Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  At some point, however, Bush seemed unable to distinguish between what a song needed and what it could live without. ‘Why Should I Love You?’ tends to sum up the problems that afflict The Red Shoes. The demo is simple and moving, a beautiful mixture of voice, organ and rhythm. The song as it appears on the album, however, is wildly overloaded, a hellish broth featuring the attentions of Prince, the Trio Bulgarka, Lenny Henry, a trombone and a flugelhorn, all seemingly straining in different directions. It’s a mess, and a shameful waste of what could have been a truly inspirational collaboration.

  Bush and Prince had been edging closer for years. In many ways they were remarkably similar artists: relentlessly mythologised, very private, undeniably eccentric with a dry, quirky sense of humour, obsessed with control and displaying an inventiveness that was often misunderstood and sometimes ridiculed. After Bush turned up at one of his 1990 Wembley shows they had communicated with an eye on a collaboration, and in 1991 Bush sent him the multi-track tape of ‘Why Should I Love You?’ In the words of Del Palmer, it returned “from … Paisley Park studio covered in vocals, guitar solos and keyboards.”29 Prince’s engineer, Michael Koppelman, was less diplomatic, calling his contribution “lame disco”.30 It was certainly wildly over-the-top and unrestrained, and it took Bush and Palmer a further two years to negotiate his maze of overdubs and retain some sense of the original track, eventually retaining only lead guitar, synths and chorus vocals. If it had been anyone other than Prince, you suspect, Bush would have ditched his contributions entirely.

  ‘And So Is Love’ fell foul of a similar problem. At heart a simple, brooding minor key pop song, it’s dogged by a terribly mainstream, Americanised arrangement which attempts to combine the trademark blues guitar of Eric Clapton – in itself a distressingly conventional sound to hear on a Bush record – with an irritating synthetic keyboard effect. These identity crises happened all over the album, sounds and styles constantly bumping awkwardly into one another, with little attempt to find their common ground. The Trio Bulgarka, likewise, are used on three songs in a manner which largely renders their contribution a shadow of what it had been on The Sensual World.

  She had other, more important things on her mind. The process of making The Red Shoes was completely overshadowed by the serious illness of her mother. After Bush had performed ‘Rocket Man’ on Wogan on December 16, 1991, the host, Terry Wogan, had sent a greeting to Hannah, and added a ‘get well soon’ message. She died just two months later, on February 14, 1992, succumbing to cancer aged 73. Roy Harper sang the traditional Irish song ‘The Lark In The Morning’ at her funeral. Everyone was crushed, especially her daughter, who said it felt “like the end of the world.”31

  “It obviously devastated her, though I don’t think she let on how much,” recalls Stewart Avon Arnold. Her passing not only left a gaping hole at the very heart of the Bush family, but also in the working and domestic environment of Wickham Farm, in which Hannah had been the centrifugal life force for so many years. “Suddenly she just wasn’t around,” says Charlie Morgan. “And she had always been around.”

  Bush’s instincts would normally have told her to push on through a crisis. This time it proved impossible. “Usually I can pull myself through things like feeling low or having problems … but I have been at points where I just couldn’t work,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly sing – it was beyond me, it just hurt too much…. I think that the biggest thing that happened on this album is that my mother died. I couldn’t work for months, I couldn’t go near the whole process. I had no desire to start, no desire to work at all.”32

  Somehow the album sessions eventually had to go on. Hannah’s death was too cataclysmic to be digested straight away or directed into the music, but – coming on the back of a period of loss, and a certain confusion about how the record should sound – the impact can be felt throughout the album, which is both pensive, painful and unfocused. “I haven’t been able to write about any of it – nevertheless the experience is there … being expressed through very subliminal things, like the quality of some of the performances,” she said, very honestly.33

  ‘Rubberband Girl’ is a deceptively jaunty sounding opener, twanging away on a single note, its raw, repetitive groove betraying the fact that it was written quickly in the studio. “When we arrived to do ‘The Red Shoes’, the night before she’d been up doing ‘Rubberband Girl’,” recalls Colin Lloyd-Tucker. “It was very rough, hardly anything on it with just a guide vocal. She was still working out the lyrics – she had a verse, which she kept repeating on the rough version, and said she was going to write the words later.”

