man’ on the Wogan show (virtually the only TV show she regularly consented to perform on, not least because it was a favourite of her mother, Hannah) in December of that year, one of her most stunning television appearances. Looking dark and rapturous in a knee-length skirt, she revisited the theme of the video, strumming a ukulele in a subtle homage to Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot; an electric guitar sat on a chair towards the back of the stage in silent and poignant tribute to Murphy.
She later recorded ‘The Man I Love’ for a 1994 album, The Glory Of Gershwin, a celebration of the eightieth birthday of the venerable harmonica specialist Larry Adler, produced by George Martin at Abbey Road. Her sighing, sensuous reading of the standard struck just the right note of wishful projection into a longed-for future – “Someday he’ll come along …” – reinventing Bush for four minutes as a trembling torch singer. It was a side that some of those closest to her career had long encouraged her to show.
“I always wanted her to do an album of covers,” says Bob Mercer. “She did ‘Rocket Man’, which was excellent, and she did a Gershwin thing, and it’s fucking wonderful, and that’s exactly what I was saying to her at the time: ‘I would love you to do covers because I don’t think people understand how good your voice is.’ Her voice was so much a part of her writing that the two just went together; you always got the feeling that she somehow had a peculiar voice, and I wanted people to understand that she really could fucking sing, and to do that you kind of need to say, ‘You’ve heard this song a million times, now listen to her sing it.’ But we never did that. I don’t think she really had any enthusiasm for it, she just went along with the conversation because it was silly old Uncle Bob sounding off. She got a bit pissed at me for going on about it, because the implication in her mind was that I didn’t think her writing was quite up to par, which wasn’t right at all.”
Following Murphy’s premature death, another grim blow followed. One of her two long-standing dance partners, Gary Hurst, also died as a result of AIDS in 1990, again at a heartbreakingly young age. With their passing came a sense of a chapter closing, underscored by the dawning of a new decade and capped by the release in October 1990 of the vast, eight-disc retrospective box-set This Woman’s Work, which included all six of her previous albums as well as two discs of B-sides and rarities.
“I feel the box-set marks the end of an era because I’ll never work with [Alan and Gary] again,” she said. “And I do miss them, and it’s made me think about a lot of things, and I have consciously taken a break from work since their deaths to do nothing. I’ve just taken six months off. I’ve had six months gaps between things, but always carrying this project around, and I don’t know why I haven’t done it before. I’m a bit obsessive about my work you see. But now I can see there’s a part of me that loves not being tied into a project, that loves just to be able to go off.”22
When she did finally begin writing material for The Red Shoes in the middle of 1990, she was determined to “go back to a rooted way of working”23, returning more frequently to the piano, physically playing the song over and over, kneading it into shape. She expressed concerns about her music being “too complicated for people to take in – that they have to work too hard at it.24 Ideally I would like the music to be an easy experience.”25 Like many artists before and since, after the first flush of wild adventure has passed through her work, Bush began to seek a greater, hopefully more profound simplicity in both her words and her music. This wasn’t a commercial aspiration, more a worry that she wasn’t communicating as well as she might, or really getting to grips with what was happening in her own life.
Perhaps as a result, she seemed to crave direct contact, something more spontaneous, a positive outlet for all that negative energy. She talked, intriguingly, of becoming more comfortable being “the observed” rather than the observer.26 At the fan convention in late 1990 she announced that the new songs were leading her in a direction that suggested – “if circumstances allow,” she hedged, “If things go well”27 – that she would be playing live the following year, which was also, she hoped, when the new album would be released.
“The idea of this album was to get it recorded quickly and get out on the road with it,” said Del Palmer. “It didn’t work out that way, but the idea did influence the way the album was put together.”28 The initial plan to make a relatively uncomplicated record was a good one but, as Palmer suggests, it proved unsustainable.
For the first time in many years, the songs were often built upon the sound of a bass player (John Giblin) and drummer (Stuart Elliott) playing together in the same room, giving the songs a live feel. Some of that spontaneous punch is preserved on the record. The title track whipped itself up into an appealing frenzy, ‘Big Stripey Lie’ was engagingly odd if ultimately unconvincing, while ‘Constellation Of The Heart’ featured some of Bush’s most labyrinthine vocal arrangements, a maze of syntaxsnapping call and response trade-offs between Bush and Paddy and Colin Lloyd-Tucker.
