Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  The next track, ‘Deeper Understanding’, was an astonishingly prescient pre-internet tale of how obsessive computer love engenders a breakdown of communities and families, leading the protagonist to an isolated state where she turns to a machine for solace and interaction. It’s both desperately poignant and yet strangely touching, that amidst such a bleak and lonely existence she still craves emotional connection. “I suppose I liked the idea of deep, spiritual communication … coming from the last place you’d expect it to, the coldest piece of machinery,” she said. “And yet I do feel there is a link. I do feel that, in some ways, computers could take us into a level of looking at ourselves that we’ve never seen before.”17

  This was crystal ball stuff. She had toyed with using vocoders and other synthetic special FX to vocalise the computer, but the idea of using instead the raw, human voices of the Trio was inspired, imbuing a song about emotional estrangement with a spiritual, otherworldly dimension. The lack of literal understanding between the two groups – the Trio were simply told to communicate a feeling of despair, while Bush had no idea what they were singing – works perfectly in the context of a song where humans and machines don’t understand each other yet can still find an underlying connection and, improbably, salvage some comfort.

  On the third song, ‘Never Be Mine’, the clashing styles and harmonies underscored the divergence of purpose and conflicted feelings at the heart of the lyric. However, by now the newly liberated Trio were also poking a little good-natured fun at their esteemed arranger. When Bush sings “This is what I want to be, this is where I want to be,” the Bulgarians are singing “Mite, Mite, I am not going to ask you”. It was a sly declaration of artistic freedom: ‘Mite’ was Penev’s nickname. While Bush gained much from the collaboration, it was a mutually nourishing relationship – she in turn freed something in the Trio. “It had a great impact on Yanka,” says Nedeva. “Before that she was more confined to the normal ways of doing things, but she took in this creative spark. I think the arranger was a bit put out that his final input maybe wasn’t as much as he wanted. He expressed disappointment about that in a private conversation. He was sulking a bit!” In truth, Penev did a fine job in exceptional circumstances, and Bush had nothing but praise for all his efforts.

  It was a highly charged few days, exhausting, emotionally draining and yet hugely rewarding. To compound the pressure, a BBC crew popped in to interview Bush and film her singing with the Trio – a brief piece of film which captures beautifully the bond between the four women – for the Rhythms Of The World series on global music, which aired in March 1989. But nobody forgot the deep, shared love of music that had brought this improbable ensemble together in the first place. During a rare break towards the end of the session, sitting around the studio in a semi-circle, the Trio instinctively broke into a series of ancient Bulgarian love songs. Everyone present – Bush, Paddy, engineer Kevin Killen – promptly burst into tears. Again.

  In the end the Trio’s contribution was by far the most discussed and lauded aspect of the record. It added a thrilling extra dimension, although those with a close affinity to Bulgarian music – including Nedeva and Boyd – felt that at times, particularly on ‘Rocket’s Tail’, there may have been too much going on to convey the music at its best. “Kate got to realise her vision,” says Boyd. “Personally, I like to hear those harmonies in a big, open a cappella space, so they sound a bit smaller than I’m used to when blended with a modern mix with lots of instruments. But I was pleased with the project and full of admiration for Kate’s skill as a producer.”

  Editing and mixing continued until May 1989, including a session recording string overdubs with Michael Kamen at Abbey Road. To accommodate the CD and cassette market, a bonus track was added right at the end of the process. ‘Walk Straight Down The Middle’ sprung to life from an old backing track, originally intended as a B-side, which was rapidly dusted down for action. Bush wrote the lyrics and recorded the vocals and synth overdubs in a single day, using the next day for final overdubs and mixing. The track, finished in just over 24 hours, put the seal on a gruelling four year process.