  The song is a brave attempt but ultimately a futile gesture. This is the album where Bush does not bounce back. In a sense, she spent her first couple of albums as little more than a girl trying on the clothes of a woman. On The Red Shoes, she sounds like a woman trying desperately, and in vain, to cling onto her sense of hope and innocent wonder. “When you lose your mother, you’re no longer a little girl any more,” she said.34

  The songs are full of doubt, literally full of questions. Lyrically, the listener can take their pick of lines that might stand as manifestos for the way she was feeling: “We used to say, ‘Ah hell we’re young’, but now we see that life is sad,” she sings on ‘And So Is Love’, in a thought borrowed from Joseph Campbell, the American writer and mythologist and author of The Masks Of God. On ‘Lily’ she even consults her – real life – healer, Lily Cornford, of London’s Maitreya School of Healing, about what to do, because “life has blown a great big hole through me.” The Red Shoes describes a world defined by absences “Life is loss, isn’t it?” she mused. “It’s learning to cope with loss.”35

  “Just being alive it can really hurt,” is the killer line from ‘Moments Of Pleasure’, which recalls fleeting times of past happiness while commemorating a sadly growing list of departed friends: her aunt Maureen, Alan Murphy (Smurph) and Gary Hurst (Bubba), Bill Duffield, not forgotten after all these years, and John Barratt (nicknamed ‘Teddy’, from the children’s show Andy Pandy: Bush was ‘Loopy Lou’ and Jon Kelly ‘Andy’), the assistant engineer on Never For Ever and The Dreaming who would enthusiastically join in the game of spinning round and round in the control room chair at Abbey Road.

  Michael Powell is also name-checked, the renowned British film director who had worked with Hitchcock and, in 1948, made one of Bush’s favourite films, The Red Shoes, taken from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale in which a ballerina cannot stop dancing. The film inspired the album’s title track and was also a direct influence on Bush’s own short film, The Line, The Cross And The Curve, which she made immediately after finishing the record. She had contacted Powell not long before he died to see whether he’d be interested in working with her, which sparked a short but intense long-distance friendship. While on a visit to New York in the late spring of 1989 to discuss a different master of The Sensual World by Bob Ludwig for the American market, and also to talk tactics with her new record label Columbia, she had met the aged director at the Royalton Hotel during an unseasonal blizzard. Their encounter is recalled in the second verse; he was 84 and already frail, and within a year he too was dead. Although it was recorded in mid-1991 and finished long before her death, Hannah also appears in the song, dispensing one of her stock phrases, “Every old sock meets an old shoe”. Prior to the album’s release, Bush previewed the song on the Aspel & Company talk show on June 20, 1993, on what would have been Hannah’s seventy-fourth birthday.

  In other ways, too, The Red Shoes has all the ache of letting go. In Alan Murphy’s absence Danny McIntosh came in to play guitar. A member of the Seventies rock band Bandit, with future Eighties pop star Jim Diamond on lead vocals, McIntosh went on to play in Grand Hotel, a band which featured Ivan Penfold, an old friend of Del and Brian Bath who had played in their pre-KT Bush Band group Conkers and whom Bush had mentored briefly as a writer, playing piano on a couple of his songs. McIntosh had had prior contact with many of tho
se in Bush’s orbit, which may have been the reason he was invited to play on the album. “[Danny] reputedly taught Alan Murphy all his stuff,” says Bath. “Great player.”

  His arrival was significant in more ways than one. It coincided with another highly significant change in Bush’s life, for it was during the sessions for The Red Shoes and the filming that took place immediately afterwards that her 15-year romantic relationship with Del Palmer came to an amicable close. Soon after she began dating McIntosh, who remains her partner today and is the father to their son, Bertie.

