The Red Shoes - Album

[Lori]

Discuss the album 'The Red Shoes' as a whole.

[CopyOfCpt (just say Cor)]

To me this album is a really mixed bag. On the one hand it is happy, cheery, chipper and on the other it is downright gloomy and full of hurt. One of the examples is "Why should i love you"; nice uptempo song (prince sound, and lyrics in his style), but the message underneath could be interpreted as very downish if viewed in the aftermath of a relation (we've split up, and on hindsight: why should I love you?). The "Song of Solomon" is another example but then right before the splitup: somebody who wants you only for the sexuality, but refuses to also accept that you have problems and that you are not always available because of .. whatever.

I am still trying to find out how to look at the album.

[matanchik]

don't we have already the thread "the red shoes revisited" which discusses the album as a whole?. i don't see the point opening another one

[CopyOfCpt (just say Cor)]

Where is that thread?

[matanchik]

here:

katebush.proboards6.com/index.cgi?board=theredshoes&action=display&n=1&thread=1756

[W.HI.P]

I remember when this came out, I was in England at the time. After a month delay after the original release date, i finally got my hands on it. I loved it immediatly, A lot of extreme emotional shifts in this album. I listened to it 24/7 as I did with all Kate albums, but it didn't seem to last on me as much as the others. I guess the album relates alot with her life at the time, it's certainly not her best work, but I surely appreciated it. I must mention my favorite song from the album "Big stripey lie", I'm not sure why i like it so much. It's a certain thrust, an attitude she shows in her voice.

[matanchik]

here what kate said about the red shoes, from an interview:

"I desperately needed a break after my last album, because looking back at it, I'm not too happy with it.

Even though you control everything, from the compositions to the cover art?

“The Red Shoes” contains some of my best songs, but in retrospect I'm not too happy with the finished record. A big part of this is because of the CD format, that sort of forces us musicians to put on 80 minutes of continually good music. But that isn't easy. In hindsight I don't think my last album is exciting enough, because of its length."

i actually find it quite sad and troubling she don't like her own album

[Adey]

No-one can deny that she's her own worst critic - guess that's why her quality control is so high. I'd speculate that no artist is ever entirely happy with their own work, whilst we mere mortals just goggle amazedly at it..

[mizzshy]

Ooh, yay, FINALLY got TRS! It was my 16th birthday, so I asked my parents for it, and now I have it! *victory dance*

I love the album so far, especially Rubberband Girl, And So Is Love, Moments Of Pleasure, The Red Shoes and Why Should I Love You? and the rest is all growing on me more slowly, but surely.

And, am I the only person who thinks Top of teh City sounds like it should be on Aerial?

[Adey]

oh yes indeed..

When I first heard the title track off the Aerial album, I immediately thought of Top of the City. Still do infact.

Hope you continue to enjoy The Red Shoes. There's a lot to like despite the (undeserved)reputation it seems to have acquired by more than a few KB fans. I like it very much and find it slightly lighter/brighter than the very intense "Sensual World" album that came before it..

[tannis]

from Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age, and Gender
(Whiteley, 2005; pp 81-83)

Sensuality is taken a step further in The Red Shoes (1993). The CD fold-out sleeve is, itself, morbidly decadent in its imagery. The lyrics (printed in white against a black background which evokes the tombstones of Victorian cemeteries) are laid out against a panorama of voluptuous fruits (pomegranates, passion fruits, black grapes, figs) where the seeds spill out in rich and sticky profusion. It is evocative both of Persephone, queen of the underworld and ruler of darkness, and the lyre-playing Orpheus whose search for Eurydice resulted in failure and a brutal death at the hands of the maenads. There is thus a promise of both the erotic and the thanatic, and this fusion of the love of life and pleasure, and the love of death, is further developed in the black and white of the centrepiece where Bush is shown as a dancer. Her dark hair, dark eyes, dark mouth on a symbolically white body, is thematically linked to the balletic red shoes of Hoffman's sinister fairytale, and to the richly red cornucopia of fruit - strawberries, cherries, grapes, pears, apples, allegories of passion, creativity and desire - with which it is surrounded. The underlying theme of death is evoked both in 'Lily', in 'Constellation of the Heart' and in 'Eat the Music' in a rhythmic dance which fuses the erotic pleasure of the fruit with the thanatic of 'Split me open...'

