FEATURE:
An Arresting and Soul-Moving Title Track
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Kate Bush’s The Sensual World at Thirty-Five
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AHEAD of marking the album’s…
thirty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to spend some time with its title track. The Sensual World was the first single released from one of Kate Bush’s most acclaimed albums. Released on 18th September, 1989, this amazing single was a departure from what we heard on 1985’s Hounds of Love. Not that The Sensual World was the next single after that album. Bush released Experiment IV in 1986. That was the only single released from her greatest hits album, The Whole Story. The Sensual World was a new phase. Not a massive departure from Hounds of Love, it at least did show new side’s to Bush’s music. The first single released in her thirties, there is a depth and lyrical aspect to the song that hinted at a different approach. If Hounds of Love was quite a masculine album in a lot of ways – especially with percussion and sound -, The Sensual World was more feminine. Regarded as one of her greatest singles, I wanted to celebrate and explore The Sensual World ahead of its thirty-fifth anniversary. I will go deeper with the song. Before that, Kate Bush Encyclopedia provided some critical reception to the song. Some words from Kate Bush about The Sensual World:
“Critical reception
The first Kate Bush single in three years was met quite positive reviews.
A dazzling return to form after a few slightly indifferent releases. The best song she’s written since ‘Army Dreamers’, even if slightly on the long side.
David Giles, Music week, 23 september 1989
She’s got bloomin’ sexy… in which talk of desire, touching, and Kate’s own breasts is rife. But these aren’t merely shock tactics… a delicate and all-consuming song.
Tim Southwell, Record Mirror, 23 September 1989
She sings of a deep sensuality that ensures that I have to wear baggy trousers when I dance. Beautiful, warm, and ever-lasting.
Kerrang!, 23 September 1989
Kate about ‘The Sensual World’
Because I couldn’t get permission to use a piece of Joyce it gradually turned into the song about Molly Bloom the character stepping out of the book, into the real world and the impressions of sensuality. Rather than being in this two-dimensional world, she’s free, let loose to touch things, feel the ground under her feet, the sunsets, just how incredibly sensual a world it is. (…) In the original piece, it’s just ‘Yes’ – a very interesting way of leading you in. It pulls you into the piece by the continual acceptance of all these sensual things: ‘Ooh wonderful!’ I was thinking I’d never write anything as obviously sensual as the original piece, but when I had to rewrite the words, I was trapped. How could you recreate that mood without going into that level of sensuality? So there I was writing stuff that months before I’d said I’d never write. I have to think of it in terms of pastiche, and not that it’s me so much.
Len Brown, ‘In The Realm Of The Senses’. NME (UK), 7 October 1989
The song is about someone from a book who steps out from this very black and white 2-D world into the real world. The immediate impressions was the sensuality of this world – the fact that you can touch things, that is so sensual – you know… the colours of trees, the feel of the grass on the feet, the touch of this in the hand – the fact that it is such a sensual world. I think for me that’s an incredibly important thing about this planet, that we are surrounded by such sensuality and yet we tend not to see it like that. But I’m sure for someone who had never experienced it before it would be quite a devastating thing. (…) I love the sound of church bells. I think they are extraordinary – such a sound of celebration. The bells were put there because originally the lyrics of the song were taken from the bookUlyssesby James Joyce, the words at the end of the book by Molly Bloom, but we couldn’t get permission to use the words. I tried for a long time – probably about a year – and they wouldn’t let me use them, so I had to create something that sounded like those original word, had the same rhythm, the same kind of feel but obviously not being able to use them. It all kind of turned in to a pastiche of it and that’s why the book character, Molly Bloom, then steps out into the real world and becomes one of us.