“We were in hysterics with all that question and answer business,” says Lloyd-Tucker. “It’s difficult to imagine now, but we’d never heard it until we walked into the room. She was singing us all these answer lines, and we were like, ‘Hang on a minute, what was that?’ We were literally sliding down the walls by the end of the session. Working with her is quite tough. Every syllable had to be bang in time, she’s a perfectionist, which is great, it gets results. When you’re working with her she’s incredibly professional. She’s very relaxed, but she wants to get the job done and you work hard.”
At some point, however, Bush seemed unable to distinguish between what a song needed and what it could live without. ‘Why Should I Love You?’ tends to sum up the problems that afflict The Red Shoes. The demo is simple and moving, a beautiful mixture of voice, organ and rhythm. The song as it appears on the album, however, is wildly overloaded, a hellish broth featuring the attentions of Prince, the Trio Bulgarka, Lenny Henry, a trombone and a flugelhorn, all seemingly straining in different directions. It’s a mess, and a shameful waste of what could have been a truly inspirational collaboration.
Bush and Prince had been edging closer for years. In many ways they were remarkably similar artists: relentlessly mythologised, very private, undeniably eccentric with a dry, quirky sense of humour, obsessed with control and displaying an inventiveness that was often misunderstood and sometimes ridiculed. After Bush turned up at one of his 1990 Wembley shows they had communicated with an eye on a collaboration, and in 1991 Bush sent him the multi-track tape of ‘Why Should I Love You?’ In the words of Del Palmer, it returned “from … Paisley Park studio covered in vocals, guitar solos and keyboards.”29 Prince’s engineer, Michael Koppelman, was less diplomatic, calling his contribution “lame disco”.30 It was certainly wildly over-the-top and unrestrained, and it took Bush and Palmer a further two years to negotiate his maze of overdubs and retain some sense of the original track, eventually retaining only lead guitar, synths and chorus vocals. If it had been anyone other than Prince, you suspect, Bush would have ditched his contributions entirely.
‘And So Is Love’ fell foul of a similar problem. At heart a simple, brooding minor key pop song, it’s dogged by a terribly mainstream, Americanised arrangement which attempts to combine the trademark blues guitar of Eric Clapton – in itself a distressingly conventional sound to hear on a Bush record – with an irritating synthetic keyboard effect. These identity crises happened all over the album, sounds and styles constantly bumping awkwardly into one another, with little attempt to find their common ground. The Trio Bulgarka, likewise, are used on three songs in a manner which largely renders their contribution a shadow of what it had been on The Sensual World.
She had other, more important things on her mind. The process of making The Red Shoes was completely overshadowed by the serious illness of her mother. After Bush had performed ‘Rocket Man’ on Wogan on December 16, 1991, the host, Terry Wogan, had sent a greeting to Hannah, and added a ‘get well soon’ message. She died just two months later, on February 14, 1992, succumbing to cancer aged 73. Roy Harper sang the traditional Irish song ‘The Lark In The Morning’ at her funeral. Everyone was crushed, especially her daughter, who said it felt “like the end of the world.”31
“It obviously devastated her, though I don’t think she let on how much,” recalls Stewart Avon Arnold. Her passing not only left a gaping hole at the very heart of the Bush family, but also in the working and domestic environment of Wickham Farm, in which Hannah had been the centrifugal life force for so many years. “Suddenly she just wasn’t around,” says Charlie Morgan. “And she had always been around.”
