FEATURE:
Kate Bush: The Deep Cuts
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in an alternate publicity shot for 2005’s Aerial/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
Mrs. Bartolozzi
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I will move away from this series…
after today, as I want to do some more general Kate Bush features, plus a couple more about The Sensual World, ahead of its thirty-third anniversary next month. The point of this series is to highlight Kate Bush songs that are not played much or are deeper cuts. Aerial was released in November 2005. This was Kate Bush’s first studio album (a double at that) since 1993’s The Red Shoes. Split into two halves, A Sea of Honey, and A Sky of Honey, I wanted to focus on one of the songs from the first half. I have written about Mrs. Bartolozzi before. I was keen to explore this song, as I think it is quite misunderstood and overlooked. Many reviewers and critics focused to much on the erotic nature of the track or were reductive, in the sense they said it was about a washing machine. I mean, it is in a way, but there is so much more to the track, lyrically and musically. Thanks to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, we get some archived interviews where Bush talked about Mrs. Bartolozzi and what it means:
“Is it about a washing machine? I think it's a song about Mrs. Bartolozzi. She's this lady in the song who...does a lot of washing (laughs). It's not me, but I wouldn't have written the song if I didn't spend a lot of time doing washing. But, um, it's fictitious. I suppose, as soon as you have a child, the washing suddenly increases. And uh, what I like too is that a lot of people think it's funny. I think that's great, because I think that actually, it's one of the heaviest songs I've ever written! (laughs)
Clothes are...very interesting things, aren't they? Because they say such an enormous amount about the person that wears them. They have a little bit of that person all over them, little bits of skin cells and...what you wear says a lot about who you are, and who you think you are...
So I think clothes, in themselves are very interesting. And then it was the idea of this woman, who's kind of sitting there looking at all the washing going around, and she's got this new washing machine, and the idea of these clothes, sort of tumbling around in the water, and then the water becomes the sea and the clothes...and the sea...and the washing machine and the kitchen... I just thought it was an interesting idea to play with.
What I wanted to get was the sense of this journey, where you're sitting in front of this washing machine, and then almost as if in a daydream, you're suddenly standing in the sea. (Ken Bruce show, BBC Radio 2, 1 November 2005)
Well, I do do a lot of washing [chuckles]. I'm sure I would never have written the song if I didn't... You know, just this woman, in her house, with her washing. And then the idea of taking the water in the washing machine with all the clothes, and the water then becoming the sea... and I also think there's something very interesting about clothes. They're kind of people without the people in them, if you know what I mean? [Kate laughs] They all have our scent, and pieces of us on them, somehow. (Front Row, BBC4, 4 November 2005)”.
I am intending to write a series of features about Kate Bush albums that celebrate anniversaries in November. Aerial is among them. I will not revisit Mrs. Bartolozzi then, but I wanted to spotlight it now, as you do not hear that many songs from Aerial on the radio. I often wonder what it would have been like if Bush had decided to release another single from the album, following Aerial’s opening track, King of the Mountain. It would have been really interesting seeing what Bush would have done. Maybe there would have been quite a literal interpretation of the song, or perhaps something a bit more abstract. I have a lot of love and affection for all Kate Bush’s songs, and it is a shame that ones like Mrs. Bartolozzi are not better known or heard. This is what Bush said to Tom Doyle about the song in 2005 during an interview for The Guardian:
“If there is perhaps less mystery to Kate Bush than we might have expected, her music remains reassuringly the same ecstatic alchemy of the humdrum and otherworldly. Recalling the hello-clouds wonder of The Big Sky from 1985's Hounds of Love or the frank paean to menstruation that is Strange Phenomena from her debut, The Kick Inside, Aerial finds Bush marvelling in the magic of the everyday: the wind animating a skirt hanging on a clothes line, the trace of footprints leading into the sea, the indecipherable codes of birdsong.
But the one track on Aerial that best bridges the divide between Bush's domestic and creative existences is the haunting piano ballad Mrs Bartolozzi, in which a housewife character drifts off into a nostalgic reverie while watching clothes entwining in her washer-dryer. It's also the one track set to polarise opinion among listeners, with its eerie, unhinged chorus of "washing machine ... washing machine". Bush acknowledges as much.
"A couple of people who heard it early on," she says, dipping a spoon into her avocado, "they either really liked it or they found it very uncomfortable. I liked the idea of it being a very small subject. Clothes are such a strong part of who a human being is. Y'know, skin cells, the smell. Somebody thought that maybe there'd been this murder going on, I thought that was great. I love the ambiguity”.
A terrific track that I would actually have loved to have seen unveiled at 2014’s Before the Dawn (Bush did perform many songs from Aerial at that residency, yet Mrs. Bartolozzi was not included), it is s superb deep cut that is worthy of more love and attention. The fact Bush can discuss domestic life and dreams in such a compelling and engaging way is testament to her originality and incredible talent. Mrs. Bartolozzi proves that there is…
NOBODY in music like her.