Roger Scott, Interview. Radio 1 (UK), 14 October 1989
There’s a few songs that have been difficult to write. I think the most frustrating and difficult to write was the song, ‘The Sensual World’. Uh, you’ve probably heard some of the story, that originally it was written to the lyrics at the end of ‘Ulysses’, and uh, I just couldn’t believe how the whole thing came together, it was so… It was just like it was meant to be. We had this sort of instrumental piece, and uh, I had this idea for like a rhythmic melody, and I just thought of the book, and went and got it, and the words fitted – they justfitted, the whole thing fitted, it was ridiculous. You know the song was saying, ‘Yes! Yes!’. And when I asked for permission, you know, they said, ‘No! No!’ That was one of the hardest things for me to swallow. I can’t tell you how annoyed I was that, um, I wasn’t allowed to have access to this great piece of work that I thought was public. And in fact I really didn’t think you had to get permission but that you would just pay a royalty. So I was really, really frustrated about it. And, um… kind of rewrote the words, trying to keep the same – same rhythm and sounds. And, um, eventually, through rewriting the words we also changed the piece of music that now happens in the choruses, so if they hadn’t obstructed the song, it would have been a very different song. So, to look at it positively, although it was very difficult, in the end, I think it was, it was probably worth all the trouble. Thank you very much.
Kate Bush Con, 1990”.
The video itself is arresting and cinematic. Co-directed by Kate Bush and Peter Richardson, it is one of her most iconic. Reaching number twelve in the U.K., it was her most successful chart placing in the country since Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Technically, if you count the Peter Gabriel song, Don’t Give Up, it was the highest placing since that song - though in Kate Bush’s universe, The Sensual World was seen as a return to form. The history is interesting. When Bush re-recorded the song and titled it Flower of the Mountain for 2011’s Director’s Cut, she finally got permission to use text from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Whether this version was better than the original. Many argue that The Sensual World is better because of its suggestiveness and Bush’s lyrics. How she produced her own version of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. There is not a lot written about the song itself. People explore the album and the songs from it though, for its amazing title track, there are not that many words dedicated to it. It is a pity, as The Sensual World is one of the most interesting and arresting songs! I love the composition and musical richness of The Sensual World. Paddy Bush on whips. Some incredible bass work from Del Palmer. Charlie Morgan’s percussion. The most essential and powerful musical element is the fiddle from John Sheahan, uilleann pipes from Davy Spilane and Dónal Lunny’s bouzouki. Sheahan and Lunny worked alongside Kate Bush on Hounds of Love.
Some of Kate Bush’s most evocative and poetic lyrics can be found on The Sensual World. The verses are incredibly moving and vivid: “Then I’d taken the kiss of seedcake back from his mouth/Going deep South, go down, mmh, yes/Took six big wheels and rolled our bodies/Off of Howth Head and into the flesh, mmh, yes”. I do love Bush’s words. How she builds her own world. Touches al the senses: “To where the water and the earth caress/And the down of a peach says mmh, yes/Do I look for those millionaires/Like a Machiavellian girl would/When I could wear a sunset? mmh, yes”. I like the idea of Kate Bush hearing Irish actress Siobhan McKenna reading the closing soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Her character recounting her earliest sexual experience with her husband-to-be. Bush felt that that Joyce’s text was in the public domain, so she paired it with the backing track that she had created. Jimmy Murakami was the man she approached to make a music video at the time. He would later direct her for King of the Mountain. That was the single from 2005’s Aerial. I think, in some ways, that song and The Sensual World share some DNA. Also, that title connection between King of the Mountain and Flower of the Mountain. It must have been frustrating not being able to use text from Ulysses. Kate Bush had always had an interest in exploring sounds and scents from other nations. I think this came more to the fore on The Sensual World and its follow-up, The Red Shoes (1993). In terms of genres, Bush exploring everywhere from Africa to Europe. Working with the Trio Bulgarka on both albums. The incredible Bulgarian vocal trio. A traditional Macedonian piece of music, Nevestinsko Oro (Bride’s Dance), was in her mind. It makes me think back to her earliest years and her brother Paddy introducing her to unusual and untraditional sounds. Music that many of her friends and peers would not have known about.
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
I want to end with section of an interview from 1989. Kate Bush was speaking with NME’s Len Brown. Bush gave a song-by-song guide to the album. I think it is very interesting reading the interview and how Bush approached the title track for The Sensual World. Almost defining the album in terms of its energy and lyrics, this was Bush exploring different sides to her artistry and personality. Always inspired by literature and film, The Sensual World is one of her most captivating and acclaimed songs:
“Four years from Hounds Of Love, 12 months since we last met in the company of three Bulgarian grannies called Trio Bulgarka, Kate’s changed little physically. Still petite, naturally older, her hair’s still long and henna-ed and the nervous laugh is as infectious as ever.