Bush’s instincts would normally have told her to push on through a crisis. This time it proved impossible. “Usually I can pull myself through things like feeling low or having problems … but I have been at points where I just couldn’t work,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly sing – it was beyond me, it just hurt too much…. I think that the biggest thing that happened on this album is that my mother died. I couldn’t work for months, I couldn’t go near the whole process. I had no desire to start, no desire to work at all.”32
Somehow the album sessions eventually had to go on. Hannah’s death was too cataclysmic to be digested straight away or directed into the music, but – coming on the back of a period of loss, and a certain confusion about how the record should sound – the impact can be felt throughout the album, which is both pensive, painful and unfocused. “I haven’t been able to write about any of it – nevertheless the experience is there … being expressed through very subliminal things, like the quality of some of the performances,” she said, very honestly.33
‘Rubberband Girl’ is a deceptively jaunty sounding opener, twanging away on a single note, its raw, repetitive groove betraying the fact that it was written quickly in the studio. “When we arrived to do ‘The Red Shoes’, the night before she’d been up doing ‘Rubberband Girl’,” recalls Colin Lloyd-Tucker. “It was very rough, hardly anything on it with just a guide vocal. She was still working out the lyrics – she had a verse, which she kept repeating on the rough version, and said she was going to write the words later.”
The song is a brave attempt but ultimately a futile gesture. This is the album where Bush does not bounce back. In a sense, she spent her first couple of albums as little more than a girl trying on the clothes of a woman. On The Red Shoes, she sounds like a woman trying desperately, and in vain, to cling onto her sense of hope and innocent wonder. “When you lose your mother, you’re no longer a little girl any more,” she said.34
The songs are full of doubt, literally full of questions. Lyrically, the listener can take their pick of lines that might stand as manifestos for the way she was feeling: “We used to say, ‘Ah hell we’re young’, but now we see that life is sad,” she sings on ‘And So Is Love’, in a thought borrowed from Joseph Campbell, the American writer and mythologist and author of The Masks Of God. On ‘Lily’ she even consults her – real life – healer, Lily Cornford, of London’s Maitreya School of Healing, about what to do, because “life has blown a great big hole through me.” The Red Shoes describes a world defined by absences “Life is loss, isn’t it?” she mused. “It’s learning to cope with loss.”35
“Just being alive it can really hurt,” is the killer line from ‘Moments Of Pleasure’, which recalls fleeting times of past happiness while commemorating a sadly growing list of departed friends: her aunt Maureen, Alan Murphy (Smurph) and Gary Hurst (Bubba), Bill Duffield, not forgotten after all these years, and John Barratt (nicknamed ‘Teddy’, from the children’s show Andy Pandy: Bush was ‘Loopy Lou’ and Jon Kelly ‘Andy’), the assistant engineer on Never For Ever and The Dreaming who would enthusiastically join in the game of spinning round and round in the control room chair at Abbey Road.
Michael Powell is also name-checked, the renowned British film director who had worked with Hitchcock and, in 1948, made one of Bush’s favourite films, The Red Shoes, taken from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale in which a ballerina cannot stop dancing. The film inspired the album’s title track and was also a direct influence on Bush’s own short film, The Line, The Cross And The Curve, which she made immediately after finishing the record. She had contacted Powell not long before he died to see whether he’d be interested in working with her, which sparked a short but intense long-distance friendship. While on a visit to New York in the late spring of 1989 to discuss a different master of The Sensual World by Bob Ludwig for the American market, and also to talk tactics with her new record label Columbia, she had met the aged director at the Royalton Hotel during an unseasonal blizzard. Their encounter is recalled in the second verse; he was 84 and already frail, and within a year he too was dead. Although it was recorded in mid-1991 and finished long before her death, Hannah also appears in the song, dispensing one of her stock phrases, “Every old sock meets an old shoe”. Prior to the album’s release, Bush previewed the song on the Aspel & Company talk show on June 20, 1993, on what would have been Hannah’s seventy-fifth birthday.
In other ways, too, The Red Shoes has all the ache of letting go. In Alan Murphy’s absence Danny McIntosh came in to play guitar. A member of the Seventies rock band Bandit, with future Eighties pop star Jim Diamond on lead vocals, McIntosh went on to play in Grand Hotel, a band which featured Ivan Penfold, an old friend of Del and Brian Bath who had played in their pre-KT Bush Band group Conkers and whom Bush had mentored briefly as a writer, playing piano on a couple of his songs. McIntosh had had prior contact with many of those in Bush’s orbit, which may have been the reason he was invited to play on the album. “[Danny] reputedly taught Alan Murphy all his stuff,” says Bath. “Great player.”