  The Sensual World was released on October 16, 1989, just as the leaves were turning gold, preceded by the title track as a single, which entered the charts at number 12.*

  ‘The Sensual World’ was a marvellous song but it was no ‘Running Up That Hill’, not the kind of track that demanded radio play and propelled the album forwards. The single, highly praised, dropped immediately down the charts, while the following pair – ‘This Woman’s Work’ and ‘Love And Anger’ – barely scraped into the Top 30 and 40 respectively. The album quickly reached number two on the UK album charts and sold well, achieving Gold status (over 500,000 sales) in the US and multiplatinum status (over a million sales) in the UK, but success is about more than facts and figures; it is also about perception.

  The album reviews were generally strong, though many contained a ghostly subtext of minor disappointment, a lurking sense of feeling somewhat underwhelmed which was given full vent when the later single releases attracted some highly uncomplimentary comments, as if many of these songs sounded unconvincing stripped from their context – a harsh but not unreasonable viewpoint. Bush dramatically scaled down her promotional activities. TV performances were scarce, there were no personal appearances at all and interviews were generally conducted at discreetly plush London hotels or recording studios. The media were kept at arm’s length and given little access to her world, while almost every interview followed a well travelled path; guarded and measured to the point of dullness, which presumably was the point.

  She held round table briefings at a hotel in Kent with 40 overseas journalists, at which 15 paltry minutes were parcelled out to each party with Del hovering in the background, but eventually she relented to a brief promotional visit to US in January 1990. She had signed to Columbia in America, something which EMI’s Brian Southall “never understood – she should have gone to somewhere like Geffen. Small, bespoke. [With CBS] she was just another act signed to a big record company.” In the end, the switch made little material difference to her Stateside fortunes. ‘Love And Anger’ was a college radio hit, achieved a degree of MTV interest and reached number one on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, while the album peaked at 43 on the Billboard chart and received a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Album. Respectable showings, but by no means a breakthrough. She had not escaped her niche as an alternative, marginal act. There’s no suggestion that she ever really wanted to.

  In the UK, radio exposure was muted. One of the problems of taking so long to make a record was that world moved on inexorably. Bush emerged from the studio to find a host of ‘new Kate Bushes’ – Sinead O’Connor, Bjork, Enya, Suzanne Vega, Jane Siberry – making ‘quirky’ music; Bulgarian folk had become this year’s hip world music hobby horse while, at a time when the Madchester scene, house music and rave were at the vanguard and people were making highly sophisticated sounding records with the most basic of equipment, she was certainly no longer working at the cutting edge of technology. In a world where U2’s unsubtle Americana shtick ruled the earth, and where Stock, Aitken & Waterman’s pop factory ruled the charts, Bush was listening to Jeff Beck and John Lydon and declared herself largely “in mourning” for good new music.18

  She was now a thirty-something member of the art-rock establishment, rather than a thrusting young pop star. She had never been one for following trends, or even being aware of them, but with The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love she had established herself as a pioneer. The Sensual World did little to advance that reputation. It is a fine album, with several moments of breathtaking beauty which tend to obscure some of its failings, but it lacks the imprimatur of wild, unbridled adventurousness that marks out her finest music. It smoulders at a much lower heat than the fireworks of Hounds Of Love and the musical colours are generally more muted, decidedly autumnal, deliberately avoiding the elemental power of her previous album. “[It] had a male
energy, but I didn’t want to do that on this album,” she said.19 Rhythm was far less emphasised – even on a song like ‘Heads We’re Dancing’, which is heavily in thrall to the Prince of Parade and Sign O’ The Times, the rhythm track is sparse and mechanical, in no way overpowering.

  The downside of this approach was that, aside from the riotous invention of ‘Rocket’s Tail’, there was a certain reined-in conventionality about the musical settings, a uniformity of pace, less leaps through time and space in her lyrics, and the occasional sense of someone trying to bully good-but-not-great material into shape. ‘Between A Man And A Woman’ expresses a fateful view of romantic relationships – “let the pendulum swing” – and holds to a course that outside interference in these matters can be destructive. Hardly an original thought, and one that makes for a remarkably dull song. ‘Heads We’re Dancing’ is an interesting idea, but clunkily told over an unappealing melody. ‘Love And Anger’ sounds like a rather less successful version of ‘The Big Sky’, that other troublesome album track, starting small and ending in a riot of clattering rhythm.

