1989-"The Sensual World"

Alexis* a écrit:
J'ai achevé,  ce week, d'installer mon petit studio dans une chambre de la maison ... J'y ai un monitoring de la mort ...
Et ce matin, en me levant, j'ai eu le BESOIN d'y courir écouter TSW avec mon thé tout chaud.
Quelle merveille, quel bonheur. J'ai eu une crise d'extase ...
C'est toujours mon préféré de KB ... Il me bouleverse.

Kate Bush (Rock&Folk 1989) a écrit:

"Je voulais que ce soit mon disque le plus personnel. J'ai donc procédé d'une façon plus directe qu'avant... J'ai eu du mal à faire cet album. Ecrire les chansons m'a pris beaucoup de temps parce que je suis passée  par des phases de doute où je ne savais pas quoi écrire. Tout me semblait nul. Ca me paraissait n'avoir aucun sens. Et puis, finalement, je suis parvenue à trouver un intérêt suffisant à ce que je faisais...
En tout cas, il m'est de plus en plus difficile de trouver de nouveaux sujets d'inspiration...
Quatre chansons sur l'album ont été écrites très rapidement, mais il m'a fallu beaucoup de temps entre chacune d'entre-elles."

The Thrill And The Hurting: 30 Years Of The Sensual World
The Quietus , October 14th, 2019 06:43

Burning fields, black November nights, the swirling beauty of the Uilleann pipes… Matthew Barton examines how Kate Bush made the perfect soundtrack to autumn

"They're setting fire to the cornfields/ as you’re taking me home"

So sang Kate Bush thirty years ago on the majestic 'Never Be Mine', a forlorn ballad of yearning that radiates from its parent album, The Sensual World with understated autumnal grace. It is a song that still conjures the same images for me every time I hear it – an early evening sunset in October, birds departing a harvested field, the sunlight low and fading on the horizon. Eberhard Weber's bass has a throbbing beauty that weaves around Kate's piano like a cloak, while the strident vocals of the Trio Bulgarka merge with the melancholic Uilleann pipes to evoke all sorts of emotions – sadness, hope, reflection, loss, longing. Beginnings. Endings. It doesn't matter when I hear it, what time of year, or in what context – it is immediately transportive. "The smell of burning fields / will now mean you and here," she sings. Well, quite.

Autumn, for me anyway, encapsulates all of these things. It's both a beginning and an ending, a time of reflection and anticipation; it bridges the warmth and joy of summer and the barren starkness of winter. Music is an art that can suggest a sense of time and place like no other – and has there ever been an artist who so emotively captures the mood and texture of the seasons as Kate Bush?

2005's Aerial, with its cover portrait of a honeyed sky, is her definitive summer album – all lambent birdsong and gleaming synth washes, with its allusions to lazy summer days "watching the painter painting" and exhortations, atop a flamenco beat, to "sing of summer/ and a sunset." The album's second disc A Sky Of Honey, brought to life so vividly during the Before The Dawn residency in 2014, traces a day from morning to night, from the elegant trills of 'Prelude' and 'Prologue' through the oceanic, balmy 'Nocturn' and back into the raucous dawn chorus of 'Aerial'.

The spectral intimacy of winter is immortalised in 2011's 50 Words For Snow, where Kate's alternately gentle and foreboding piano accompaniment truly sounds like falling snow – at once romantic and threatening. Listen to 'Snowflake' and tell me that the hypnotic, tender pulses don't make you think of drifting flakes, or that the gigantic spaces between notes don't suggest a slowly rising blanket of white. The album bears a bracing atmosphere, interpolating choral vocals, Victorian melodrama, and bizarre synth-prog featuring Stephen Fry reciting wintry synonyms. Oh, and a song about a tryst with a snowman.

Kate may yet make a definitive spring album, but for me 1985's Hounds Of Love has always been the one – the propulsive energy of it, its vigorous newness, its open, spacious production style that speaks of fresh life, optimism, independence. It's an album with vistas of clear skies and light rains ('The Big Sky'), coming-of-age epics ('Cloudbusting'), and indeed, depending on your interpretation, allegories of rebirth and redemption ('Waking the Witch', The Ninth Wave).

The Sensual World, then, with its poetic allusions to Bonfire Night and the harvest, is her autumnal album. If Hounds Of Love, with its percussive and effect-heavy arrangements, is a budding fruit, The Sensual World is its ripened, fully mature successor. Where the drums were booming they are now accentual, where the synths were pulsating and fulsome with Fairlight wizardry they are now ambient and warmly textured. The rich instrumentation reflects the mood; Kate had flirted with Celtic arrangements on songs like 'Night Of The Swallow' from 1982's The Dreaming and parts of Hounds Of Love (most notably 'Jig Of Life'), but the Uilleann pipes of Davey Spillane and the various Celtic instruments played by her brother Paddy and by Alan Stivell (arranged by Bill Whelan) are woven into the very fabric of The Sensual World.

