What is it?
Another informal gathering for Kate Bush fans, this time in Ireland. A pleasant walk along the cliffs of Howth Head ("...where the water and the earth caress...") then down into Howth village for an afternoon and evening of live music and merry-making; celebrating Kate, Molly Bloom, James Joyce - and whatever else tickles your fancy! Peaches and seedcake will be the backpack munchies of choice. Last year we had about 30 happy souls join us for the day. This year it's sounding like more of you are coming, and you'll be most welcome!
When?
Meeting at 2PM, Saturday June 14th 2008 (two days before the actual Bloomsday, which this year falls on a Monday.)
Where?
At the start of the cliff walk by the Howth Summit Car Park on Howth Head, North County Dublin, Ireland. Don't fret about getting lost, if you're bringing a mobile phone I'll happily give you my number to check in with us. Email me at
twoms@eircom.net
We will gather near the car park at 2pm and be entertained by some music (details to follow) before strolling along the cliff walk down to Howth Village.
Afternoon/Evening venue
After we complete the walk we will have our own room in The Baily Hotel which is just up the main street from the harbour on the left. The room (in the very nice Ba Mizu part of the hotel) will be perfect for the live music that we'll enjoy (with an emphasis on Kate's music naturally and Joycean stuff too), first confirmed act is brilliant Dublin band Groom, Norwegian splatterfolk duo Thinguma*jigSaw will be making a triumphant return to The Sensual Walk and bluegrass darlings The Prairie Dawgs will be along too! Mark and Michael Stanley from Richer Than Astronauts are confirmed, as is one of Ireland's finest singer-songwriters Mumblin Deaf Ro and Carol Keogh, one of Ireland's finest singers will be performing with her band! Delighted that our own Magdeleen van Eersel will also be coming over from The Netherlands and singing for us on the night, backed by Groom! Ebby from Galway will also be playing a couple of tunes, he's a longtime Kate fan and The Walpurgis Family will be playing a song on the hill. The bar will be serving till 2am. As with last year, we will be organising sandwiches, soup and other food platters as needed (the cliff walk makes you strangely starving!) If you feel you'd like to sing a song, just drop me an email.
Do I have to buy tickets for the music at the hotel?
Nope! No charge. Just send me an email/message that you're coming so I can greet you and say hello on the day and stuff. We're happy to organise this day as a free, rambling, mini-festival, the room won't cost anything and the PA system we're getting is very reasonable. Sorted.
Is the walk hard then?
The walk is downhill for the most part, and won't take any more than 40 minutes, much quicker if you're in brisk mode! Sensible footwear is advised, and be prepared for any weather (i.e. bring a light rain jacket just in case and a wooly hat for the wind). The walks are very popular with Dubliners and tourists alike, but they are by dangerous cliffs - so take your time and stick squarely to the path.
How To Get There?
By Car:
R105 from City Centre to Howth.
From M1 take the Swords / Malahide exit on to R132, at the Malahide roundabout follow Route R106 through Malahide Village and Portmarnock all along the coast. At Sutton junction turn left onto Howth Road (route R105) Look out for signposts for the right turn up to summit & car park.
By Bus:
Numbers
31
,
31B
, and
31C
from Eden Quay in the City Centre terminates at Howth Summit. (Click on the bus number for timetable) The DART train &
31C
option might be the best one from the city.
By Train (DART):
Car parks are provided at most DART stations from Bray to Howth. Take the northbound DART to Howth: Timetables NOTE: There's an uphill walk of 30-40 mins from the station to the summit car park - so take the bus (31/31B/31C) to the summit from Howth Station. Buses stop right near the summit so save on exertion! It's just a couple of minutes walk from the summit bus stop to the summit car park where we'll be gathering.
Flights to Dublin from UK?
Since there's a good deal of interest from UK fans, the
Ryanair
site is currently offering return flights for less than £50 for this weekend...check it out!
Accommodation?
The city hotels can book up quickly in the summer, so booking early is advisable.
The Baily Hotel, our evening venue, has its website
here
if anyone fancies staying in Howth, current listed room rates are €80 for a single, €130 for a double/twin or €140 for a triple. There are many B&Bs and guesthouses on the Northside of Dublin city which would be ideal. You can even try the accommodation options in Howth itself
here. Check out
www.dublintourist.com/
or look at the Family Homes Of Ireland site for B&B accomodation in the Dublin area - north Dublin areas such as Clontarf would be really ideal (easy travel into city etc).
