Review of The Sensual World Video

[nbc%inf.rl.ac.uk@mitvma.mit.edu]

The February issue of Q Magazine has a review of The Sensual World video.

                          Woman's Realm
	Welcome to the sensual, nay sexual, world of Kate Bush: where
	oestrogen meets testosterone.

	Endowed with a come-hither title if ever there was one, this slim
	but perfectly formed video brings up to date the Kate Bush
	story-in-moving-pictures. It consists of a fireside chat with an unseen
	interviewer about 1989's The Sensual World album and the three
	self-directed videos that accompany the extracted singles, Love and
	Anger, This Woman's Work and the title track, followed by the clips
	shown in their entirety. Yours for #9.99.

	For all her charm and sincerity, Kate is one of those artists who
	should perhaps leave her work to speak for itself. "I've explored
	female energies in myself as a writer/producer," she earnestly avows.
	"Before, I'd really just done as I'd seen guys do. In hindsight, a lot
	of what I was doing was male-influenced." An interesting thought, but
	it's unsubstantiated by the evidence of her very first video, 1977's
	Wuthering Heights, compared to the recent Sensual World (co-directed
	by The Comic Strip's Peter Richardson).

	In the first, the 19-year-old Kate in a virgin-white dress,
	balletically swirls through a dry-ice mist. In the second, she wafts
	through an enchantered forest in full medieval fig. The former, we must
	believe, is esentially chock-full of testosterone while the latetr runs
	on oestrogen, but one defies even the most sharp-eyed budgie-sexer to
	tell the diference. The theme of Love and Anger lends itself more
	readily to distinguishing between the X and Y chromosomes, and Kate
	wittily spends the first half of the clip in familiar, if you will,
	female swoon, only to be borne halfway through by her ballet-dancing
	handmaidens to a rough, tough male world of rugged black amplification
	through which a burly David Gilmour leads other bestubbled rockers in
	giving it some welly.

	A self-confessed apolitical animal ("I think I'm an emotionally-based
	person"), Kate derives most inspiration from conversations, books,
	painting and films and in particular she extols Alfred Hitchcock - "a
	tremendous influence when I'm making a video, the ultimate refereence
	point." With that in mind, one looks afresh at her clip for This
	Woman's Work. Elegantly and economically, she dramatises a woman's
	collapse and her other half's anguish with a dream-like fluidity that
	indeed denotes that she's studied such classics by the master as
	Spellbound, Notorious and Vertigo with more than a little
	attentiveness. At the same time (and she is seldom given credit for her
	sense of humour), she casts in what you might call the Jimmy Stewart or
	Gregory Peck role no less than Tim McInnerny of Blackadder fame - who
	is, of course, referred to throughout the song as "darling". Hitch
	might have had a chuckle himself at that.

	Mat Snow

The video gets 4 stars (out of a maximum of 5).

There is also a small piece about the Convention.

   "Sighs, swoons and hankies dabbing damp eyes at the Kate Bush fan convention
   when their heroine not only made a personal appearance on stage at the
   Hammersmith Palais but announced that she would be playing live dates in
   autumn this year - sensational news considering that her first tour, in
   1979, has thus far looked like being her last. While the sanguine looks of
   record company personnel on hearing this suggested that a certain amount of
   "believe-when-see" should be included in the equation, the sweetheart of the
   suburbs is said to be progressing with unusual velocity on her new album and
   maybe this time wildest dreams will come true."

Be seeing you,
	Neil
--
Neil Calton                          UUCP:   ..!mcsun!ukc!rlinf!nbc
Informatics Department,              NSFNET: nbc%inf.rl.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory,      BITNET: nbc%inf.rl.ac.uk@ukacrl
Chilton, Didcot, Oxon,  OX11 0QX     JANET:     nbc@uk.ac.rl.inf
England                              Tel: (0235) 821900   ext 5740