Musically she’s been gone a long time. Sure there’ve been collaborations (Gabriel’s ‘Don’t Give Up’), charitable outings (Amnesty, Comic Relief, Ferry Aid) and The Whole Story compilation, but The Sensual World is her first fresh substantial work since the ‘Experiment IV’ single in late ’86. Reasonable people were beginning to wonder whether, at last, she’d lost it completely and thrown in the towel.
What’s always been remarkable about Kate Bush has been the ability to withdraw from the music world, escape from the machine, and return months or years later with something rejuvenating, original, set apart from chart-fodder disposable pop. Like Bowie in the 70s, Bush in the 80s has been one of the true oddities, exceptions to the rules. Always out of step, always unique.
And always, as The Sensual World implies, provocative. Bells ring as you enter her ‘Sensual World’, bells of celebration, of sensual joy. "The communication of music is very much like making love," she once said, so it’s entirely appropriate that she should derive her title track from James Joyce’s Ulysses and, in particular, Molly Bloom’s thoughts on sex, sensuality and oysters at 2/6 per dozen.
"Because I couldn’t get permission to use a piece of Joyce it gradually turned into the songs about Molly Bloom the character stepping out of the book, into the real world and the impressions of sensuality," says Kate, softly, almost childlike. "Rather than being in this two dimensional world, she’s free, let loose to touch things, feel the ground under her feet, the sunsets, just how incredibly sensual a world it is.
"I originally heard the piece read by Siobhan McKenna years ago and I thought ‘My God! This is extraordinary, what a piece of writing!’ it’s a very unusual train of thought, very attractive. First I got the "mmh yes" and that made me think of Molly Bloom’s speech, and we had this piece of music in the studio already so it came together really quickly. Then, because I couldn’t get permission to use Joyce, it took another year changing it to what it is now. Typical innit!"
The result is extraordinarily sensual mouth music, far removed from the cod-pieced crassness that usually passes from physical love songs: "And at first with the charm around him, mmh yes / he loosened it so if it slipped between my breasts / He’d rescue it, mmh yes".
"In the original piece it’s just ‘Yes!" – a very interesting way of leading you in, it pulls you into the piece by the continual acceptance of all these sensual things. ‘Ooh wonderful!’ I was thinking I’d never write anything as obviously sensual as the original piece but when I had to rewrite the words I was trapped.
"How could you recreate that mood without going into that level of sensuality? So there I was writing stuff that months before I’d said I’d never write," she laughs. "I have to think of it in terms of pastiche and not that it’s me so much."
Having begun her career on The Kick Insider singing lines like, "Oh I need it oh oh feel it feel it my love" and "feeling of sticky love inside", and then gone on inLionheart to write a lyric like "the more I think of sex the better it gets", her reluctance to get too sensual, too fruity a decade later may seem a little strange.
But as Bush has increasingly gained control over the presentation of her music and her image during this period, stepping back from early marketing attempts to titillate (God, how they worked!) these reservations are understandable.
She claims The Sensual World contains the most "positive female energy" in her work to date and compositions like ‘This Woman’s Work’ tend to enforce that idea.
"I think it’s to do with me coming to terms with myself on different levels. 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."
But isn’t it odd that this feminist or feminine perspective should have been inspired by a man, Joyce?
"Yes, in some ways but it’s also the idea of Molly escaping from the author, out into the real world, being this real human rather than the character, stepping out of the page into the sensual world."
So is this concept of sensuality the most important thing to you at the moment, is it one of the life forces?
"Yes, it’s about contact with humans, it could all come down to the sensual level. Touch? Yes, even if it’s not physical touch, reaching out and touching people by moving them. I think it’s a very striking part of this planet, the fact there is so much for us to enjoy. The whole of nature is really designed for everything to have a good time doing what they should be doing…
"Fancy being a bee, leading an incredible existence, all these flowers designed just for you, flying into the runway, incredible colours, some trip…"
Mmh, buzz.
Many mumbles have breathed their last since Kate Bush first arrived on our screens, flouncing about in dry ice and funeral shroud, oddly crowing ‘Wuthering Heights’; obviously different and apart from any musical movement before or since. But whereas the all-conquering, universally acclaimed Hounds Of Love affair at least slotted into the-then pop world, The Sensual World is clearly even more out of step with the current piss poor post-SAW scene.