Meanwhile, the titanic, full-throated vocals of the Trio Bulgarka (an inspired choice of personnel) add a wise spirit to the music. The palette of bells and pipes, the imagery of setting fire to cornfields, synths that are somehow removed yet oddly comforting - it all adds up to a striking sound world perfectly evocative of this particular time of year.


Everything about The Sensual World exudes autumnal beauty – from the elegant arrangements to its dusky, monochromatic cover portrait of a wide-eyed Kate Bush; from the album title's rusty-leaf text to the bells that fade in like a tender alarm call on a crisp morning. Her voice, an instrument that bloomed on The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love, is exquisite throughout, alternately keening and soft, throaty and forceful.

Kate turned 30 during the making of the album and conceded that her personal circumstances influenced the mature themes of the album. "I think it's a very important time from 28 to 32-ish, where there's some kind of turning point," she told NME in 1989. "Someone said in your teens you get the physical puberty and between 28 and 32 mental puberty. Let's face it, you've got to start growing up when you're 30, it does make you feel differently, I feel very positive having gone through the last couple of years."

As such, it is an album of opposites, of dual nature – it speaks of loss and hope, of childhood and adulthood. It reflects the passing of time, and the contemplation of mortality, but also the freedom of exploration and the generous acceptance that comes with age. For an album with such themes, autumn is the perfect setting.

Gone is the light joy of summer, and the freshness of spring, but in its stead something more mature, more realised – perhaps still bristling with internal conflict, but with a newly-attained level of perspective. It is an album that suggests both the ending of childhood and the beginning of adulthood ("let's face it, you've got to start growing up when you're 30") and the bizarre hinterland between the two – the tension between cutting cords ("just put your feet down child, cos you're all grown up now") and yearning for parental security ("reaching out for mama"), not to mention the prospect of parenthood of your own ("now starts the craft of the father").

'The Sensual World' itself sets out the album's autumnal stall immediately – soft, pealing bells give way to an arrangement that incorporates pipes, warm synth washes, and an insistent drum pattern; its accompanying video, following the singer through a forest of crimson leaves, is as seamless a supplement as could be. She told International Musician in 1989 how she had "had this idea for about two years to use the words from Molly Bloom's speech at the end of [James Joyce's] Ulysses, which I think is the most superb piece of writing ever, to a piece of music. So Del [Palmer] 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.'"

Famously, the Joyce estate refused permission for Kate to reproduce the text. Instead, she had to remodel the lyric to fit the rhythm and, in doing so, created one of the most beautiful of all her songs. As she explained, "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." (More than two decades later, Kate was finally able to realise her initial vision on 'Flower Of The Mountain' from 2011's Director's Cut, which dials down some of the atmosphere and ups the ante on the softly-sung intimacy.)



The Molly Bloom of Joyce's soliloquy escapes the confines of his text, "stepping out of the page into the sensual world," to enjoy the "down of a peach," the "kiss of seedcake," to "wear a sunset," where bodies roll "off of Howth Head and into the flesh." Kate described the album as her first to really explore "positive female energy" – "I think it's to do with me coming to terms with myself on different levels," she told NME. "In some ways, like on Hounds Of Love, it was important for me to get across the sense of power in the songs that I'd associated with male energy and music. But I didn't feel that this time and I was very much wanting to express myself as a woman in my music rather than as a woman wanting to sound as powerful as a man. And definitely 'The Sensual World', the track, was very much a female track for me. I felt it was a really new expression, feeling good about being a woman musically."

Maturation, acceptance with age, being surer of yourself – these are themes that pervade the album, and themes that play out in the songs about human relationships and interactions. Throughout, there is a unique tension between youthful exuberance and adult complexity; as such, The Sensual World marks a shift in Kate's work, looking forwards as much as backwards, recognising the cyclical nature of life. It bears the maturity and wisdom of age tempered with the memories and experience of what has gone before – "living in the gap between past and future." A bit like autumn, really.

The intricacies of adult relationships emerge beautifully on 'Love And Anger' ("it's so deep you don't think that you can speak about it to anyone"); she addresses romantic frustrations in a more simplistic manner on 'Between A Man And A Woman' and 'Walk Straight Down The Middle,' while 'Heads We're Dancing' uses Hitler, perhaps slightly clunkily, as a trope to explore the nature and meaning of identity. 'Deeper Understanding,' meanwhile, tenderly and imaginatively probes the depths of adult introspection and loneliness. What happens when you are alone, isolated, alienated, trying to make sense of things?

Amid the confusion and uncertainty, she finds humanity in the mundane – the song garnered attention at the time for its bizarre plot line of digital romance, but who can bet against Yanka Rupkina's soaring, emotional solo vocal? Or the maze-like arrangement, a swirling kaleidoscope of fretless bass, electric piano, synth effects, and the robotic yet improbably cherubic vocals of the Trio Bulgarka? As Kate told Melody Maker in 1989, "When I was working on 'Deeper Understanding,' the idea was that the verses were the person and the choruses were the computer talking to the person. I wanted this sound that would almost be like the voice of angels: something very ethereal, something deeply religious, rather than a mechanical thing. And we went through so many different processes, trying vocoders, lots of ways of affecting the voice, and eventually it led to the Trio Bulgarka… it made absolute sense - you know, this loving voice - because they have a certain quality: their music feels so old and deep. It's really powerful; such intense, deep music that, in some ways, I think it is like the voice of angels."