His arrival was noteworthy in more ways than one. It coincided with another highly significant change in Bush’s life, for it was during the sessions for The Red Shoes and the filming that took place immediately afterwards that her 15-year romantic relationship with Del Palmer came to an amicable close. Soon after she began dating McIntosh, who remains her partner today and is the father to their son, Bertie.
The break-up was not, as you would expect, conducted publicly. She dealt with it privately, as she had done with her mother’s death. Because of the close working proximity of all parties, however, her friends and colleagues were of course aware that something was afoot regarding her relationship with Del. But what exactly? It was a confusing time for everyone. In addition to Hannah’s death, the album was proving problematic and she appeared to be bouncing between splitting up with Palmer, getting back together with him, then splitting up again. That it wasn’t the happiest or most stable period of her life was obvious to those around her. Nevertheless, when she finally ended up with McIntosh it came as a surprise to many of her friends.
“I didn’t see anything that I thought, ‘Oh, they’re going out together,’” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “We did talk a lot, me and Danny, on the set, but to me he was just a professional musician until some time later they were going out – officially.”
In retrospect, Del’s description of Bush playing guitar – for the first and only time on record – on ‘Big Stripey Lie’ appears full of portents of what was to come. “She said to the guitarist we were using [McIntosh], ‘I’m really into the guitar, I’d really like to be able to play it’. And he said, ‘Oh, here, play this one (a Fender Stratocaster) for a bit.’ So, he showed her a few chords, and – this is no kidding – a week later she was in front of this Marshall stack in the studio giving it her all! I’ve never seen anything like it. She’s a natural. She was playing lead guitar and no one would know it wasn’t an experienced guitarist.”36
Whatever seismic changes were occurring in private, in public Del remained very much on the scene. When The Line, The Cross And The Curve premiered in November 1993, Bush attended with Del and her father. When she flew to New York shortly afterwards for a short round of promotion, Del went with her. At the fan convention later in 1994, Del was there (as was Bush, briefly), helping to auction items. Despite the final parting of the ways romantically they managed to retain their close friendship and Del has remained her engineer, her most trusted voice in the studio. He later moved to Reading, near Bush’s current home, and all parties seem to have reached a very civilised accommodation.
“Every time I went round to teach her classes Del would be there working in the studio and Danny would be there working in the house,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “If [Danny] wasn’t playing he’d be doing housework or saying, ‘Kate we’ve got to go and do this this afternoon.’ When we’d come back in from the workout, sometimes all four of us would be sitting around drinking [tea]. It’s quite bizarre, really, but then Del has been very much a part of Kate’s life since she was a teenager.”
It’s impossible to listen to the album’s closing track, ‘You’re The One’, and not hear it as a troubled attempt to reconcile an inevitable but deeply hurtful ending. “Everything I have I bought with you,” she sings. “Everything I do we did together.” Perhaps tellingly, McIntosh doesn’t play on the track; Jeff Beck does, as does Gary Brooker, Procol Harum’s former keyboard player, a further example of the album’s tendency towards celebrity cameos. It’s only a shame that ‘You’re The One’ is so stodgy, an unconventional Bush song only in the sense that it’s so entirely conventional, a thudding, ponderous rock ballad with an artless, heart-on-sleeve lyric, the kind of apparently unvarnished autobiography we perhaps thought we always wanted to hear from her. When it finally arrived it was clumsy and clunky, the bald words actually getting in the way of the emotion. Banal, almost, although it is the one track where the Trio Bulgarka really shine.
The Red Shoes is the first time that clichés – both lyrical and musical – begin to appear in her writing. It’s interesting how much of a struggle her quest for greater directness became. Spelling out what she was once able to suggest and imply, the net results were a significant drop in artistry. As a lyricist, Bush is by no means beyond reproach. She’s most assured when showing rather than telling; she does not have an easy, natural gift for the vernacular or conversational in the way that someone like Joni Mitchell does. Even the fun, fleshy eroticism of ‘Eat The Music’ – in which Bush truly makes a meal of her “food of love” metaphors – is laboured and obvious, as is the similarly themed inner album artwork, in which soft fruit is sliced open and displayed, labia-like, filled with seed. In her quest for direct communication, everything becomes overstated.
