Kate Bush
The Sensual World

I will admit it, like a dirty sinner – I’ve skipped and I’ve shuffled. And I loved it. In my defence, the ipod is a seductive demon and I have been weak, but I have tamed it and overpowered it by plenty of Pet Shop Boys and Wings (Sam tells me that I don’t mess about with listening to crap music, I zone in for the core of crap).

But I did begin listening to this album on a long bus ride from Bedminster to Speedwell. I got half into it and then I saw some-one I knew so had to take the telltale white earphones out and have a quick conversation. So I listen to it again now on a monstrously lazy day, having danced for hours at the hatchet wearing a top hat and sunglasses. Veronica told me the opening song is related to Ulysses, and that’s another thing I need to finish off, I got halfway through it and became waylaid by the wasteland instead…will return to it, I loved the sketch of the amputee watching fireworks…

I confess I hardly know this album, maybe three or four songs have embedded themselves in my head but perhaps there’s always going to be a kind of anti-climax after Hounds of Love…it sounds in a way as if there’s some kind of tepid maturity after the water-rebirth…have been reading Jung again and thinking about his interpretation of the Oedipal myth, and the two Piscean fish swimming away from each other, Jonah and the Whale…a little piece of rope won’t hope it together…it’s so deep you don’t think you can speak about it…

The sound is slicker already, 1989…that represents quite a pause between Hounds of Love and this one…the Celtic vibes to the whole thing stay…but there’s a lot of heavier guitar surrounding it, I hope I’m not sulking just because the previous album is over (which I guess we’re all guilty of) but the lyrics even start to sound like the dreary “trust in yourself and you can achieve anything” philosophy I remain so suspicious of…at least she laughs at the end of the song. The idea of “I’m all grown up now” disturbs me a little, maybe it’s supposed to, just put your feet down there because you’re all grown up now…maybe it’s the child-like aspects of her voice that render it so disturbing to me; I’ve not worked it out just yet but it raises discomfort in me when placed with the same flaky feminist sentiments expressed previously… there’s definite landscape in this, rolling strings…I read the lyrics, swimming, feet on the sandy ground, her father speaks – that’ll be my discomfort. Imagine your father calling you “child” – am I jealous or outraged? And something else hidden in there possibly. I’m glad the song ends when it does but that’s more for me than the CD…

Actually, this album takes a lot of child/parent images on its way. There is something of that dreadful late 80s “we are the world” crap seeping through, despite the presence of the Balanescu Quartet. There’s something about the rhythms she employs, so scattered…not quite (or even remotely) breakbeat, but although they do become cohesive eventually, there’s a certain time of a hall-of-mirrors with beats chasing beats before they arrive as some kind of concrete, walnut-shaped whole… I think of Chaplin in The Circus. And then of course I think of Chaplin dancing in The Great Dictator (dancing with Hitler being the theme of the song) – “Madame, your dancing was exquisite… wonderful… amazing… very good…good” as if the truth of the matter lay in the diminuendo.

This is one of the songs now that’s always hit me, Deeper Understanding, about a woman’s love affair with her computer, the computer sings to her, offering love and deeper understanding. I imagine a dark room, and the light coming from the screen the woman huddles around being brighter than the light of any Jesus currently available…until my family found me and intervened…there was a story about a Bristol City Council tenant who had died and lain undiscovered for 8 years, I think of Maya Angelou writing in Africa, and a friend wailing because a corpse had remained unclaimed in the morgue for two days…sunglasses being the privilege of secularism, change the light, make it evening when it is morning, turn to your computer in little rooms up and down the land and rejoice in freedom, voices surf from liquid crystal and graphics forgive. Computer-controlled Cognitive-Behavioural-Therapy programmes, your computer will cure you and mould you to serenity – is it so unfeasible to see the computer as a god and a lover? I hate to lose you.

But now, clumsy rhythms, dialogue-style lyrics, wailing recorders and some West-Coast guitar to try and cling it all together. Two songs have gone past, and now Rockets Tail fills me with the absurdist Kate Bush I so love, so much more than the one who languidly dissects (carelessly) relationship misunderstandings…the story of a woman who dresses as a suicide bomber to understand the feelings of a firework soon to explode, lonely and frightened while the crowds cheer below…Veronica and I sat in the kitchen the first time we heard this, purple walls, black and white tiled floors, she sat, smoking and laughing at the big cock-guitar solo. When I first came to Bristol I peddled a couple of compositions to the Gasworks choir, the woman and her husband liked my music very much and invited me to come to a rehearsal but I was still too timid and post-Edinburgh to carry it out. She played me a recording of their choir singing this, an exact copy…even the wailing of the Trio Bulgarka (similar backing techniques to the early Kate Bush – why did she abandon almost completely that side of herself? The more guttural voices make it so much more interesting than the wistful lace-clad witch and earth mother she seemed to style herself as after that…)

This Woman’s Work retains special meaning for me; early March 2004 an event brought me nearer to and further from different kinds of life, and while I acted and reacted rationally and sensibly and felt, really no sadness, sometime after the song gave me, and still gives me moments of silence I can’t really understand or explain. I don’t like hearing it on that NSPCC advert, it feels too holy for that.
And oh God, after that, what a terrible song to end with “He thought he would die but he didn’t”…the bird noises neither help no rescue it. Calling out for middle street sounds more like wandering aimlessly in the middle of the road.