There is also a diaphanous quality to Nigel Kennedy's sublime, elegiac violin in 'The Fog,' that cuts through the swathe of its, yes, foggy arrangement like a beam of light on a murky autumn day. Along with the sweeping 'Reaching Out,' 'The Fog' deals with the end of childhood, the passing of time, the way the parent-child relationship morphs over the years. The colossal, mournful strings (arranged by Michael Kamen) slowly twist and turn, rise and fall, like the churning waves – uncertain, threatening, unfamiliar – on "the day I learned to swim." It's a heavy arrangement, deep and hazy, like a fading childhood memory, recalled in adulthood.

As Kate told NME: "It's about trying to grow up. Growing up for most people is just trying to stop escaping, looking at things inside yourself rather than outside. But I'm not sure if people ever grow up properly, it's a continual process, growing in a positive sense."

The image of learning to swim and letting go – the parent letting go of the child, and the child letting go of the parent – is one of her most direct, effective, beautiful analogies. "I started with the idea of a relationship in deep water and thought I could parallel that with learning to swim, the moment of letting go," she told Q in November 1989.

"When my dad was teaching me to swim he'd hold both my hands, then say, 'Now, let go.' So I would, then he'd take two paces back and say, 'Right, swim to me,' and I'd be, 'Oo-er, blub, blub, blerb.' But I thought it was such a beautiful image of the father and child, all wrapped up in the idea of really loving someone, but letting them go, because that's a part of real love, don't you think, the letting go?"

The sense of letting go recurs in 'Never Be Mine', perhaps the definitive autumnal Kate Bush song, where the blurred lines of fantasy and reality become, with age, a lot clearer. "It's that whole thing of how, in some situations, it's the dream you want, not the real thing," she told NME. "It was pursuing a conscious realization that a person is really enjoying the fantasy and aware it won't become reality. So often you think it's the end you want, but this is actually looking at the process that will never get you there. Bit of a heart-game you play with yourself."

Adult realisations and experiences form the basis of much of The Sensual World, and add layers of depth to her work – a trademark that remains to this day. But Kate Bush remains one of pop's greatest proponents of joyful abandon, and the musical tour de force of 'Rocket's Tail' is one of the most obvious, bonkers examples. It is classic Kate Bush bizarre melodrama, a prog fantasia of David Gilmour guitars, throaty Bulgarka vocals, and an incredible, jerky harmonic arrangement that sounds like wheezing and whizzing fireworks streaking across a black November sky. As Kate told Q, "[Trio Bulgarka] couldn't speak a word of English and I couldn't speak a word of Bulgarian. Everything went through translators and it didn't matter at all. Lovely working with women, and especially them, they're very affectionate. We tended to communicate through cuddles rather than words. In fact, we could get on perfectly well without the translators. At one point we were talking away in the studio when the translator walked in and we all shut up because she'd suddenly made us self-conscious about what we were doing." That pretty much sums up the depth of feeling of The Sensual World.

 In 'Rocket's Tail', Kate imagines herself strapping on her size five lightning boots and flying across the skies, gunpowder packed, taking off from Waterloo Bridge. What could be more redolent of an English autumn than that?

Perhaps now the most famous of the album's songs, 'This Woman's Work' seems to condense all its themes into three-and-a-half minutes. It's about the calm wisdom and acceptance that comes with age, arriving at the point where "[you have] to grow up." Kate, solo on piano, sings from the perspective of a father at the birth of his child. Here, there's a different kind of letting go, a different kind of making peace – where 'The Fog' speaks of an ending and a beginning at one point of life, 'This Woman's Work' speaks of an ending and a beginning at quite another. Cycles, the turning of the seasons – real life. 
Kate Bush albums are always strange, intoxicating beasts; with her ear for deceptively amorphous, swooping melodies and insistent hooks, it's little surprise that she has sustained a pop career more than four decades on from the perceived novelty of 'Wuthering Heights' in 1978.

But beneath the veil of accessibility, Kate albums are densely layered, complex works incorporating sound effects, literary and cinematic allusions, hidden messages, and offbeat symbolism.

 Her albums have, over time, seemed to bend to the wills and the ways of the natural world. Hers is a landscape of fog, flowers, moors, sky, the sea. She employs the natural world as a means of communicating about love, life, loss, redemption; she expertly distils big themes into little capsules of everyday life. Kate Bush songs are both ordinary and extraordinary. 