Much of the music has a similar, uncomfortably forced quality to it, as though, in the phrase that Bob Dylan once used to describe his own creative travails in the Seventies, she “had to learn to do consciously what [she] used to do unconsciously.” Listen hard and one can hear her physically trying to summon up the inspiration; very little appears to be coming through naturally. Struggling to adapt and shape real life into song, for once she failed to make a glorious artifice out of her art. She does not transcend.
Instead, the results were solid but a tad uninspired. In these versions at least, ‘Top Of The City’ and ‘The Song Of Solomon’ leaned perilously close to sanitised background music. Their true potential would be partially unmasked on Director’s Cut, while the former was given a revelatory makeover in ‘Before The Dawn’, but for now their flatness seemed symptomatic of a wider loss of focus. The doubts in Bush’s mind and music were shared by those old chums working on the record. “It was a very difficult time and I was aware of that more than anything,” says Haydn Bendall. “Because of that I didn’t really connect with her that much. It was a bit of a mess, to be honest. I was sort of half-booked through a third party to do some work on it. Del was there and he was engineering and needed to assert himself in a way, I think there was some personal stuff going on that I don’t really want to go into [but] that I was aware of. I was kind of on the periphery a bit, I wasn’t terribly involved. It was just a weird, fractious, fragmented time, and nothing really seemed to gel. I didn’t really understand why I was there. I just tried to be as diplomatic as possible.”
The Red Shoes marked a move from analogue to digital recording, and it all ended up sounding rather tinny, not at all deep or warm. Del oversaw the mix as Bush began dance practice in preparation for the film, and right up until the final mastering sessions she seemed uncharacteristically unsure of her own judgement. “The Red Shoes was one of the very first albums I did at Metropolis Mastering,” recalls Ian Cooper. “After it was done she essentially said it was OK and myself and Del Palmer couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘I think we’d better do it again, because I can’t believe she’s approved it. That’s a first!’ So we redid it and changed it a little bit, which is the way it went out.”
The Red Shoes is nowadays often dismissed as the runt of the Bush litter, but it was by no means a catastrophe. It sold well, reaching number 28 in the US, her highest ever position, although all the UK singles bar ‘Rubberband Girl’ struggled to make much impact, while the album suffered the ignominy of being beaten to number one by Meat Loaf. Many of the reviews, however, were positively gushing, falling into the trap of writing what they thought they were supposed to think about a new Kate Bush record, rather than what they were actually hearing. Chris Roberts’ review in Melody Maker – “Bush in on form like the Bible is well-known. The Red Shoes dances so far ahead of the rest it’s embarrassing” – was a memorable case of expressing a laudable sentiment at precisely the wrong time. Stephen Dalton in Vox was much more perceptive, concluding that the album “adds up to less than the sum of its unorthodox parts.” Several reviewers echoed Colin Irwin’s observation that the album displayed a “firmament of distress.”37
The release was held back until November to accommodate the completion of the 45-minute film Bush had resolved to make. Until midway through the album process Bush was still talking about the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of doing a tour, or at least some shows. She eventually decided against it, for any of the reasons already discussed, though it’s possible Hannah’s death knocked any remaining enthusiasm out of her.
She decided instead to make a film featuring six songs from the album linked by a narrative thread, starring the actress Miranda Richardson, her old friend and mentor Lindsay Kemp, Stewart Avon Arnold and most of the musicians who appeared on the record. Filming began in July 1993 with a planned finishing date in mid-August, in order to get the performance segments finished and readied for video release to support the singles.*
A film in which she would sing, dance, act, write the script, direct and generally hold sway over every creative decision appeared to be an insane undertaking at this stage in her life. Throwing herself into the movie may have seemed like a necessary distraction from other, more pressing issues, but it was clear she struggled to successfully focus her concentration on the project. On reflection, it was the worst of all possible times to embark on such a challenging new endeavour.