The title song itself evokes both the erotic jouissance of shoes that cannot stop dancing and where death is the only release. Underpinned by the swirling rhythms of an Irish jig and backing vocals which urge her on, the song juxtaposes dreams of success with faith in the future; yet while the album fulfils Bush's earlier ambition to be on a par with her rock heroes, the album evokes overall a sense of nostalgia.

It is arguably at the level of the fantastic that Bush is most remarkable. Her compositions address both the specific subjugation and revitalisation of women's experience, drawing on the tensions between representation and its relationship to history, ideology and culture; marginalisation and its impact on cultural self-expression; and the urge to create and articulate personal perspectives and points of view. Not least, her construction of images and the different ways of culturally defining women reflects both a history of what is meant by femininity, and the ways in which mythology has articulated a cultural sense of what it is to be a women. At the same time, she has accessed the revelationary potential of sound through her understanding and use of the recording studio, while emphasising rhythms and timbres that are disruptive and which disturb any sense of ordered time, so creating tension between the rational and irrational, between reason and intuition, rupturing the structures of thought and syntax to access the chaos of the 'feminine' unconscious. Not least, her interaction with mythology, fairytale and literature transcends history by linking her with the experience of other women, the celebration of sexuality in both its joyous and darkest manifestations. It is here that the chaos of the unconscious, the passionate and the extraordinary meet and draw into association both desire and dread, the erotic and the thanatic, mythological imagery and the feminine within.

[tannis]

KB: "I've really enjoyed artists who indulge in personal writing. People like Leonard Cohen. I admire him, but I just can't stand listening to him. At the end of the album you feel so depressed."
Melody Maker, "Paranoia and Passion of the Kate Inside", 1980
gaffa.org/reaching/i80_mm.html

If you've pegged Kate Bush as a dreamy cosmic spirit, don't miss the climax of THE RED SHOES, where the stunning "You're the One" renews the tradition of brazenly pitiful love songs. Though this torchy ballad features some of her most powerful singing, not to mention vintage Jeff Beck, who contributes the sort of passionate lead work rarely found on his own records anymore, all pales next to Bush's gut-wrenching sign-off, a strangled shriek of pain that might prompt calls to 911.

The rest of this fevered meditation on the meaning of it all isn't as wonderfully raw or direct, but desperate impulses abound. Exploring the terrain of the heart in her hyperdramatic way, Bush argues that romance is all we have, even if life stinks ("And So Is Love"), so there's no reason to hold back ("Eat the Music"), that being true to your emotions provides the one sure defense against the darkness ("Lily"), so don't be scared ("Constellation of the Heart"); and follow those desires ("Big Stripey Lie") even if they lead to perdition ("The Red Shoes").

Between the theatrical arrangements and aggressively intimate vocals, Bush has clearly labored to do justice to the soul's storms. Mostly, she succeeds. "The Song of Solomon" finds Bush imitating a crazed angel, shrilly singing, "Don't want your bullshit/Just want your sexuality" in a memorable collision of the carnal and holy. Just when preciousness threatens to overflow, she tests a more conventional alternative that validates her wacky extremism: "Why Should I Love You?", a funky little rocker, featuring heavy Prince involvement. It's fun and catchy, but it's not Kate Bush.

Thus, let us hail this woman who stops at nothing in pursuit of inner truths, even to point of imitating the sound of a stretching rubberband in "Rubberband Girl." And, above all, unleashes that dreadful howl at the end of "You're the One". Awesome!

"Musician" 1993
gaffa.org/reaching/rev_trs1.html


The new album 'The Red Shoes' has been threatened for three years, but even by Kate's own tortuous standards, it's been a painful one. Personal problems, including the death of her mother, permeated the recording...and it shows.

It is a brilliant album. An album that features the likes of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and, most extraordinarily, Prince. But it is also an album that is acutely depressing, Kate's voice swooping and soaring dizzily through a heavy barrage of complex emotional puzzles dwelling on farewells and traumatic affairs. If we can ever read any personal outpourings in Bush's music, traditionally based on literature and wild, offbeat scenarios, then she's had a shattering of the heart in these lost years, too.