Whether it is the moon casting silver light over the illicit love in 'Kashka From Baghdad', or the pungent flowers of 'Night-Scented Stock' blooming into the tragi-comic waltz of 'Army Dreamers', or the sea hiding cities, and memories, in 'A Coral Room', the natural world is more than a backdrop in Kate Bush's music; it is symbolic, it is intrinsic, it is a character itself. In The Sensual World, those burning cornfields, the November night beset by shrieking fireworks, the enveloping fog, are the fierce harbingers of life's complexities – the loss, the wisdom, the adventure, the sensuality that comes with experience.

The seasons in particular, for Kate Bush, represent markers of life; Hounds Of Love has a new-life energy borne of the fresh possibilities and newfound independence attained by building her own home recording studio. It is the sound of someone poised, on the precipice of the next phase of life, open to the opportunities ahead. Aerial is the sound of homebound contentment, of the labours of motherhood, and the joy of a new phase in life. It is slower of pace and mood; if Hounds Of Love is a spring day spent bounding across green fields looking up at clouds that look like Ireland, Aerial is a lazy, hazy summer's day in a garden surrounded by birdsong and sunlight. 50 Words For Snow, meanwhile, is brittle with elements just on the cusp of decay; the ageing, ghostly dog in 'Lake Tahoe,' for instance, and the preservation of Kate's son Bertie's choirboy voice in 'Snowflake.' The complex, woolly layers of some of her records are removed in favour of starkest simplicity, much like the bare branches of winter trees.

The Sensual World is like an orchard, each song a ripened fruit. It has an insular atmosphere in keeping with her home studio set-up, and the music perfectly matches the mood evoked in the lyrics. It is the sound of Kate Bush more comfortable in her own skin, facing the complications of life. It looks forward while somehow looking back. It may be an album that personifies Molly Bloom and references Hitler, but it is also a deeply personal, sensual utopia. "This is definitely my most personal, honest album," she told Q. "And I think it's my most feminine album, in that I feel maybe I'm not trying to prove something in terms of a woman in a man's world… On The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love, particularly from a production standpoint, I wanted to get a lot more weight and power, which I felt was a very male attitude. In some cases it worked very well, but… perhaps this time I felt braver as a woman, not trying to do the things that men do in music."

Kate Bush albums are, of course, for all seasons, but there's a reason why The Sensual World sounds just that little bit better in autumn. It is an album turning thirty years old as the leaves turn brown, the same age as its creator during the time of its recording. Time continues to pass, and the seasons continue to turn. I was talking about The Sensual World with my friend Alice recently; she remembers buying the cassette from Woolworth's as soon as it came out and listening to it on her Walkman for weeks on end. We talked about how 'The Fog' (and even just talking about 'The Fog') continues to give us goosebumps, how 'Never Be Mine' has soundtracked relationships, 'This Woman's Work' the birth of children. Many albums provide the backdrop to personal milestones, and for me, as a child of autumn, I have always thought of The Sensual World as something of my own birthstone album. I look forward, as every year, to plugging in the headphones and taking it on a long walk.

"We could be like two strings beating/ Speaking in sympathy/ What would we do without you?"

Music
Just Say Mmmmm-Yes!: Kate Bush's The Sensual World at 30

Kate Bush’s sixth album came into the world 30 years ago today sounding old. Largely midtempo and/or melancholy, The Sensual World signaled a calming down of sorts from the furious innovation and conscious madness of the albums that directly preceded it: 1980's Never Forever, 1982's The Dreaming (her masterpiece, in my opinion), and 1985's Hounds of Love (her masterpiece, in most people’s opinion). The sound on The Sensual World is largely murky, a heap of instruments and ideas compressed into a soggy chunk of sponge. Drums thud like they’re full of sand, guitar solos scurry out to the forefront of the sound design and then back in like rodents, and Bush’s endlessly exploding and lifting roman-candle of a voice is so processed as to sound like it’s coming from behind glass. During recording, Bush blended original sounds with presets on the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, a power-ballad staple, and the result could sound typical of its day, as though the DX7 had won the battle with Bush’s ideas.

The Sensual World abandoned the conceptualization that made Hounds of Love’s B-side, the narrative song cycle The Ninth Wave, so brilliant. Instead, comprising the album in Bush’s own words were, “10 short stories that are just saying something different in each one.” (The CD version contained an 11th song, the bonus track “Walk Straight Down the Middle.”) It was in every way less immediately thrilling than anything Bush had released prior to it, and for years I dismissed it. Contrast the utter madness of The Dreaming’s “Suspended in Gaffa” to the assured tranquility of The Sensual World’s title track.

“Boring music for old people,” is how I regarded The Sensual World. But now that I, too, am old, I get it.

