She proposed a record of “10 short stories”8, flitting between distinct moods and textures. Once again writing and recording dissolved into one long process. Her working methods had become even more refined since Hounds Of Love and the time frame was loose. Del was now her principal engineer and often they worked alone; they could go home for the day if things weren’t working out, or indeed take an extended break to allow her to evaluate where they were. A friendly face such as Haydn Bendall appeared now and again to add experience and expertise, and of course the family were constantly around, providing tea, sandwiches and exotic instrumentation – this time, folks, say hi to the valiha (a Madagascan bamboo tube zither) and the tupan (a Balkan drum) – on tap.
Periodically, musicians were also invited in to add a splash of paint to the canvas. Bush called upon her usual retinue of drummers, bassists and guitar players, augmented by some exceptional craftsman in their chosen fields, such as Celtic harpist Alan Stivell, or Nigel Kennedy, the brash, somewhat contrived enfant terrible of modern British classical music. They each performed alone to the existing backing track, and even then usually a composite of several different takes would be used.
The sense was of a musical jigsaw being slowly and rather painfully assembled. The first track written, ‘Love And Anger’, was still being laboriously manipulated into shape over two years later, and even after the record’s release Bush still didn’t regard it as finished, nor indeed have much idea what it supposed to be about. The title song also underwent a long and troubled birth. Written with a DX7 and built on a sparse rhythm track, much of the musical texture was added during sessions at Windmill Lane in Dublin, where Irish instrumentation was also added to ‘The Fog’ and ‘Never Be Mine’, and where Davey Spillane’s piped Macedonian air accentuated Bush’s vaguely Eastern melody on one of her most seductive compositions.
Bush had been inspired to write ‘The Sensual World’ after hearing the celebrated Irish actress Siobhan McKenna read the torrential closing soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses, where the character Molly Bloom recalls – in lovely, liquid detail – her earliest sexual experience, the moment she gave herself, in body and mind, to husband-to-be Leopold Bloom. As a piece of writing it’s a rolling monument to unashamed female desire, a celebration of a purely physical life-force. Ulysses was first published in its entirety in 1922 and Bush, believing that the novel was now out of copyright, simply lifted parts of Molly’s speech and sang them over the soft, swaying backing track, astonished at how well the words fitted. Those who heard the track in this original incarnation regard it as one of her greatest pieces of work.
“Jeez, it was a stunning record,” says Jimmy Murakami, director of the animated classics The Snowman and When The Wind Blows and, later, Bush’s 2005 video for ‘King Of The Mountain’. “Kate came to me in the late Eighties when I had a commercial studio in Dublin. She wanted me to do a video promo on this song, this beautiful music for James Joyce’s lines for Molly Bloom. I went over to her house in England and she played this track and it was absolutely fantastic. It was done. She said she thought it was PD [Public Domain] but I told her I wasn’t so sure, because the Joyce relative who lives in Paris [Joyce’s grandson, Stephen James Joyce] owns it. She got nervous about that and she called up and found out that it was true.”
The Joyce estate refused to release the words. Bush, not used to having her creativity stifled by pettifogging red tape, spent over a year trying to gain permission before accepting defeat. “Obviously, I was very disappointed,” she said. “It was completely their prerogative, you know, they don’t have to give their permission, but it was very difficult for me, then, to re-approach the song. In some ways I wanted to just leave it off the album, but we’d put a lot of work into it.”9
The fact that Bush was already in discussions about making a video for the song (she eventually co-directed the promo clip with the Comic Strip’s Peter Richardson) indicates how far down the line she was before she had to change tack. In the end she kept the backing track and simply “re-approached the words”,10 painting a scenario where Molly, the sensualist in excelsis, steps out of the two-dimensional confines of the page (and out of the clutches of a male author, albeit one with a genius for female dialogue) to experience the joys of the real world.