Of course you can never be sure. She's always used her passion for fiction and escapism through drama and theatre as a way of camouflaging any reference to her own personal life in her music. And if anyone gets too curious about where the two may intermingle, then Kate ain't telling. Her interviews are few and far between and are legendary in the total lack of any revelations whatsoever. You come away from a meeting with Kate giggling, charmed, probably madly in love, and you couldn't care less that she's told you absolutely nothing about herself. Yet her songs have always held such mysteries and hidden depths, you can scarcely credit the person and the artist as occupying the same skin. But then that's the glorious enigma of Kate Bush.

So 'The Red Shoes' maintains the tradition, and further fuels the myth and the mystery, taking its title and inspiration from an old Thirties movie and using subtle imagery and elusive lyrical reference points to counterpoint the intense passion she conjures up on virtually every track.

The single - and opening track - 'Rubberband Girl' is a red herring, deceptively bouncy and dance-oriented. Whatever anyone throws at her, she zings right back, she sings brightly over a thunderous backing. She lies. The rest of the album is a firmament of distress that leaves you floored, even when Prince joins the throng for an excellent bout of light relief. It makes you worry about exactly what she has been through in the lost years. Oh them heavy people...

Rock World, "Who's That Girl?" (Issue 10, Vol.2, Oct. 1993).
gaffa.org/reaching/i93_rw.html


Still trying to discover that sad place from which these sad songs have sprung, I try her childhood. What sort of things moved her then? I'm hoping there'll be an anecdote about her father, her brothers, her mother, her grandparents. But no. "I was always impressed by the sea, I think it's completely stunning. I'd love to be part of the sea. Wonderful." I can't even swim I tell her. I feel as though I'm drowning. I persist and she tells me, "It's been a difficult three years for everybody. The recession has affected everybody so badly..."

We are both exhausted from the experience, with my wrangling and her not letting go. She stands up to show me out. She's truly tiny, but not just in height. I see her as a bonsai person. Everything that should be is perfectly developed but in miniature: her emotional range is intense, stunted, trapped. Although she insists she is more happy than sad, I have not found her sense of humour to justify this. I have not found her.

A few days after the interview I met an early biographer of hers, Paul Kerton, and he understood my problem. He recalled, "I sent an asistant to get her birth certificate. She came back saying, "Bad news: she was born a man called Martin.' I sighed, and then she said, 'April Fool, April Fool'. But she's so mysterious and androgynous it would not have surprised me."

Perhaps we can get an insight from a poem he sent me written by Catherine Bush, Form 2 (1970-71). It later became a song, and here it is. "I have seen him/I have noted him seven times or more/but he has not seen me/He may have seen a girl called by my name/But neither he nor anyone else will ever really see me."

The Sunday Times, September 12th 1993
gaffa.org/reaching/i93_lt1.html


I have seen him

I have noticed him seven times or more
But he has not seen me.
He may have seen a girl called by
My name--
But neither he nor anyone else will
Ever really see me.

Catherine Bush (aged 12-13, Form II, 1970-71)

Early Poems
gaffa.org/garden/poems.html

[tannis]

Del tells what Katie Did
"ODDLY ENOUGH, the idea of this album," explains Del, "was to get it recorded quickly and get out on to the road with it." Kate's only previously played one short tour. "It didn't work out that way, but the idea did influence the way the album was put together. Because I wanted to concentrate on engineering and didn't want to be in the live band, I didn't play much bass on the album, and we used the same drummer and bassist - Stuart Elliott and John Giblin - almost throughout. A lot of the time we got them to play together live to create a consistent backing for a song, even if we had to go back and change that as the song developed.
Now, with plans for live performances of The Red Shoes shelved, listeners are left with an album which has a preponderance of tight, live-sounding tracks. Some of these will be aired in a 50-minute film which, like the album itself, is influenced by the tale of The Red Shoes filmed by Michael Powell in the 1950s. The film will feature Kate herself in an acting role as well as Miranda Richardson, choreography from Lindsay Kemp and work from Terry (Monty Python) Gilliam's animation studio. . . .
If you're deeply committed to pop of a particular persuasion, listening to The Red Shoes can be a very unsettling experience. Kate Bush has little regard for fashion, transitory musical tastes or transparently obvious lyrics.
If you're in the mood for a sonic experience which stretches the limits of style, vocal technique and compositional mixing and matching, this could be the album for you - and if initial response to the single release of Rubberband Girl is anything to go by, it seems abundantly clear that Kate Bush is back in a big way.
Future Music interview with Del Palmer, "Well red", Nov. 1993
www.gaffaweb.org/reaching/i93_fm.html