“Boring music for old people,” is how I regarded The Sensual World. But now that I, too, am old, I get it. If Hounds of Love found Bush at peak pop stardom, a flash of lightning when her unbridled genius had commercial appeal (it was a massive hit in the U.K.), The Sensual World is decidedly post-peak. But there’s something almost comforting in hearing an art-god come down to earth, and what a post-peak The Sensual World is. In the most self-possessed manner, this is not an album that immediately signals its brilliance. You must stroll leisurely through the forest of Bush’s imagination and parse it out as you go. If compared to the three albums that preceded it, it is muted, less theatrical, less interested in braying in your ears like a donkey, its restraint is deserved. Imagine what it would have been like to be Bush, routinely letting the weirdness in while concocting her songs. The sheer psychic burden of her early-’80s work is palpable and exhausting (in, I would argue, the most sublime way). Imagine what it was like to conduct that, to sound completely out of control on records, while refining with the hand of a perfectionist, as Bush did. Her midtempos were merited.

Bush turned 30 on July 30, 1988, during the recording of The Sensual World. When she finally emerged from the cave of her home studio after the longest period of time between albums she’d ever taken—over four years—she described the tortured process of its creation. “I went through a patch where I just couldn’t write,” she said in an interview that ran in the February 1990 issue of Musician. “I didn’t know what I wanted to say... Everything seemed like rubbish, you know? It seemed to have no meaning whatsoever.” Even after the album was released, Bush admitted to not knowing what the single “Love and Anger” was actually about.

In his comprehensive Bush biography Under the Ivy, Graeme Thomson writes that after working on the album for 18 months with her engineer/boyfriend Del Palmer, the summer of 1988 brought with it a second wave of studio work that found Pink Floyd guitarist (and early Bush champion) Dave Gilmour lending his hand (and axe) to two of the songs, contributions from John Giblin on bass, and Bush’s three-song collaboration with the Bulgarian throat-singing group Trio Bulgarka, whose vocals are one of the defining features on The Sensual World.

Culturally specific sounds not frequently heard in Western pop music were a cornerstone of Bush’s work, which had long been influenced by her Celtic roots. The Sensual World expanded her palate to include a valiha, a stringed instrument native to Madagascar. Uilleann pipes on the title track (which to my Yankee ear just sound like bagpipes) play a part inspired by the Macedonian piece called “Nevestinsko Oro” (or “Bride’s Dance”). Bush also pushed for what she described as an “Eastern rhythm” on the album highlight “Never Be Mine.” The seamlessness with which she integrates her foreign references is a true feat of execution and suggests a lack of fetishizing on her part.

The crystalline second verse are, to my ears, the most gorgeous four bars Bush ever wrote or sang.

The sources that inspired her subject matter were similarly all over the map. “Rocket’s Tail” was named after her cat. She got the idea of “Between a Man and a Woman” from a line in The Godfather. Someone she knew once shared time with J. Robert Oppenheimer and didn’t realize until afterward that the man they were so charmed by was the one who is commonly credited with having developed the atomic bomb. In “Heads We’re Dancing,” the charming devil is transposed onto Hitler, whom Bush’s narrator fails to recognize in 1939 until she sees his picture in the newspaper the next day. (It’s kind of a dumb story, especially because it just crescendos on the narrator’s surprise with no real insight beyond that.)

Bush’s howlingly sad “This Woman’s Work” was written for and featured in the John Hughes dramedy She’s Having a Baby, released the year before The Sensual World. Bush called it “one of the quickest songs I’ve ever written,” as well as easy, since she had source material that it had to speak to—there was no chance of being paralyzed by the blank page on which anything could happen. The song manages to completely transcend the largely forgotten movie for which it was written. Via its litany of regrets and its ambivalence toward the thrill and the hurting (to crib a phrase used in “Never Be Mine”) of rummaging through old memories, Bush was able to tap into a universality that Hughes simply could not. The crystalline second verse (“Give me these moments back/Give them back to me/Give me that little kiss/Give me your hand”) are, to my ears, the most gorgeous four bars Bush ever wrote or sang.

The whoosh of the tastefully placed orchestral accents, the G force the song leaves as it hurtles to a close of furious desperation, it’s all so enormous for a weepy little song about a fictional man whose wife is having a difficult childbirth. Many people consider this their favorite Kate Bush song, and on many, many days I totally see where they are coming from. (“This Woman’s Work” is her third most streamed song on Spotify with over 16 million streams, after “Wuthering Heights” [54 million+] and “Running Up That Hill” [almost 40 million].)

But the reference that cast the biggest shadow, both in terms of the album’s theme and the headache it gave Bush, was Molly Bloom’s ecstatic monologue in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Bush initially wrote “The Sensual World” using lines from the passage in which Bloom enthuses about pleasure, including sex. When she asked permission to use Joyce’s words, though, the dead author’s estate turned her down. On the 2011 release Director’s Cut, which featured rerecorded versions of songs from The Sensual World and its 1993 follow-up The Red Shoes, Bush was able to record a version of the song with its original lyrics in tact, retitled “Flower of the Mountain,” after at last securing the Joyce estate’s permission. I’d argue, though, that the original (which is to say revised) version, “The Sensual World,” is more ingenious for managing to reference Molly without copying her and applying a postmodern interpretation of how the character would react to the physical world when “stepping off of the page.” Bush’s refrain is an ecstatic, breathy “Yes!” which Joyce described as “the female word.” She exhales it 17 times as the song saunters along.