Bush’s rewrite – painstaking as it was – is remarkably effective, and preserves the giddy sexuality of the original text as well as invoking Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ (“my arrows of desire rewrite the speech”) to provide a decidedly post-modern comment on her own struggles to complete the song. ‘The Sensual World’ is the ultimate hymn of affirmation. The bells at the beginning are celebratory, a marriage or a rebirth is being announced, while the recurring echo of Molly’s long, languorous ‘Yesssss’ – which Joyce referred to as ‘the female word’* – is the perfect expression of Bush’s ability to be directly erotic without being either crass or coy. With its talk of “wearing a sunset” and exalting the down of a peach (in Ulysses Molly describes the female sexual organs as ‘soft like a peach’), the track is a stunning insight into the way Bush seeks to melt into the world of the senses. Art is fine, but nothing is quite as electrifying as simply being. And all this in a four-minute pop song.
The mood music surrounding the new material was obviously feminine. Now in her late twenties and having recognised some of the missteps of her past, Bush felt she had finally gained “power o’er a woman’s body” and began to see the album as “a strong expression of positive female energy.”11 The lyrical themes followed suit: she said frequently that the album was “all about relationships.” This is the very loosest of loose definitions, but true in the sense that, if The Sensual World has any unifying theme, it is the intrinsic human need to connect to something or someone. The album consistently comes back to our desire for contact, which brings moments of joy, warmth and ecstasy, but also loneliness, uncertainty, sadness, pain, unresolved emotions and a striving for all the things we can never have. The need to touch and hold comes, inevitably, with a corresponding awareness of the transience of everything. “The older I get, the more I feel that this is what life is about,” she said. “Letting go of all these things that you get caught up in.”12
It was a bittersweet calling card. ‘The Fog’ swirls between childhood recollection and a very adult dilemma, a song about having the courage to leave the nest and swim alone into deep water, taking solace in the notion that pushing out from safe ground is usually far worse in thought than reality. On the beautiful ‘Never Be Mine’ she examines the perennial fight between dream and fantasy: the battle between reason and instinct, what we know to be true and what we feel, “the thrill and the hurting,” is a recurring motif on the record. Bush is so good at this, capturing the way in which we are entrapped as well as set free – as on the title track – by the things we can’t help but want to feel. And how vividly she conjures up the association of memory, the inescapable conspiracy of the senses which ensure that “the smell of burning fields will now mean you and here.”
‘Heads We’re Dancing’ is a dark little song about the masks we all wear and also place upon the faces of others, marking the distance between who we are and who we appear to be. Inspired by a family friend who had once – unknowingly – sat next to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atomic bomb, and been charmed by this anonymous dinner guest, it told the (highly implausible, it must be said) story of a girl who had waltzed with Hitler in 1939 and found him perfectly alluring until she discovered in the next day’s newspaper that she had effectively been dancing with the devil.
On ‘Reaching Out’ the child not only grasps for the hand that holds, but also the hand that scolds, and also the fire that burns. Every act has a consequence. The song also touches on one of her passions – gardening. “See how the flower leans instinctively towards the light,” she sings. In her mind, music and horticulture seemed to share certain core characteristics. “I’ve planted a flower bed; you have to be very patient,” she said. “And it
’s a good thing for me to work with, because making an album, you have to be very patient, and this flower bed helped me tremendously, to watch how things have to fight for space. You have to get the weeds out, a little bit of water every day, every day a little something.”13
Patience was indeed required by all parties who claimed a stake in the album. Even compared to the more leisurely pace of music-making in the mid-to-late Eighties, The Sensual World took its time; the diehard loyalists at the Kate Bush Club Newsletter ceased trading as a point of protest until a new album was forthcoming, but still she would not be rushed. By the summer of 1988 most of the 10 tracks had been mixed by Julian Mendelssohn. EMI badly wanted product and suggested semi-publicly that the album might be released that autumn – a presumption which angered Bush, who knew that it wasn’t ready. She had become so wrapped up in the largely isolated process of recording that in the summer of 1988 she called in Kevin Killen, the Irish engineer she had worked with previously at Windmill Lane and on ‘Don’t Give Up’, and invited him to come and hear some of the mixes. She needed a fresh pair of ears.