  The break-up was not, as you would expect, conducted publicly. She dealt with it privately, as she had done with her mother’s death. Because of the close working proximity of all parties, however, her friends and colleagues were of course aware that something was afoot regarding her relationship with Del. But what exactly? It was a confusing time for everyone. In addition to Hannah’s death, the album was proving problematic and she appeared to be bouncing between splitting up with Palmer, getting back together with him, then splitting up again. That it wasn’t the happiest or most stable period of her life was obvious to those around her. Nevertheless, when she finally ended up with McIntosh it came as a surprise to many of her friends.

  “I didn’t see anything that I thought, ‘Oh, they’re going out together,’” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “We did talk a lot, me and Danny, on the set, but to me he was just a professional musician until some time later they were going out – officially.”

  In retrospect, Del’s description of Bush playing guitar – for the first and only time on record – on ‘Big Stripey Lie’ appears full of portents of what was to come. “She said to the guitarist we were using [McIntosh], ‘I’m really into the guitar, I’d really like to be able to play it’. And he said, ‘Oh, here, play this one (a Fender Stratocaster) for a bit.’ So, he showed her a few chords, and – this is no kidding – a week later she was in front of this Marshall stack in the studio giving it her all! I’ve never seen anything like it. She’s a natural. She was playing lead guitar and no one would know it wasn’t an experienced guitarist.”36

  Whatever seismic changes were occurring in private, in public Del remained very much on the scene. When The Line, The Cross And The Curve premiered in November 1993, Bush attended with Del and her father. When she flew to New York shortly afterwards for a short round of promotion, Del went with her. At the fan convention later in 1994, Del was there (as was Bush, briefly), helping to auction items. Despite the final parting of the ways romantically they managed to retain their close friendship and Del has remained her engineer, her most trusted voice in the studio. He later moved to Reading, near Bush’s current home, and all parties seem to have reached a very civilised accommodation.

  “Every time I went round to teach her classes Del would be there working in the studio and Danny would be there working in the house,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “If [Danny] wasn’t playing he’d be doing housework or saying, ‘Kate we’ve got to go and do this this afternoon.’ When we’d come back in from the workout, sometimes all four of us would be sitting around drinking [tea]. It’s quite bizarre, really, but then Del has been very much a part of Kate’s life since she was a teenager.”

  It’s impossible to listen to the album’s closing track, ‘You’re The One’, and not hear it as a troubled attempt to reconcile an inevitable but deeply hurtful ending. “Everything I have I bought with you,” she sings. “Everything I do we did together.” Perhaps tellingly, McIntosh doesn’t play on the track; Jeff Beck does, as does Gary Brooker, Procol Harum’s former keyboard player, a further example of the album’s tendency towards celebrity cameos. It’s only a shame that ‘You’re The One’ is so stodgy, an unconventional Bush song only in the sense that it’s so entirely conventional, a thudding, ponderous rock ballad with an artless, heart-on-sleeve lyric, the kind of apparently unvarnished autobiography we perhaps thought we always wanted to hear from her. When it finally arrived it was clumsy and clunky, the bald words actually getting in the way of the emotion. Banal, almost, although it is the one track where the Trio Bulgarka really shine.

  The Red Shoes is the first time that clichés – both lyrical and musical – begin to appear in her writing. It’s interesting how much of a struggle her quest for greater directness became. Spelling out what she was once able to suggest and imply, the net results were a significant drop in artistry. As a lyricist, Bush is by no means beyond reproach. She’s most assured when showing rather than telling; she does not have an easy, natural gift for the vernacular or conversational in the way that someone like Joni Mitchell does. Even the fun, fleshy eroticism of ‘Eat The Music’ – in which Bush truly makes a meal of her “food of love” metaphors – is laboured and obvious, as is the similarly themed inner album artwork, in which soft fruit is sliced open and displayed, labia-like, filled with seed. In her quest for direct communication, everything becomes overstated.

  Much of the music has a similar, uncomfortably forced quality to it, as though, in the phrase that Bob Dylan once used to describe his own creative travails in the Seventies, she “had to learn to do consciously what [she] used to do unconsciously.” Listen hard and one can hear her physically trying to summon up the inspiration; very little appears to be coming through naturally. Struggling to adapt and shape real life into song, for once she failed to make a glorious artifice out of her art. She does not transcend.