While Bush’s experiments with rhythm in many ways defined the two albums that preceded it, her pulse was gentler on The Sensual World, and not just because of the soft-focus nature of its mastering. “On The Dreaming and Hounds of Love, particularly from a production standpoint, I wanted to get a lot more weight and power, which I felt was a very male attitude,” she told Q. “In some cases it worked very well, but... perhaps this time I felt braver as a woman, not trying to do the things that men do in music.”

Over and over in promo interviews of the era, she talked about feeling more comfortable than ever to explore her womanhood in her music. Bush had been sexualized in the press for her appearance, and continued to be during The Sensual World era, as well as after. “When I started in this business, I felt very at home in my body,” she explained to The Guardian. “And it was very scary for me those next few years, because whatever I wore, whatever I did, people were putting this incredible emphasis of sexuality on me, which I didn’t feel. I think I was a victim of the fact that I was a young woman who was writing music and the emphasis went on the fact that I was a young woman. There were a lot of things that didn’t fit like I was very young, I was female, people thought I was attractive, and I had a very idealistic and positive attitude at a time when negativity and anarchy were hip. So I was coming in from completely the wrong tangent.”

when Greater London Radio’s Janice Long asked Bush if she considered herself a feminist, Bush’s response was “Yuck.”

The Sensual World, then, represented a gentle reclamation. “I think I’m just starting to think of myself as a woman, and to actually feel quite nice about that,” she also told The Guardian. “I also feel I can express myself as a woman without having this tremendous pressure from the outside world, which I... couldn’t move. But I feel really good now.” Disappointingly, though, when Greater London Radio’s Janice Long asked Bush if she considered herself a feminist, Bush’s response was “Yuck.” What followed was a trite rationale that feminism is for extremists.

Another talking point of the 1989-90 press cycle was the virtue of simplicity. “I do think art should be simple, you see,” she said to Melody Maker. “It shouldn’t be complicated, and I think, in some ways, this has come across a bit complicated.” This was coming from someone whose intricately layered previous work seemed designed to beguile. Its eclectic source material and sonic globetrotting aside, The Sensual World is Bush’s most straightforward album, at least since her first two, which predated her love affair with electronics and, in retrospect, hew more toward standard singer-songwriter fare (at least sonically speaking). The Sensual World, an album of songs about relationships according to Bush, is only occasionally erotic so as to be that kind of sensual, but it does uniformly exist firmly in the realm of the senses.

Looking at the paper is what leads to the big Hitler reveal in “Heads We’re Dancing.” “The smell of burning fields/Will now mean you and here,” she sings on “Never Be Mine.” A taste of seedcake gets passed between the narrator of “The Sensual World” and a lover. “Reaching Out” is all about touch (“See how the child reaches out instinctively/To feel how fire will feel”). It’s one of the only Kate Bush songs that I would comfortably qualify as utter cheese, as her voice trembles in the verses like the lower lip of a petulant child, and the chorus explodes into melodrama that in the moment feels unearned. But when you consider the bigger picture, that The Sensual World is an album about connections—some of them missed, others unconventional (“Deeper Understanding” tells the prescient story of a narrator who turns away from real-life communication to the safe haven of a computer)—all of the attempts at touch in “Reaching Out” are more plausibly worth wailing about. There’s so much feeling here and everywhere, and not all of it makes contact.

The psychodramas of “Deeper Understanding” and “Never Be Mine” reside in the dimension of the narrator’s mind. “Never Be Mine” is not about longing; it is resolute in its described relationship having no future. “I want you as the dream/Not the reality,” sings Bush, putting into such simple words such complicated inner turmoil. “Never Be Mine” is classic Bush, at once fantastical and human. The Trio Bulgarka and uilleann pipes blare in unison during the song’s chorus so as to be indistinguishable, and a bass unwinds in a woozy middle instrumental midsection that’s as alien sounding as anything Bush ever committed to tape. It’s the only Sensual World song to have been included on her Before the Dawn live album that captured her most recent concert run at the Hammersmith Apollo in London in 2014. Sitting alongside bonafide hits from Hounds of Love and Aerial, the song’s placement on the retrospective release suggests how important Bush thinks the song is in her catalog. She’s not wrong.

In 2018, Bush released remastered versions of all of her albums, which served to clear out some of the sonic murk on The Sensual World, though the late-’80s hum still sits on its songs like peach fuzz. Whereas other Bush albums seemed to come from another world entirely, The Sensual World is very much a product of its time, for good and bad. Its earthliness is, in fact, the point. Bush told NME that there was more of herself on this album than ever before. Acknowledging her artistic obsessiveness, though, she told Radio One’s Roger Scott, “It is just an album, it’s just a part of my life. It’s not my life. And I think it was, you know... making albums was my life and it doesn’t feel like that is any more.” Bush’s ordinary, though, still manages to be extraordinary by just about any standard.