They agreed that the mixes were technically excellent but also concurred that the songs and performances weren’t yet finished. Therefore, a full 18 months into the recording of the album, a second wave of studio work started: lifting up the bonnet and getting into the nuts and bolts of the songs, adding, taking away, changing textures and tones, generally seeing what could be improved upon. Bush recorded some new vocals; David Gilmour came in with his box of tricks and added explosive guitar to ‘Love And Anger’ and ‘Rocket’s Tail’; John Giblin added his distinctive bass parts. By far the most radical addition to the album’s overall sound palette, however, was the Trio Bulgarka.
Bush had already written ‘Rocket’s Tail’ for them, a track built almost entirely around the voice and one for which she had conducted a dummy run in her studio, with some friends providing a block of shrieks and gargles to get a sense of “vocal intensity”.14 Ahead of her October trip to Sofia she faxed through the lyrics to the song, a preview which caused understandable bafflement within traditional Bulgarian musical circles. ‘Rocket’s Tail’ describes a couple watching a firework display from Waterloo Bridge, one wishing that they were up there in the sky, experiencing a true, dangerous connection with the world, while the other at first sees only a “stick on fire, alone on its journey,” but then changes her mind and – armed with a witch’s hat, a silver suit, Size 5 boots and a gunpowder pack strapped to her back – transforms herself into a human rocket, “tail on fire”.
Although named in good humour in honour of one of Bush’s three new kittens (the others were Torchy and Sparky), brought into the fold after the death in 1987 of her beloved Zoodle, it was really a deeply symbolic song underscoring the necessity of taking risks, of being able to transcend the constraining pressures of both self and society to live in the moment of dangerous impulse and inspiration. It was an appropriately fearless song to send to Sofia as a statement of intent. If it summed up the spirit of the risky collaboration, it also worked as a standard bearer for Bush’s general artistic ethos: don’t be afraid to crash the rocket.
With this suitably eccentric warning flare lighting her path Bush, accompanied by Joe Boyd, flew to Bulgaria for a weekend in October 1988. It was an eventful few days. She was invited to dinner with the Trio on the first night and watched in astonishment as Eva picked up the phone in order to take her pitch from the dial tone, before the three women began to sing in perfect unison around the kitchen table. Not for the first time, she was almost immediately moved to tears.
But there was much hard work to be done. Translator and musician Borimira Nedeva drove Bush and Boyd around the city to various rendezvous in her tiny little car – at one point it broke down and Bush had to get out and push. It was another apt metaphor for an uphill struggle. The structure of Bush’s songs and their detailed backing tracks could not be changed at this late stage. Meanwhile, the Trio’s harmonies – though they might have appeared raw and spontaneous – were formal and meticulously planned. Between the Trio, Nedeva, arranger Dmitir Penev and Rumyana Tzintzarska, an ethnologist from the state radio station, it was a process of trial and error to find which of these centuries old melodies might best fit Bush’s new songs, a case of trying to bend history, tradition and clashing cultures to suit a shared purpose.
“They spent two days in a school room with Kate and her beat box and a tape of the tracks,” says Joe Boyd. “The ethnographer would suggest a folk melody that might work with a line of Kate’s song, the arranger would come up with a harmony for it and Kate would say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. All those harmonies are arranged, not spontaneous folk harmonies. They couldn’t just play a part on the piano and sing it – the women could only perform if they could fit it into their experience of Bulgarian traditional music. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to sing in the ‘open throat’ style that Kate wanted.”
At the end of the weekend little had been resolved in practical terms. “We didn’t have any idea how we were going to do it!” laughs Nedeva. “The conclusion was that we were going to do it, that was probably the only certain thing.” Bush had already booked time at Angel Studios, and the next step was to move the ensemble to London for recording. Bulgaria was still a Communist country (free elections did not take place until June 1990) with all the restraints that implies, and Boyd had already encountered difficulties in previous trips travelling to the remote villages in order to access music, because they were close to the border and required a special pass; he often had to keep quiet and pretend to be asleep as they approached. Getting the Trio and their entourage back to London at such short notice required similar acts of jiggery-pokery.