Probably because it’s got a slightly ethnic feel, founded on Kate’s use of Irish and Bulgarian musics and musicians in the creative process. Perhaps because she’s been free from pop for so long. Maybe because she’s crossed the threshold of 30?
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in the cover photo from The Sensual World’s single/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
"God! Yes, I’m sure it’s all tied in with it," she laughs. "I think it’s a very important time from 28 to 32-ish, where there’s some kind of turning point. Someone said in your teens you get the physical puberty and between 28 and 32 mental puberty. Let’s fact 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."
She’s not specific about what she’s actually gone through in recent years, apart from the usual trials by media. If you were to scan back through the smeared pages of cheaper organs you would probably come to the conclusion that she’s been a) pregnant b) fighting drug and alcohol addiction c) 25 stone and d) having several flings with Peter Gabriel.
More credibly, it seems she’s been reclusively struggling with her music and even living in bliss (somewhere near Kent, apparently) with long-term lover, bassist and moustachioed-mixer Del Palmer.
And yet one is naturally tempted to peer into The Sensual World and inquire whether or not a song such as ‘Between A Man And A Woman’ is a personal account of romantic difficulties? ("It’s so hard for love to stay together / With the modern Western pressures".)
"But anything you write, people tend to think it’s about you," she says, nervously. "Like Woody Allen, his films are obviously very personal, there’s obviously an awful lot of him in his work, but you see him being interviewed and as soon as he’s asked if it’s personal he gets really defensive, it’s a very awkward area…”
In a recent feature, MOJO ranked The Sensual World twenty-second in their top fifty Kate Bush songs listing. It is interesting reading what they say about a song that still sounds fascinating and moving to this day. Thirty-five years after it was released into the world:
“Like trains of thought continually tumbling” is how Kate Bush described Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of James Joyce’s 1922 novel, Ulysses. It isn’t hard to see why the rhapsodic conclusion of Joyce’s modernist masterpiece took root in the singer’s subconscious. With Wuthering Heights, 11 years previously, Bush had alchemised Catherine Earnshaw’s tormented pleas for Heathcliff’s forgiveness into a sexual fever dream and if anything, Molly’s speech was an even more suitable case for such a treatment. From the first “Mmh, yes” that emerges from the opening peals of wedding bells, Bush’s languorous performance astrally vaults the listener to the mother of all postcoitally sunny Sunday mornings. One ironic consequence of The Sensual World’s success was that, by the time Bush set about re-recording it for 2011’s Director’s Cut, Joyce’s estate had clearly been won over by the purity of her intentions. With permission now granted, the new version – retitled Flower Of The Mountain – duly reverted to the original words, and saw Bush confer a breathier, worldlier ambience on Bloom, as if channeling the woman enjoying the memory of first love, rather than the woman in the memory. For all of that, it’s the first version that remains the definitive one”.
In 2018, The Guardian ranked The Sensual World in fifteenth. That was in their feature where they were placing her singles. What Hi-Fi? published a feature this year where they named the songs of Kate Bush which are best to test your stereo to. The ones with the best sound. The Sensual World was in there. Also this year, Classic Pop placed The Sensual World ninth in the top forty Kate Bush songs. A track that is respected and regarded highly today. Even if it was an unconventional single release and very different to what was being released in 1989, there is no doubting the fact that it is popular and seen as one of Bush’s best moments. So much groove, sensuality and dance through the song. This waltz and dizzying dream that the listener gets sucked into. So many scents that entice the heart and entice the mind. It is a wonderful song that I first heard in the 1990s. Ahead of The Sensual World album turning thirty-five, I wanted to spend time with the single. Released on 18th September, 1989, we need to spotlight and celebrate this song. Introducing this amazing new Kate Bush album, it was clear there was a mix of positivity and slight confusion from critics. Some maybe not embracing this new direction. Many noticing the clear potential and prowess of the song. It is both grand and intimate. I thought that I knew everything about The Sensual World’s title track. I have learned something new writing this feature. Amazing that new layers of this stunning track are being revealed…
AFTER thirty-five years.