Vinyl Release

It’s October 1989 and we’re chatting with Kate Bush on the occasion of the release of her sixth LP, The Sensual World. This is an album that not only sounds utterly sumptuous but, looking back on it now, appears to predict the spiritual and social upheaval we’re entering today with the growth of artificial intelligence.

I mean, if an article I read recently is anything to go by, not only will 40% of the jobs humans currently do be usurped by AI in the very near future, with unpredictable consequences, the matter of what actually constitutes life itself might well come into question. ‘After all, we are already doing everything we can to escape our biological existence’, the writer claimed. ‘Most people barely make use of the bodies they have, and many would be glad to be freed from bodies that are sites of disappointment and disgust.’

Perhaps, it teases, each of us is moving toward a non-material eternal life, the state of existence that religions have promised since the dawn of time – only now we have no need to actually die to get there.

OK Computer
Without recourse to a brand new interview, we can’t possibly know what Kate Bush would think of all that but listening to the pre-Internet The Sensual World it’s evident that the relationship between technology and humanity was weighing heavily on her mind.

‘We seem to be very much in the era of reason, and I think science is the ultimate example of that’, Bush said back then. ‘The other side is the instinctive, which is not logical on any level. Perhaps it’s the putting together of the two... Maybe we’ve lost touch with our instincts, so it’s become very important for us to work out logical explanations for things all the time, which I think is a bit of a shame, really.’

We’re talking specifically about ‘Deeper Understanding’, the most extreme song on the album where the protagonist is so desperately lonely that (s)he’s formed an addictive relationship with a computer. ‘Wherever you live, chances are you won’t know your neighbours’, the singer explained. ‘You won’t even know the person who lives next to you. I suppose I really liked the idea of deep, spiritual communication – deep love which should come from humans – coming from the last place you’d expect it to, the coldest piece of machinery. And yet I do feel there is a link. I feel in some ways, computers could take us into a level of looking at ourselves we’ve not seen before.’

Kate Bush performing in 2014 at London’s Hammersmith Apollo, label of the original LP

More Than Words
The Sensual World, as its title suggests, is a gorgeous struggle to come to terms with some kind of acceptance that pretty much everything we thought we knew and pretty much every way we sought to communicate it was… well, if not wrong, then failing. The title track, for instance, does this thing that Bush has been doing since the start of her career, replacing words with sounds as if language isn’t capable of capturing the emotion. Meanwhile, in ‘Love And Anger’, she says, ‘It’s so deep I don’t think that I can speak about it’, as if language doesn’t get to the heart of it. This is followed by, ‘We could be like two strings beating/Speaking in sympathy’. It seems music, rather than language, comes closer to expressing her emotions.

‘Words are sounds for me’, she agreed. ‘I get a sound and I throw it in a song and I can’t turn it into a word later because it’s actually stated itself too strongly as a sound. Like, in “Love And Anger”, the bit that goes “Mmh, mmh, mmh” was there instantly and, in itself, it’s really about not being able to express it differently. “Love And Anger” was an incredibly difficult song for me to write. In some ways, it’s about the process of writing the song: I can’t find the words; I don’t know what to say. This thing of a big, blank page, it’s so big… It’s like it doesn’t have edges around it, you could just start anywhere.’

Joyce Choice
The title track is about Molly Bloom, the fountain of lust and life in James Joyce’s dauntingly super-realist novel, Ulysses, another work that messes with the way we communicate. ‘I just thought it was such an extraordinary piece of writing. It’s such a beautiful style’, said Bush. ‘It’s like trains of thought continually tumbling, tumbling speech, and not kind of... “stopped”.’

‘We’d written this piece of music in the studio, and I thought, “What about putting the Molly Bloom speech together with this?”. So I went and grabbed the book, and it worked perfectly. It just scanned... the whole song. But, unfortunately, when I applied for permission to use the words, they wouldn’t let me.’

This, admits Bush, was disappointing but not unexpected. ‘It was completely their prerogative. They don’t have to give their permission. But it was very difficult for me, then, to reapproach it.’

Bush in 2011, the year she released her ninth studio album Director’s Cut

Reach Out And Touch
At this point she considered leaving ‘The Sensual World’ off the album, but with all the effort already put into the song (‘the Irish musicians had worked so hard’) she decided it should stay. ‘It was a matter of trying to rewrite the lyrics so it kept the same rhythmic sense, because the words are so rhythmic; and to keep the sense of sensuality as well, without using the Joyce lyrics. So it all kind of turned into this piece where Molly Bloom steps out of the book into real life, where she can actually reach out and touch things. In a lot of ways, because of their lack of co-operation, it transformed the track into something else.’

The album itself also represented a transformation of sorts, according to the artist. On its predecessor, Hounds Of Love, Bush said she ‘wanted to try and get across a sense of power, and the way I related to that was very much what I consider very good male music... There was this level of approaching the album, soundwise, that I think had a male energy.

‘But I didn’t want to do that on [The Sensual World]. I wanted to do it as a woman, not as a woman working around a man’s world. The Sensual World was very much a chance for me to express myself as a female in a female way. That’s the only way I can describe it.’

Re-Release Verdict
First released in 1989 by EMI on CD, cassette and vinyl [EMD 1010], this 180g reissue of The Sensual World is on Kate Bush’s own label Fish People [FP6LP], and features a 2018 remastering of the album’s ten tracks, from Bernie Grundman, James Guthrie and Joel Plante, on a single black vinyl LP. The sleeve features the original portrait shot of Bush, and ‘Fish People’ sticker. Also available is an ‘Indie edition’ [FP6LPX] on an ‘ash grey’ platter, with Obi strip.

Sound Quality: 90%