Washing Machine

Kate Bush has always been one of my favourite female artists. Hounds of Love is a fantastic album and like so many of her fans I eagerly awaited her latest, Aerial, when it came out a few years ago. On first hearing I liked a lot on the first side, cringed at a couple of songs, but absolutely loved the second CD (the proggy stuff), which professed more creative freedom than the poppy songs that had to sell. For a while I listened to the album a lot, then it kind of moved into the ranks as I went through a classical, then a jazz phase.

Yesterday I came home from a long day at college, spent after reading about war, violence and other such historical nonsense. Students had taken up my afternoon, colleagues needed admin resolved, I hastily had to put togheter a few research topics for a potential collaborative project, spent some times savouring the miserable news of the world, and then, finally, got home for dinner with my sweetheart. I finally calmed down and realized that I really had to relax. I recalled Aerial. We stuck on the second side and it was just as masterful as I had remembered it. Eberhard Weber is divinely complementing her voice and piano work, the birds and voices add beautifully to the texture of the sound and I basked in the soothing sounds of light that she somehow managed to capture so sensually.

That was yesterday. Tonight it was my turn to wash dishes after dinner. I put on the mp3player and my pink rubber gloves and went at it. This time I listened to side one. Something peculiar happened. The two songs that originally made me cringe, “Lovely Bertie” about her little son and “Mrs. Bertalozzi” with its really weird chorus about a washing machine, suddenly acquired a new dimension. I must have listened to both with different ears today, because I really appreciated both immensely. Why?

It is easy to like the obviously masterful craft, poetic riches combined with that rare commodity of originality, which make the second CD such a joy to listen to. But today I realized that the first CD is about something rather different. If the second CD relies on poetry, the first relies on prose. There is a reason why one reviewer (at neumu.net) referred to this album as expanding “into novel-like richness”: the first CD, like a novel, tells the story of a (grown!) woman’s most personal moments: Admiration for a powerful man (King of the Mountain), desire for a younger man (Pi), the delight of a mother watching her son (Bertie), the misery of a housewife that has lost joy and probably her marriage (mrs. Bertalozzi), the urge to be alone and withdraw utterly from the moment and this existence (How to Be Invisible), the beauty of a female warrior (Joanni) and, finally, how that moment strikes us when we realise that our mothers are dead (A Coral Room).

It is an astounding sensitivity that KB brings to this novelistic examination of a woman’s inner world. While I used to favour the first song on the CD (about the alpha male, go figure), I am beginning to think that it is actually Mrs. Bertalozzi that takes the wreath. It is the first time I have been moved like this by a woman singing about women and their middle aged plight since Marianne Faithful’s Ballad of Lucy Jordan. It is the first time I realized that KB tells the story of a woman who watched the clothes of her man spin in the washing machine and begins daydreaming about an erotic moment with him at a mediterranean beach (the entire album musically captures the Mediterranean, its water, its beaches, its light and somehow also the flight of the birds above). It is a profound mourning song about lost sexuality, oh and beauty.

So there it is. Not a song to listen to every day, unless you are really sick of life, but something to appreciate when you get the chance to share one of those sad moments of painful self-reflection in women's lives. I recommend putting it on when you are cleaning stuff. It really seems to work then.