Time to get your interpretive dance moves ready…. Kate Bush is Back!
The words ‘new’, ‘album’ and ‘Kate Bush’ aren’t heard in the same sentence very often nowadays, and that’s just not cool. When her last album Aerial came out in 2005 it was the first new material Kate had released in 12 years. So when all those words started popping up in same sentence a few months ago, I got very excited indeed.
Sadly it’s not all good news because it’s not a new album, well, not really. It’s two old Kate Bush albums remixed, rerecorded and in many cases completely changed. Which is good enough for me. The albums in question are The Red Shoes from 1993 and The Sensual World from 1989, interesting choices and certainly two of her more experimental records.
There’s no one quite like Kate Bush and as influential as she has been on other artists, her music still sounds like nothing else you’ve ever heard. She’s the musical face of British eccentricity and may have been everyone’s first taste of interpretive dance. Directors Cut, as this new release is called, is a name that suggests like film director George Lucas returning to his Star Wars films with all new CGI monsters that nobody wanted, will Kate’s remixed back catalogue really distract us from the disappointment of not getting an album of all new material? I think it will, Kate Bush rarely puts a foot wrong.
One new track features a passage from Ulysses, spoken by James Joyce himself, originally she had been denied permission from the James Joyce estate, but it would seem they’ve seen the error of their ways and now we get to hear the song like Kate had always intended. There’s also the promise of computerised voices to enhance The Sensual World’s best track 'Deeper Understanding', something that’s technically much easier to achieve today than it was when she first recorded the song. It’s a song about falling in love with a computer, an idea that was pretty portentous in retrospect. The full track list is a good selection of both these albums best tracks:
'Flower Of The Mountain' (originally titled 'This Sensual World')
'The Song Of Solomon'
'Deeper Understanding'
'Lily'
'The Red Shoes'
'This Woman's Work'
'Moments Of Pleasure'
'Never Be Mine'
'Top Of The City'
'And So Is Love'
'Rubberband Girl'
Kate is often thought of as reclusive and is by all accounts quite a private celebrity. It was all the more surprising then, that one of the more interesting features of Aerial were the songs about Kate’s children. There’s plenty more of that on Directors Cut with her 12-year-old son Bertie adding his voice to one of the tracks. It would seem Kate Bush is still as enigmatic as ever, but then, that’s just how we like her.
It’s not clear yet whether or not Kate intends to extend this treatment to the rest of her back catalogue, but I suppose that depends on whether or not we like what we hear. There are certainly plenty of albums to choose from and she may have deliberately left out the classics like The Kick Inside and The Hounds of Love on purpose. There’s also no word of a tour, unsurprising as she’s only ever toured once. But still, I can dream…
Directors Cut by Kate Bush is released on 16th May