  There’s a distinct lack of clarity to the production – overly compressed, the voice in particular sounding uncomfortably squeezed. She called it her most honest, most personal album, but it frequently sounded cold and a little remote. It’s not the most tactile record. Ironically, aside from the title track, another unimpeachable highlight, the sensuality of The Sensual World largely has to be imagined rather than felt.

  Listening with the benefit of 20 years’ worth of hindsight, something fundamental changed with Bush’s sixth album. There is an audible slackening of intensity which betrayed a conscious re-ordering of her priorities. “It’s not everything now,” she said of her music shortly after it came out. “I think at some point it was – my work was everything because it had such a sense of importance about it. That’s so stupid, so blown out of proportion, and if you’re not careful that spiralling effect can make you believe what you’re doing is the most important thing in the world! Ha! When it’s absolutely not at all.”20

  Of course, she had blazed through her twenties in the manner of someone who very firmly did believe that her work was all-consuming and of primary importance in her life, even if the attention it brought her was usually entirely unwelcome. Now, she was forced by a series of tragic events into recognising that music couldn’t always come first.

  The period between The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, and for a spell thereafter, was by far the most challenging of her life. The first portent arrived almost immediately: on October 19, 1989, just days after the new album was released, her guitarist of ten years, Alan Murphy, died of pneumonia in Westminster City Hospital, fatally weakened by the AIDS virus. He was just 35 and, though visibly ailing, had kept the nature and seriousness of his disease largely secret. “I cried my eyes out,” says Brian Bath. “I read it on the front of the Daily Mirror: ‘Kate Bush guitarist …’ I phoned up Paddy, it was such a shock. What a player.”

  As he had on Bush’s previous three records, Murphy had added his guitar to The Sensual World, although the last ever song he played on was her cover of ‘Rocket Man’, recorded just after the album was finished in June 1989 for an album called Two Rooms, a tribute to the work of Elton John and Bernie Taupin. John was one of Bush’s favourite artists from her teenage years – “When I asked to be involved in this project and was given the choice of a track it was like being asked ‘Would you like to fulfil a dream?’” she said21 – and she took due care over ‘Rocket Man’, giving it a lilting treatment which divided opinion (the group St Etienne, reviewing it collectively for NME, declared that it made them want to vomit; in 2007 the Observer Music Monthly voted it the best cover version of all time) but was both bold and quietly moving, somehow combining uillean pipes and a reggae beat without scaring the horses. The public vote hoisted it to number 12 in the charts when it was issued as single in late 1991 to coincide with the release of Two Rooms, with her unremarkable, indeed rather cloying, version of ‘Candle In The Wind’ on the B-side.

  Bush performed ‘Rocket Man’ on the Wogan show (virtually the only TV show she regularly consented to perform on, not least because it was a favourite of her mother, Hannah) in December of that year, one of her most stunning television appearances. Looking dark and rapturous in a knee-length skirt, she revisited the theme of the video, strumming a ukulele in a subtle homage to Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot; an electric guitar sat on a chair towards the back of the stage in silent and poignant tribute to Murphy.

  She later recorded ‘The Man I Love’ for a 1994 album, The Glory Of Gershwin, a celebration of the eightieth birthday of the venerable harmonica specialist Larry Adler, produced by George Martin at Abbey Road. Her sighing, sensuous reading of the standard struck just the right note of wishful projection into a longed-for future – “Someday he’ll come along …” – reinventing Bush for four minutes as a trembling torch singer. It was a side that some of those closest to her career had long encouraged her to show.