Kate Bush Steps Out of the Pages of James Joyce and into The Sensual World

Bush explores the power of love, texts, and art to liberate and confine

by Tyler Dunston on November 16, 2019, 6:08pm

Music and literature have a long history of affiliation. From the ancient Greek poet Sappho, whose poems were set to music and performed, to the Italian madrigals of the Italian Renaissance (often based on Petrarch’s sonnets), which would be sung communally in people’s homes, to the lyrical masterminds of rap like Biggie, Lauryn Hill, and Jay-Z, poets have often found a medium in song. Kendrick Lamar is already inspiring college courses and theses. You could write a book on Joanna Newsom’s lyrics alone, not to mention the music itself. And this summer, we said goodbye to one of the great contemporary poet-musicians, David Berman — known for his work with the band Silver Jews, his poetry collection Actual Air, and, most recently, his great album as Purple Mountains.

Kate Bush is one of those fascinating songwriters not only interested in making literature through music, but also in making music about literature — consciously alluding to and complicating literary and literary-critical traditions, a tendency perhaps most pronounced on her masterful album The Sensual World, which turns 30 this year. There’s an art to the implied commentary of juxtaposition and allusion. Bob Dylan was known for it — name-dropping Eliot, comparing his own tempestuous relationship to that of the French poets Verlaine and Rimbaud, and then there was some Italian poet from the 13th century, considered by some to be Petrarch (who technically lived in the 14th century) or Dante. (Side note: Dylan once claimed in an interview it was “Plutarch,” the Greek writer of antiquity. He might have meant Petrarch — or he might have just been fucking with the interviewer, as he’s been known to do.)

These kinds of allusions can be a way for a musician to position themselves, not only within a musical canon but within a literary canon as well, Dylan’s recent Nobel Prize in literature being an institutional confirmation of this, as well as an institutional confirmation of the intertwining histories of the two genres. We see the same tendency in The Doors’ decision to name their band after Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception, which described his experience on mescaline, itself a reference to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by the English poet William Blake. Jim Morrison was, of course, a poet himself, a reader of William Blake and the Beats.

But unlike The Doors or Bob Dylan, Kate Bush went beyond allusion, entering the territory of interpretation and criticism in her music. It’s been 30 years since the release of her masterful record The Sensual World, an album that likewise uses song as a vehicle for exploring and commenting on literature — in this case James Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as (less prominently) William Blake. This was not without precedent for Bush, whose breakout hit, “Wuthering Heights”, surely one of the strangest songs to ever hit No. 1 on the UK charts, evoked the tormented sorrow of Emily Brontë’s novel of the same name. Even if you haven’t read the novel, the lines “Heathcliff, it’s me, Cathy/ Come home, I’m so cold” will no doubt still strike a chord due to Bush’s acrobatic phrasing and her melody, which constantly winds back on itself.

For the opening, title track of The Sensual World, Bush had originally planned to take an excerpt of Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses — a continuous, un-punctuated mass of text — and put it to music. However, unable to get the rights from the Joyce estate, she wrote her own version of Molly Bloom’s speech, incorporating elements of the original text while making something that was her own. (In 2011, the Joyce estate actually did grant Bush’s request, and you can hear another version of the song, which quotes Ulysses verbatim, on the 2011 record Director’s Cut.) The song unfolds from Bush’s words. It is rhythmically punctuated by Bush singing, “Mmm, yes,” evoking Molly Bloom’s repetition of yes near the end of the book. Adorning these words, Davy Spillane plays the uilleann pipes, a traditional Irish instrument, the melody adapted from a Macedonian dance. By recontextualizing language in song, Bush gives form to a piece of text by Joyce that is, by its nature, formless (insofar as it lacks punctuation). Bush characterizes this form in terms of moving from text to the real world: “Stepping out of the page into the sensual world.”

The lack of punctuation in the final chapter of Ulysses has led many literary critics to attribute to Molly Bloom’s thoughts a kind of “flow.” The English academic Derek Attridge, however, has taken issue with this characterization. Attridge points out that many critics’ comments on the unconventional nature of Molly Bloom’s language, to which this sense of “flow” is attributed, is based not in her language itself, but in its presentation. As he puts it, “Once the missing punctuation and other typographical absences have been made good, the language of this episode is relatively conventional.” For example, add conventional punctuation to “God of heaven there’s nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things,” and you have: “God of heaven, there’s nothing like nature — the wild mountains, then the sea and the waves rushing, then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things.” Definitely a long sentence, but not a particularly atypical one. Attridge effectively summarizes the phenomenon at work here: “We have to conclude, then, that the sense of an unstoppable onward movement ignoring all conventional limits is derived from the language, not as it supposedly takes shape in the human brain, but as it is presented (unknown to Molly) on the page.”

