The song Kate Bush described as her “least favourite”
Kate Bush has never been the biggest fan of The Red Shoes. In various interviews over the past several years, she has criticised its sound, noting her regret for choosing digital techniques over traditional ones and disliking how this distracted from its nuance and depth. While she doesn’t actively hate the entire record—there are some parts she is proud of—for the most part, she views it as a chapter that looks a little too much like “trying too hard”.
Inspired by the 1948 movie and complete with Bush’s signature flirtatious macabre, The Red Shoes was always an ambitious project. Although considered by her harshest critics as boring and commercial, the record is arguably as crucial to Bush’s discography as The Kick Inside or Hounds of Love. Those two yield more innovative analysis, of course, but to ignore Bush’s artistic approach to The Red Shoes and her subsequent disdain would be to ignore a significant aspect of her own calibre.
The album, crafted with the idea of live performance in mind, naturally has an overtly accessible feel. Most of the refrains and melodies could easily be translated to a live audience, unlike much of her earlier material, which focused more on challenging the listener’s ear. This time, Bush decidedly took on a “go with the flow” energy, culminating in the track ‘Rubberband Girl’.
On the surface, ‘Rubberband Girl’ seems like another 1980s-sounding pop song. Its bouncy energy, catchy chorus, and lines about being a rubberband and bending to the beat epitomise Bush’s new relinquished control and embrace of unpredictability. However, the contradictory element creeps in with the music video, which, notably from three minutes onward, takes on a more sinister tone. The rise and fall of the vocals and the canted angle, alongside Bush adorning a straitjacket, seems like a playful yet dark address of her inner chaos and how it is being subdued to conformity.
The radio might have enjoyed the one-dimensional, happy version of the catchy tune, but the broader aspects of Bush’s artistry prove otherwise. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the musician struggled with the final version, knowing that something about it didn’t really sit right from the very beginning. “I just wanted to do something really different. It is my least favourite track. I had considered taking it off to be honest,” she told Mojo.
The Red Shoes was the only album that saw Bush later re-recording a handful of its songs, including ‘Rubberband Girl’, because, in her words, the original version “didn’t feel quite as interesting as the other tracks”. In 2011, as part of her Director’s Cut album, she recorded a version of ‘Rubberband Girl’ that seemed almost entirely independent from the earlier, more conventional track. Aside from the chorus, the later version is much punchier, ambiguous in nature, and much more off-kilter than anything else on The Red Shoes.
In the context of Bush’s wider artistic legacy, The Red Shoes is rarely held in as high regard as her earlier records, but the reasoning seems obvious when looking at the basics. Bush is generally more celebrated when leaning into her fantastical, fictional storytelling, the unsettling nature of her more outlandish imaginations beckoning intrigue on a more artistic level than her more realist compositions. While The Red Shoes depicted an authentic version of Bush and her life, it lacked the enigmatic allure and imaginative depth that had previously defined her work.
