FEATURE:
Her Most Sensuous, Tender and Personal Album?
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Going Deep with Kate Bush's The Sensual World
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IN my next Kate Bush feature…
I am going to have a look at The Dreaming, as the album turns forty in September. Today, I wanted to focus on an aspect on an album that I have not covered a huge amount through the years. 1989’s The Sensual World followed the hugely successful Hounds of Love (1985). Bush was still in her twenties when that album came out. In her early-thirties in 1989, there is a maturity and new sound on The Sensual World. To me, it is her most tender, open, evocative and sensuous album. It is full of feel, touch and expression. Even when she talks about bonding with technology and computers on Deeper Understanding, there is this tangible sound and sensation of electricity, physicality and a need for connection. I think that desire for personal understanding and belonging comes through on the album. I am going to go into that more later. Before, there are a few more general pieces to source regarding the album. The Sensual World is an album that need to buy, as it is entrancing, hypnotic, erotic, soft, pulsating and the sound of a woman exploring herself and the larger world. Released on 17th October, 1989, The Sensual World reached number two in the U.K. It features some of Bush’s best singles – including The Sensual World and This Woman’s Work -, in addition to some remarkable deeper cuts. Rather than it being conceptual or linked like Hounds of Love, these are distinct songs that stands on their own, yet there does seem to be this overarching theme of exploration of the physical and sensual.
Sandwiched in-between two very different albums (Hounds of Love and 1993’s The Red Shoes), The Sensual World is a treasure trove relatively unexplored by radio stations and casual fans. From the breathy and sensual title track to lesser-known gems like Reaching Out and Between a Man and a Woman, it is an album where I think Kate Bush is at her most startling, desirous, open-hearted and mature. The Kate Bush Encyclopaedia collated some interviews where she discussed the album and what it means to her:
“Other people have said to me that they think this album is very dark, although for me I think it's my happiest album really. I find some of the tracks quite funny where other people say they find them scary. Although I have a dark sense of humour, maybe it is a subconscious thing that just goes into my music, because I think when I was writing this album that was perhaps something I was feeling a little - a sense of being a bit scared. Maybe it comes out in the music. I do think it's a very big self- therapy thing now - the more I work on an album the more I think it's almost a process for me to try and heal myself, have a look at myself. Do you know what I mean? Actually a very selfish thing in a way, but I think art is.
I do think what artistic people are trying to do is work through their problems through their art - look at themselves, confront all these things. (...) It's not that the album is written about me, not that it is autobiographical, but it is the most direct process I've used for an album. It's in my own studio and I had a lot of time so as not to be under pressure by outside forces. I've recorded the whole album with Del so it's just myself and Del in a very close relationship working together very intensely and it was hard for me to write this album. To actually write the songs was very difficult, and for the first time really, I went through a patch where I just couldn't write - I didn't know what I wanted to say. (...) Everything seemed like rubbish - you know? It seemed to have no meaning whatsoever. Somehow I managed to get a sense of some meaningfulness, and that's why (...) to me now, albums are perhaps a way of helping myself, but maybe helping other people too. To work through my problems maybe will help other people too. To work through my problems maybe will help other people to work through their problems. Maybe the meaningfulness of art is that once you've got over your selfish work within it, you can give it to other people and hopefully it might at least make them smile or something. (Roger Scott, Interview. Radio 1 (UK), 14 October 1989)
I think this album for me, unlike the last album, say, Hounds of Love, where I saw that as two sides - one side being conceptual - this album is very much like short stories for me. Ten short stories that are just saying something different in each one and it was a bit like trying to paint the pictures accordingly. Each song has a different personality and so they each a need little bit of something here, a little bit of that there - just like people, you know, some people you can't walk up to because you know they're a bit edgy first thing in the morning. So you have to come up sideways to them, you know, and it's kind of like how the songs are too. They have their own little personalities, and if it doesn't want you to do it, it won't let you. (The VH-1 interview, January 1990)”.
That thing about people perceiving The Sensual World as being dark – where as Bush said it is her happiest album. Although a lot of Hounds of Love was less personal and more conceptual, I think that, whether overt or hidden, there is more of Bush and her desires/feelings/hopes/need for connection across the ten songs on The Sensual World. Her words and vocals are so rich and full of emotions. I feel new elements such as the sonic blend and the contributions of the Trio Bulgarka give The Sensual World new depths and this extraordinary power and gravitas. Classic Album Sundays discussed how The Sensual World differed from Bush’s previous work in their feature:
“Unlike previous albums, The Sensual World did not follow a single conceptual arc. Instead each track illustrated a vignette, written from the perspectives of far more ordinary people than had previously featured in her songs. The allegories were still vivid and fantastical but at the heart of each story was the existential crises that we all face at some point in our lives. On songs such as ‘Heads We’re Dancing’, Bush deploys her dark sense of humour to imagine a young girl who is charmed onto the dance floor by a man she later learns is Adolf Hitler. The song was inspired by a friend who had spent the evening in the company of a captivating man they later found out to be “father of the atomic bomb” Robert Oppenheimer. Although somewhat ridiculous on the surface, the song speaks to something very real: can you ever really trust your own judgement? And if not, what does that say about you?
