Michael Moore is back

Next month, modern muck-raker and rabble-rouser Michael Moore comes out with a new film:

OTR: Kate Bush - The Red Shoes

Four years after the release of The Sensual World, in November of 1993, Kate Bush released her seventh studio album, The Red Shoes. This set opens with the bouncy (and stretchy) "Rubberband Girl," which was the first single from the disc. A strong opener for sure, but I find that track two, "And So Is Love" blows it out of the water for sheer passion and atmosphere. The song sounds like something Peter Gabriel circa 1986 would have written as filtered through Sarah McLachlan's "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy." And yes, that guitar work on the song is by Eric Clapton.

Clapton, is one of a handful of guest musicians making an appearance on The Red Shoes. Gary Brooker (of Procol Harum) plays the Hammond organ on several tracks and Prince brings out Bush's funky side on "Why Should I Love You?"

Like The Sensual World before it, The Red Shoes is not a concept album. It would be well over two decades before Bush would structure an album in the same manner as Hounds of Love. Once more, Bush is following her muse wherever it may take her. In that case of Red Shoes this means an album which starts with a bouncy and danceable single, moves on to a passionate and atmospheric track and then closes it's introductory trilogy with a Caribbean-flavoured song, "Eat The Music." It shouldn't work...it should be jarring, yet it isn't.

Of course, Bush throws a curveball by linking her themes with tracks four and five with "Moments of Pleasure" followed directly by "The Song of Solomon." Regarding the latter, taken directly from the Biblical passage, it is Bush's most openly erotic song (and, if memory serves, the only one where she uses a word in the lyrics which appears on George Carlin's infamous seven).

The Red Shoes was one of two Kate Bush CDs in the archives at WAIH (her other albums were on vinyl). I remember that I played "The Red Shoes" fairly often on my show, though never with the frequency that I played "Cloudbusting" or "Wuthering Heights." It is unfairly maligned as an "inferior" Kate Bush album, when really, there is quite a bit of fine song writing on this set. I'm hard-pressed to find a false note anywhere. Yes, it is not Hounds of Love, but how dull would Bush's musical output have been if she'd simply rehashed Hounds of Love for the rest of her career?

The Red Shoes was nearly Bush's swan song. In the struggle between Bush the pop star and Bush the domestic, for the rest of the 1990s and the first half of the new century, Bush the domestic won out. There would be no new music from her until 2005's Aerial.