Mmh, yes. A few words on ‘The Sensual World’

“Like trains of thought continually tumbling” is how Kate Bush described Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses. She first heard the passage several years previously on a 1956 spoken-word album in which Siobhan McKenna and E.G. Marshall read the soliloquies of Molly and Leopold Bloom. It isn’t hard to see why the rhapsodic conclusion of James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece colonised the singer’s subconscious. With Wuthering Heights, 11 years previously, Bush had alchemised Catherine Earnshaw’s tormented pleas for Heathcliff’s forgiveness into a sexual fever dream — in the process securing a number one hit. If anything, Molly’s speech was an even more suitable candidate for similar treatment. Working on songs for her sixth album, Bush found herself rhythmically exclaiming “yes” over one instrumental passage — and in doing so, was reminded of the passage in Ulysses. “I went and grabbed the book,” she recalled, “and it worked perfectly. It just scanned — the whole song.”

What must have felt like a moment of divine serendipity stalled when Joyce’s estate refused her permission to use the words. However, their intransigence merely propelled the song to greater heights. On the eponymous opener of The Sensual World, Bush’s lyric sees Molly stepping from the black and white pages of the book and into the real world. The synaesthetic euphoria of such an outcome is honoured to a breathtaking degree on what would be the first single to be released from the new record. Possibly the last Radio 1 playlisted single whose main hook was played on Uilleann Pipes, Donal Lunny’s part on the chorus was adapted from Nevestinsko Oro, a traditional piece of Macedonian wedding music. From the first “Mmh, yes” that emerges from the opening wedding bells, Bush’s breathy performance astrally vaults the listener to the mother of all postcoitally sunny Sunday mornings. In the second verse, she prompts a playful comparison to Cathy in Wuthering Heights, who spurns Heathcliff for the wealthy Edgar Linton. “Do I look for those millionaires/Like a Machiavellian girl would?” — a question which Bush/Molly immediately answers: “When I could wear a sunset, mmh yes/And how we’d wish to live in the sensual world/You don’t need words — just one kiss, then another.”

One ironic consequence of The Sensual World’s success was that, by the time Bush set about re-recording it for 2011’s Director’s Cut, Joyce’s estate had clearly been won over by the purity of her intentions for the song. With permission now granted, the new version — retitled Flower Of The Mountain — duly reverted to the original plan, and saw Bush confer a breathier, worldlier ambience on Molly’s words — as if channeling the woman enjoying the memory of first love, rather than the woman in the memory. For all of that, it’s the first version that remains the definitive one, not least because of the inspired conceit forced upon one writer by the guardians of another.