The Sensual World’s musical backbone is supported by several distinct influences. An art rock aesthetic still guides the album, with Gilmour’s soaring guitar riffs hyper-charging moments of ecstatic vocal release. Bush’s Farilight CMI makes a return; albeit in a softer, more understated capacity. But it’s the ethnic influences which give the album its particularly unique character. Adding an extra layer of Celtic colour to Nigel Kennedy’s string arrangements, an assortment of Irish folk instruments appear throughout The Sensual World, most notably on its title track in which Davey Spillane fills the middle eight with his uilleann pipes. The folk-inflected influence of her brother Paddy surfaces on songs such as ‘Reaching Out’ and ‘Deeper Understanding’, in which he plays instruments such as the mandolin and the tupan.
Another major influence came from the group of Bulgarian women known as the Trio Bulgarka, whom Bush had asked to contribute vocals on three of the album’s tracks. Painting a rich harmonic backdrop to her lead vocal on songs such as the computer love-affair ‘Deeper Understanding’, the women provide a traditional counterweight to Bush’s technological obsessions. As Bush was more accustomed to working with primarily male collaborators, the trio imprinted an even greater female presence on the album. The Irish-Bulgarian combination spoke to something deeper – as Bush recalled: “Maybe these are two races that have turned to music in times of hardship. Broken hearts singing, in terrible pain, getting help through the music”.
I do feel The Sensual World is a personal album, even if some of the lyrics have some mystique and enigma. Undeniably tender, sensuous, soul-baring and moving, the songs require proper investigation and time. I want to source a review for The Sensual World from the Johns Hopkins News-Letter. They note how, even when Bush is oblique or writes about connection to things that are not human, she is really talking about human touch:
“That Kate Bush opens her new album, "The Sensual World," with such provocative declarations signals something of a change in her lyrical outlook. In the past, Bush tended to couch the charged eroticism of her work in metaphors that gave a sense of distance. Her perchant for fantastical settings, musical and lyrical, is less indulged on "The Sensual World": such songs as "Love and Anger", "This Woman's Work", and the title track (quoted above) actually reach a level of realism characteristic of a writer like Elvis Costello.
At age thirty, after five albums of eccentric pop art, Bush seems anxious to abandon the life of the kinky spinster, intent on "stepping out of the page...where the water and the earth caress" and discovering "the powers of a woman's body." While the title track combines sexual liberation with coy come-ons (cleverly paraphrased from the closing pages of James Joyce's "Ulysses"), the album's first single, "Love and Anger," considers contradictory human motivations - the danger of "opening up" to one's lover and the intense desire to do just that. After seducing a man in the previous song, here it's as though Bush is abruptly seized with self-doubt. She conveys the resultant tensions via an array of bristling electric guitar, trap drum kits, hugely ambient Irish hand drums, and massed vocal harmonies, creating a mix more dense and harrowing than anything since 1982's hysteric "The Dreaming".
It's an exceptionally mature (read: confused) perception, especially in contrast with "The God", which, while equally focused, seems something of a lyrical step backward. Featuring some of Bush's most exquisite orchestral writing (arranged by Michael Kamen), the song seems more in the spirit of the childhood themes of her previous album, "Hounds of Love". Indeed, with its Cinemascope-style production and oceanic sound effects, "The Fog" is in essense a very lovely rewrite of that album's "Hello Earth."
A more thematically connected song, "Deeper Understanding," provides one of the album's true high points. One of the three songs featuring the magnificently non-Western harmonies of the Trio Bulgarka -Yanka Rupkhina, Eva Georgieva, and Stoyanka Bovena - "Deeper Understanding" provides an apt insight into Bush's change in attitude. "As the people here grow colder/I turn to my computer/and spend my evenings with it/like a friend," she sings, depicting a character who seems almost the opposite of the one who began the album with such lewd thoughts.
Yet one gets the feeling that the "deeper understanding" the woman seeks won't be found in the architecture of computer software, but in the warmth of the physical - sensual - world. Certainly, it's a leap of logic to make such assumptions; Bush has never abided by any of the programmatic notions common to that 70s' anachronism, the concept album. But the sense of place, mood, and continuity that Bush develops through the album's eleven songs invites the listener to take part”.
I have been thinking about The Sensual World and its qualities. Having past thirty, I am not suggesting Kate Bush was ageing or very different to the artist she was years before. Her perceptions and priorities definitely altered. One could feel something almost motherly and paternal at times. Other songs capture her at her rawest and most tender. Through the album, she produces this incredible passion and soulfulness. In search of something deeper; a truth or affection that she has been longing for, there are so many fascinating lines and moments through The Sensual World that take the breath. Over thirty years after it came out, people are still getting to bottom of one of Bush’s best albums. The listening experience is phenomenal! One has their senses and emotions caressed, moved and transformed. Go and play The Sensual World today and step…
INTO Kate Bush’s magical world.