  Instead, the result was some solid, uninspired songs. ‘Top Of The City’ and ‘The Song Of Solomon’ leaned perilously close to sanitised background music. The doubts in Bush’s mind and music were shared by those old chums working on the record. “It was a very difficult time and I was aware of that more than anything,” says Haydn Bendall. “Because of that I didn’t really connect with her that much. It was a bit of a mess, to be honest. I was sort of half-booked through a third party to do some work on it. Del was there and he was engineering and needed to assert himself in a way, I think there was some personal stuff going on that I don’t really want to go into [but] that I was aware of. I was kind of on the periphery a bit, I wasn’t terribly involved. It was just a weird, fractious, fragmented time, and nothing really seemed to gel. I didn’t really understand why I was there. I just tried to be as diplomatic as possible.”

  The Red Shoes marked a move from analogue to digital recording, and it all ended up sounding rather tinny, not at all deep or warm. Del oversaw the mix as Bush began dance practice in preparation for the film, and right up until the final mastering sessions she seemed uncharacteristically unsure of her own judgement. “The Red Shoes was one of the very first albums I did at Metropolis Mastering,” recalls Ian Cooper. “After it was done she essentially said it was OK and myself and Del Palmer couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘I think we’d better do it again, because I can’t believe she’s approved it. That’s a first!’ So we redid it and changed it a little bit, which is the way it went out.”

  The Red Shoes is nowadays often dismissed as the runt of the Bush litter, but it was by no means a catastrophe. It sold well, reaching number 28 in the US, her highest ever position, although all the UK singles bar ‘Rubberband Girl’ struggled to make much impact, while the album suffered the ignominy of being beaten to number one by Meat Loaf. Many of the reviews, however, were positively gushing, falling into the trap of writing what they thought they were supposed to think about a new Kate Bush record, rather than what they were actually hearing. Chris Roberts’ review in Melody Maker – “Bush in on form like the Bible is well-known. The Red Shoes dances so far ahead of the rest it’s embarrassing” – was a memorable case of expressing a laudable sentiment at precisely the wrong time. Stephen Dalton in Vox was much more perceptive, concluding that the album “adds up to less than the sum of its unorthodox parts.” Several reviewers echoed Colin Irwin’s observation that the album displayed a “firmament of distress.”37

  The release was held back until November to accommodate the completion of the 45-minute film Bush had resolved t
o make. Until midway through the album process Bush was still talking about the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of doing a tour, or at least some shows. She eventually decided against it, for any of the reasons already discussed, though it’s possible Hannah’s death knocked any remaining enthusiasm out of her.

  She decided instead to make a film featuring six songs from the album linked by a narrative thread, starring the actress Miranda Richardson, her old friend and mentor Lindsay Kemp, Stewart Avon Arnold and most of the musicians who appeared on the record. Filming began in July 1993 with a planned finishing date in mid-August, in order to get the performance segments finished and readied for video release to support the singles.*

  A film in which she would sing, dance, act, write the script, direct and generally hold sway over every creative decision appeared to be an insane undertaking at this stage in her life. Throwing herself into the movie may have seemed like a necessary distraction from other, more pressing issues, but it was clear she struggled to successfully focus her concentration on the project. On reflection, it was the worst of all possible times to embark on such a challenging new endeavour.

  “If I remember rightly, she wasn’t feeling that great,” says Colin Lloyd-Tucker. “She had headaches and things, she wasn’t really herself when we were making that. There was her mother, which had a big affect, and I think maybe she bit off a little bit more than she could chew. I remember a lot of times we had to keep stopping because she wasn’t feeling that great. It was a difficult thing to do, that kind of format, and she took it all on herself – no wonder she had a headache! That was hard work again, because it was that perfectionist thing and she wouldn’t give up. It was a difficult period.”

  “Directing it exhausted her completely,” recalls Stewart Avon Arnold. “The next one down from the ‘Tour Of Life’ is The Line, The Cross And The Curve, in terms of the length of time of the project. She was exhausted after that.”