TSW Review

["Katrina Michael" <katrina_michael@muwayf.unimelb.edu.au>]

                       Subject:                               Time:9:17 AM
  OFFICE MEMO          TSW Review                             Date:11/9/92
Hi all,

(A special hello to Craig - video is finally in the mail - sorry, sorry, sorry
for delay!!!)

I thought I'd post a review I happened to come across recently on TSW.  It
appeared in "Beat", a Melbourne-based music paper.  If anyone would like to
read the full (typed) review, email me and I'll send it to you.

Full Bloom - The Sensual World
Chris Roberts
----------------------------
"When Lauren was a small girl, she would stand in the field and call the cats. 
One by one they would come to her through the grass, across which lay the ice
of the coming winter; and she could see them in the light of the moon.  She
herself wondered why they came.  They were wild and heeded no one else; their
thrashing in the fields did the farmers no good and Lauren's father hated the
howl they invested in the night, like a thousand bleeding babies in the grass. 
But they came for her and it was certain therefore, because of that, that she
was in some way special" - from 'Days Between Stations', Steve Erickson.

Even reading the record company's biography of Kate Bush - that too is like
beginning a breathless windswept novel - "her father is an avid piano player
and her mother is an Irish woman who takes much joy in music and dancing.  Kate
and her two brothers were raised with an open mind to artistic experiments".  
Signed to EMI before leaving school, Kate never had to worry too much about
real life.  Quite right.  We should be eternally grateful that Kate was never
stifled by mundane reality, was always allowed complete freedom of expression
in a non-contemporary fashion.  Her confidence grows and we benefit from a
music which is so naturally 'outside', so gracefully 'above' the sweatings and
strainings of those who strive to be alternative, so instinctively 'other'. 
Because Kate Bush's music emanates from a grander reality, an inner truth.

She takes her time, acts like she lives in a leafy vacuum with her heart, and
every so often sends out a record as a message in a bottle.  Like all her best
achievements, this album marries the physical honesty and self-pride of Marvin
Gaye to the querying passionate intelligence of say, Elizabeth Smart, and gives
birth to a rare mystical precision.

Kate Bush seems acutely conscious of the gap between the infinite potential of
the dream and finite fancies of reality.  There's a song later, called "Never
be Mine", where she's making an apparently anti-love statement sound like love
in bloom: "I want you as the dream, not the reality.  It disturbed me that in
our times, even Kate Bush - our last Bronte, our last Mishima - was backing off
from amour, but gradually what the songs here demonstrate is that she's neither
a saucy-eyed dim dewy damsel or a sceptical she-puma suffering the first blasts
of doubt.  She acknowledges both the successes and failures of romantic
idealism.  The coda is "This Woman's Work".  We're told this was written for a
John Hughes film.  Tarkovsky would be more fitting.  When Kate and her piano
are singing with so much heaven in their blood, the state of music in 1989 is
not a reference point.  Her escape within is so determined and unqualified its
infectious.  And radiant with inflections. 

Once every few years, the burning Bush completes a chapter in her work and it's
like a visitation from a guardian angel.  Like flowers are never really out of
vogue.  Like slow dancing with the lights out and the windows open.  The Blue
Nile have a challenger for the most impossibly beautiful music of the year, but
it's not a contest.  It's not even a year.  Kate Bush is Kate Bush, and thank
Christ for that.  She appeals to the feral elemental child in every woman, and
if you think she only appeals to every man for one reason then frankly, you
know nothing about anything and I can't help you.  The sensual world is a world
without end - let's get it on.

- Katrina Michael
  "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" - Robert Herrick