  “I always wanted her to do an album of covers,” says Bob Mercer. “She did ‘Rocket Man’, which was excellent, and she did a Gershwin thing, and it’s fucking wonderful, and that’s exactly what I was saying to her at the time: ‘I would love you to do covers because I don’t think people understand how good your voice is.’ Her voice was so much a part of her writing that the two just went together; you always got the feeling that she somehow had a peculiar voice, and I wanted people to understand that she really could fucking sing, and to do that you kind of need to say, ‘You’ve heard this song a million times, now listen to her sing it.’ But we never did that. I don’t think she really had any enthusiasm for it, she just went along with the conversation because it was silly old Uncle Bob sounding off. She got a bit pissed at me for going on about it, because the implication in her mind was that I didn’t think her writing was quite up to par, which wasn’t right at all.”

  Following Murphy’s premature death, another grim blow followed. One of her two long-standing dance partners, Gary Hurst, also died as a result of AIDS in 1990, again at a heartbreakingly young age. With their passing came a sense of a chapter closing, underscored by the dawning of a new decade and capped by the release in October 1990 of the vast, eight-disc retrospective box-set This Woman’s Work, which included all six of her previous albums as well as two discs of B-sides and rarities.

  “I feel the box-set marks the end of an era because I’ll never work with [Alan and Gary] again,” she said. “And I do miss them, and it’s made me think about a lot of things, and I have consciously taken a break from work since their deaths to do nothing. I’ve just taken six months off. I’ve had six months gaps between things, but always carrying this project around, and I don’t know why I haven’t done it before. I’m a bit obsessive about my work you see. But now I can see there’s a part of me that loves not being tied into a project, that loves just to be able to go off.”22

  When she did finally begin writing material for The Red Shoes in the middle of 1990, she was determined to “go back to a rooted way of working”23, returning more frequently to the piano, physically playing the song over and over, kneading it into shape. She expressed concerns about her music being “too complicated for people to take in – that they have to work too hard at it.24 Ideally I would like the music to be an easy experience.”25 Like many artists before and since, after the first flush of wild adventure has passed through her work, Bush began to seek a greater, hopefully more profound simplicity in both her words and her music. This wasn’t a commercial aspiration, more a worry that she wasn’t communicating as well as she might, or really getting to grips with what was happening in her own life.

  Perhaps as a result, she seemed to crave direct contact, something more spontaneous, a positive outlet for all that negative energy. She talked, intriguingly, of becoming more comfortable being “the observed” rather than the observer.26 At the fan convention in late 1990 she announced that the new songs were
leading her in a direction that suggested – “if circumstances allow,” she hedged, “If things go well”27 – that she would be playing live the following year, which was also, she hoped, when the new album would be released. Such was the general tide of euphoria at this news, some people actually believed such a thing might happen. Perhaps Bush did, too.

  “The idea of this album was to get it recorded quickly and get out on the road with it,” said Del Palmer. “It didn’t work out that way, but the idea did influence the way the album was put together.”28 The initial plan to make a relatively uncomplicated record was a good one but, as Palmer suggests, it proved unsustainable.

  For the first time in many years, the songs were often built upon the sound of a bass player (John Giblin) and drummer (Stuart Elliott) playing together in the same room, giving the songs a live feel. Some of that spontaneous punch is preserved on the record. The title track whipped itself up into an appealing frenzy, ‘Big Stripey Lie’ was engagingly odd if ultimately unconvincing, while ‘Constellation Of The Heart’ featured some of Bush’s most labyrinthine vocal arrangements, a maze of syntax-snapping call and response trade-offs between Bush and Paddy and Colin Lloyd-Tucker.

  “We were in hysterics with all that question and answer business,” says Lloyd-Tucker. “It’s difficult to imagine now, but we’d never heard it until we walked into the room. She was singing us all these answer lines, and we were like, ‘Hang on a minute, what was that?’ We were literally sliding down the walls by the end of the session. Working with her is quite tough. Every syllable had to be bang in time, she’s a perfectionist, which is great, it gets results. When you’re working with her she’s incredibly professional. She’s very relaxed, but she wants to get the job done and you work hard.”