“At that time it wasn’t easy to arrange things for foreigners in Bulgaria,” says Nedeva. “The political climate was extremely difficult but I was in a very good position because my father was a high party member, and I managed to open a lot of closed doors. There weren’t any [plane] tickets, and Kate had already booked a studio in London. I had some connections and I went to the main computer and put them in the list of the passengers, which obviously led to the plane being overloaded. They didn’t know how this happened and they put on a second plane. It was crazy times, there was no other way but to go around the circumstances and do what you had to do. They all went on this plane, but I didn’t because I got arrested! I went three days later, which wasn’t too late, fortunately. Music is my life, and I was absolutely convinced that it was a group project that was going to work and deserved to be supported, so I would risk anything.”
It was another example of the extraordinary loyalty Kate Bush and her music inspires, even among those who have only just met her. In this case, it was the establishing of a close human bond between the two sides that enabled the sessions to work. The party which finally arrived in London included the three singers, arranger Penev, and an official translator – Nelli Svetkova – who was effectively there as a state chaperone to ensure the women didn’t defect; no one heard her speak a word of English throughout the entire trip. It was Nedeva, when she arrived, who had the task of translating not just words but also musical ideas, emotions, delicate shifts of emphasis. She felt, she said, “like a live electric wire, high voltage currents running back and forth. I had to shoot words back and forth and see how they react and try to see what’s good and try to promote it. Because sometimes Kate didn’t know what she wanted.”
Fortunately, Bush and the Trio immediately formed a sisterly bond (“She’s modest, with a very big heart,” said Yanka15) and recognised a shared instinct for what they were doing, communicating largely through the use of smiles, hugs and sign language. “They were so emotionally on the same wavelength, there wasn’t much need for words except where there was a specific thing that Kate wanted them to do,” says Nedeva. Bush defined the experience as “extraordinary. They didn’t speak a word of English and we didn’t speak any Bulgarian, but we could communicate through music, so t
hat absolutely transcended barriers. There were things we needed to translate but, generally, we communicated emotionally, and I just loved that…. They’ll just come up and touch you and cuddle you, and you can go up and give them a big cuddle, and I really enjoyed that kind of communication, it felt very real and direct to me.”16
Nonetheless, the few days of sessions at Angel Studios were long and hard, typically stretching from late morning until almost midnight. On Boyd’s advice Bush placed the Trio around a single ambient microphone and, having only scratched the surface in Sofia, most of the experimenting was done in the studio, Penev suggesting arrangements of folk tunes and Bush either agreeing or hinting that they might try something else. For ‘Rocket’s Tail’, the most complex track, Penev’s prepared arrangement combining several traditional ‘Shop’ songs rather miraculously succeeded in fitting Bush’s densely layered opus. Towards the end, however, something extraordinary occurred. Yanka, the de facto leader and a strong, glamorous, imposing presence, reacted to a translated suggestion from Bush by improvising a hair-raising polyphonic solo – i-i-iiiiii – which mimics the explosion and flight of the rocket, triggered by David Gilmour’s solo.
It worked purely on emotion: the Trio didn’t know what any of the songs were about, and the words they sang (“Darling Mando, beautiful girl”) were in no way connected to Bush’s lyrics, but the effect was stunning. Such a freewheeling approach to Bulgarian traditional music was very unusual, and the approach to ‘Rocket’s Tail’ shifted the emphasis of the session. “After Yanka’s solo everything else was mostly improvisations,” says Nedeva. “We found out that this is a better way of working, even though it takes a lot of studio time. When you have a good leader like Yanka, and she starts singing something they don’t know, they can just start singing along and they make perfect harmony. They have this feeling for each other, they are tuned to each other, it’s some amazing inner feeling.”
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