The fact that this is unknown to Molly is crucial to Bush’s project in bringing Molly off the page. As a speaker, Molly Bloom does not have control over her own lack of cohesion. The language itself is relatively conventional. It is Joyce who renders it unstable by leaving out punctuation. Bush, in taking Joyce’s words, initially would have done for Joyce what Joyce did for Molly Bloom, within the fiction of the text — that is, appropriate his words unbeknownst to him and place them in a new context. However, as Bush was unable to obtain the rights from Joyce’s estate, she took on the role of both author and framer of the words. In doing so, she lends additional form to Molly Bloom’s thoughts, through her own appropriation of Joyce’s/Molly Bloom’s language. Though the form of music is different from that of literature, Bush does punctuate the song through the rhythm of “Mmm, yes.” The vocals that open the song are highly percussive, as Bush spits each word out like a metronome: “Then—I’d—ta—ken—the kiss of—seedcake—back from his mouth.” Prefigured by church-bells, the verses unfold, accompanied by the woozy dance of uillean pipes.

Direct quotes from Ulysses like the reference to the seedcake and the “flower of the mountain” stand alongside Bush’s own commentary, which adds clarity to her own project: “Stepping out of the page into the sensual world.” With these words, Bush acknowledges her own stepping away from Joyce’s text. Her allusion to Blake in this song — “And my arrows of desire rewrite the speech” – likewise evokes Bush’s rewriting of the soliloquy. In the context of Attridge’s argument, Bush’s project of taking Molly Bloom off of the page is an act of liberation, perhaps, giving Molly cogency and agency she didn’t have before. At the same time, Bush, in giving form to Molly Bloom’s thoughts, and, much like Joyce, making her own commentary, is not so much liberating Molly Bloom’s speech as she is recontextualizing it. In doing so, she demonstrates the way in which form and lack of form both are impositions on an imagined speaker.

This game of power, control, creation, and desire carries through the rest of the album. There’s the dramatic irony of “Heads We’re Dancing,” the tenuous dance of flirtation, evil, and political power reflected in Mick Karn’s restless, anxious bass. “Between a Man and a Woman” describes the balance of power within a relationship as a pendulum swinging. On “Never Be Mine,” the speaker takes ownership of her own desire, “This is where I want to be/ This is what I need.” Bush’s reverbed vocals, alongside the Bulgarian vocal ensemble Trio Bulgarka, give the statement the force of a declaration.

By 1989, Kate Bush had already made a string of classics — including Hounds of Love, The Dreaming, and The Kick Inside — but The Sensual World, in particular the multi-layered, allusive title track, marked another ambitious statement of artistic and critical intent in an already storied career. On The Sensual World, Bush explores, through her engagement with Joyce’s text, the power of love, texts, and art in general — their capacity for both liberation and confinement.

Pierre a écrit:
Sinon, dans "Walk straight down the middle", ce n'est pas Bulgarka qui font les choeurs roucoulants à la fin de la chanson, mais KB elle-même. Elle a d'ailleurs déclaré que même si la chanson était assez profonde, elle ne pouvait plus la prendre très au sérieux depuis que sa mère cherchait dans son jardin, un peu affolée, le paon qui s'y était égaré. Elle ignorait que sa fille était justement en train d'enregistrer les roucoulades en question.

caranthir a écrit:Pour la présentation, ok dès que j'ai un moment.

Maxence a écrit:


C’est avec un pincement au cœur que je place cet album très bas dans mon classement…   Mais la discographie de Kate Bush est si riche, que des sacrifices douloureux sont nécessaires. Même si The Sensual World est connu comme étant faible (bien qu'il soit plus apprécié par ma génération), je l’aime bien moi, cet album.   C’est un disque automnal et intimiste, où la vulnérabilité de Kate s’exprime davantage que dans ses travaux précédents. On y trouve des compositions impressionnantes de beauté, mais d’autres, il est vrai, moins intéressantes et moins sensationnelles. Par exemple, The Fog me transporte littéralement jusqu’au milieu des vagues. Les violons sont puissants et magnifiques. C’est une chanson très cinématographique qui me transcende, parmi mes préférées de Kate. Rocket’s Tail est saisissante, parfaite en tous points de vue. Le Trio Bulgarka, la guitare de Gilmour et la voix ensorcelée de Kate m’élèvent jusqu’aux cieux et m’électrise.   Rocket’s Tail fait assurément partie de mes 3 chansons préférées de Kate Bush. Derrière ces deux titres, j’apprécie aussi beaucoup The Sensual World, ses paroles poétiques et son instrumentation divine, Deeper Understanding, son propos et sa production, et Love and Anger, énergique et exaltant. Cependant, après ces 5 titres réussis, je ne trouve pas de vrais bijoux dans cet album…    Elles se laissent toutes écouter et sont appréciables, mais Kate nous a habituées à mieux, à des titres divins et pas seulement appréciables. Les morceaux sont plus accessibles et racoleurs que sur ses autres disques. Je dirais que l’on peut ressentir, à travers The Sensual World, un manque d’inspiration, et une simplicité qui le rend effectivement inférieur à ses frères et sœurs biens plus ambitieux et impressionnants.

Renaud a écrit: avant de retrouver une mobilité "normale".