[tannis]

Guido Harari, Still Photographer, The Line, the Cross & the Curve (1993)

Kate Bush: "I love to work with Guido. He makes you feel special without even saying a word. I think of him as an artist as well as a photographer. He is very creative and inventive, and I always look forward to what he'll come up with next. I am honoured to be in this collection of his work."
THE BLUE ROOM, Guido Harari, 2006
www.guidoharari.com/ing/entra.asp?pag=exhibitions.asp&img=6

GUIDO HARARI BIOGRAPHY
1971-73: Guido Harari begins his twofold activity as both photographer and music critic, thus establishing the premises for a specialist freelance profession without precedent in Italy. His first assignments are for the weekly Giovani and he regularly contributes a music review column to the monthly Discoteca Alta Fedelta. He follows on tour Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Lake & Palmer, Genesis, John Mayall, Alexis Korner, Santana, Frank Zappa, Area, PFM and Banco.
1975-79: Produces his first record covers (Klaus Schulze Moondawn, Mirage, Body Love; De Andre & PFM In concerto; Soft Machine Softs; Gianna Nannini Una radura). Based in London for a while, he contributes to the magazines Gong, Ciao 2001 and the French Rock & Folk, with interviews and portraits of, amongst others, Bob Marley, Carlos Santana and Frank Zappa.
1979-81: Fascinated by Lindsay Kemp's unique combination of theatre and music, he follows the English dancer and mime artist on tour, subsequently producing a book with the artist, Lindsay Kemp (Editoriale Domus, 1982). This experience leads to a form of complicit creativity which will be recreated in a similar vein, a few years later, with the American dancer Daniel Ezralow and Pippo Delbono's theatre company.
1982: Makes his first journey to the US for a cover story on Frank Zappa for Uomo Vogue and for a reportage on Dire Straits recording their Tunnel Of Love album in NYC. He regularly contributes interviews and photographs to such magazines as Rockstar and Linea Italiana. He conceives and directs a massive editorial project on the rock scene for Fabbri and produces one of the first video-based TV shows, Music Mag, for Swiss Italian Television.
1983-84: Rockshots (Turin, Milan, Barcelona) is his first exhibition with ambient music specially provided by Peter Gabriel and David Sylvian.
1984-90: Tours constantly with rock celebrities and, over the years, will create countless record covers for artists such as Afterhours, Claudio Baglioni - together they produce the best selling book Notti di note (Rusconi Libri, 1985) followed in 1986 by the equally successful Assolo. Non solo -, Andrea Bocelli, Angelo Branduardi, Vinicio Capossela, Paolo Conte, Pino Daniele, Fabrizio De Andre, Eugenio Finardi, Ivano Fossati, Enzo Jannacci, Ligabue, Fiorella Mannoia, Mia Martini, Milva, Gianna Nannini, PFM and Vasco Rossi. Internationally, he produces album covers and tour photography for KATE BUSH, David Crosby, Dire Straits, Duran Duran, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, B.B. King, Ute Lemper, Little Steven, Paul McCartney, Pat Metheny, Michael Nyman, Lou Reed, Santana, Simple Minds (in 1991 his pictures of the Scottish band are featured in the The Art of Selling Songs exhibition at London's Victoria & Albert Museum), Frank Zappa and many more. . . .
www.guidoharari.com/ing/entra.asp?pag=bio.asp&img=1

[Kris]

Recently, I was able to order the 2011 "Remastered" version of "The Red Shoes". The remaster truly does remove the "edgy" sound that effected a lot of the songs (Rubberband Girl, etc.) I adored "The Red Shoes" before the remaster - some songs on it emotionally moved (Moments of Pleasure, You're the One, And So Is Love). Hearing the remaster makes me love the album all the more.