“If I remember rightly, she wasn’t feeling that great,” says Colin Lloyd-Tucker. “She had headaches and things, she wasn’t really herself when we were making that. There was her mother, which had a big affect, and I think maybe she bit off a little bit more than she could chew. I remember a lot of times we had to keep stopping because she wasn’t feeling that great. It was a difficult thing to do, that kind of format, and she took it all on herself – no wonder she had a headache! That was hard work again, because it was that perfectionist thing and she wouldn’t give up. It was a difficult period.”
“Directing it exhausted her completely,” recalls Stewart Avon Arnold. “The next one down from the ‘Tour Of Life’ is The Line, The Cross And The Curve, in terms of the length of time of the project. She was exhausted after that.”
After a lot of long, hard days and gruelling nights, the film was finished by early November, presented to EMI on the tenth and screened at the London Film Festival on the thirteenth, an event which sold out in ten minutes and which she attended with Del, Dr Bush and the film’s producer, Margarita Doyle. Gazing up at the vast 60ft screen at the Odeon on Leicester Square, the Bush party nervously sat through the support film, Wallace and Gromit in The Wrong Trousers, wondering how The Line, The Cross And The Curve would fare by comparison. The screening – dotted with Bush fanatics – went well, and at the end she gave a brief but graceful speech following a very generous standing ovation.
It was perhaps the kindest review the film received. It toured several other city film festivals in Europe, the US and Canada through late 1993 and into early 1994 and enjoyed a brief cinematic release before coming out on video. It even received a Grammy nomination in 1995 for Best Music Video: Long Form – Bush didn’t attend, being a fan of neither awards nor Los Angeles – but the critical reception ranged from lukewarm to hostile. “High on whimsy, low on content,” said Variety, while Q deemed it “not so much a movie as the sort of linked sequence of promo vids that pop stars are wont to hang themselves with, given a feature length rope.”
Bush herself quickly distanced herself from the film. As early as April 1994, while ostensibly promoting it, she admitted she had taken on too much. Later, she was less measured. “I shouldn’t have done it. I was so tired. I’m very pleased with four minutes of it, but I’m very disappointed with the rest. I let down people like Miranda Richardson who worked so hard on it. I had the opportunity to do something really interesting and I completely blew it.”38 Later still, in 2005, she simply dismissed it as “a load of bollocks.”39
Shortly after the premiere, Bush – again, accompanied by Palmer – flew to New York for a round of promotional appearances. Most notable was a signing session at Tower records, where she arrived in a white limousine and stayed for over three hours as the enormous queue slowly drained into the building, and an odd, rather out-of-it interview with JBTV, a small Chicago based station. Sporting big brown shades and clearly wishing herself anywhere else but here, her utter exhaustion is almost painful to behold. On her return, slowly the brakes were applied and the shutters came up. She hadn’t had time to properly grieve her mother, nor absorb all the other changes she had undergone in the past few years. “I needed to stop working because there were a lot of things I wanted to look at in my life,” she said. “I was exhausted on every level.”40 Bush, that most magnificently airborne of artists, had slowly lost altitude. She had run herself and her music into the ground.
* The Trio Bulgarka’s forenames, Yanka, Eva and Stoyanka, also spelt YES, Bush noted happily.
* The 12-inch had a double grooved A-side which, depending on where you placed the needle, would either play the vocal version or the instrumental. “She didn’t tell the record company,” recalls her mastering engineer Ian Cooper. “They pressed them all up and they were getting quite a few returns, people complaining that the vocals had disappeared. She just did it for a laugh, and it worked. Eventually, EMI had to put a sticker on it.” Bush would often push EMI’s patience to the limits when it came to ensuring the quality of her records at the crucial mastering stage. “She would always get EMI to do test pressings, and check them out, and if they weren’t good enough they’d get rejected and remastered, and told to do a better job next time. EMI never learned their lesson that this was a woman who would check everything.”
* This proved impossible, and Bush had to hastily shoot extra performance footage for the ‘Rubberband Girl’ video, the first single, released in early September.