For hotels also try Dublin Trip Advisor for those all important customer reviews!
Hostels in the city are another cheaper option that are very popular, check them out
here
.
The Music
As with last year's gathering, this year we will have some music and possibly Joyce recitations on the hill before we set off on the cliff walk. We have booked our room in the hotel from 5pm and the bands and artists will play over the course of the evening - it's not a show as such, think of it as a micro-festival dedicated to Kate, Dublin and Joyce.
Groom
Groom
are our house band for The Sensual Walk! They rock! We love them! (Big, huge, thanks to the band's singer/songwriter Mike who is co-organising the day with me).
Thinguma*jigSaw are confirmed to be playing again at The Sensual Walk this year! You'll know how much of a hit they were last year - can't wait to see them in action again - they are promising us their take on Suspended in Gaffa this time around as well as their own mesmerising stuff...
The Prairie Dawgs
will also be there! These guys just get better and better, they perform all their own bluegrass/old-style country songs and will be joining us on the hill and back at the hotel but they're also playing a gig in the city that night so we'll take what we can get of 'em!
Mark & Michael from Richer Than Astronauts
Really pleased to say that brothers Mark Stanley and Michael Stanley from the excellent
Richer than Astronauts
will also be playing at The Sensual Walk this year. One of the very best live bands I've seen in Dublin. Check them out
here.
Mumblin' Deaf Ro
Very happy to announce that one of Ireland's finest singer-songwriters
Mumblin' Deaf Ro
will be playing for us on June 14th! He's just great. Check him out
here.
Carol Keogh (and band)
Carol is widely acknowledged one of the finest singers in Ireland, her stunning voice and songwriting has graced albums by The Plague Monkeys, The Tycho Brahe and Autamata. She is now working on her own solo material.
STEPPING OUT OF THE PAGE...The Story of a Song Inspired by Molly and James
The Sensual Walk is an excuse for Kate Bush fans and their friends to get together in one of Dublin’s most striking landscapes to celebrate Kate’s music, Bloomsday, and the stretch in the evenings with music, craic and yes, pints. The link with James Joyce and Ulysses may not be fully apparent to everyone so I’ve written the following brief note by way of explanation. Personally it’s also a way to express my affection for a song, which remains probably the most positive and life-affirming piece of music I’ve ever heard. All inspired by something that one reader in the 1920’s called “the most damnable slush and filth that ever polluted paper in print…muck and sewage of the human mind.”
- Sean Twomey
James Joyce's Ulysses has long been hailed as a masterpiece since its publication in 1922. The character of Molly Bloom looms large over the events of the single day in Dublin depicted in the story. The novel takes place on 16th June 1904, the day of Joyce and Nora Barnacle’s first date, now celebrated as Bloomsday. It was Joyce’s intention for the novel to have Homeric parallels and Molly, the wife of Leopold Bloom, represents Penelope. Unlike her faithful mythical counterpart she is having an adulterous affair with Hugh 'Blazes' Boylan after ten years of celibacy. Her celebrated internal monologue, which concludes the novel, takes the form of eight enormous "sentences," with only two marks of punctuation in the entire episode. Molly accepts Leopold into her bed, frets about his health, and then reminisces about their first meeting and her first feelings of love for him. The episode both begins and ends with “yes”, a word that Joyce described as "the female word". Earlier, Leopold had been having a cheese sandwich and glass of Burgundy in Davey Byrne’s pub and thinking of the moment in the spring or summer of 1888 when Molly agreed to marry him, among the ferns and rhododendrons on Howth Head with just a comical nannygoat to witness it. This deeply romantic reminiscence, parts of which recur several times in Ulysses, includes the description of Molly passing the warm and chewed seedcake from her mouth to his. Their love, at least sixteen years before, was passionate, erotic and vital.
More than sixty years after the publication of Ulysses, Kate Bush was working on the follow-up to her 1985 ‘Hounds of Love’ album, which is now widely hailed as her own masterpiece. Around this time Kate had written an instrumental piece of music, a rhythmic melody that strongly suggested the cadence of Molly Bloom’s speech. Kate’s introduction to the final passage of Ulysses had been a 1958 recording of the soliloquy by the Irish actress Siobhan McKenna. Kate was transfixed by the beauty and femininity of the writing. “It's like this never-ending sentence, this long train of thought, and the only thing that punctuates it is the word “yes” and it very gradually accelerates. I just thought it was one of the most sensual pieces ever written.” The words from the book matched perfectly to the music. “It was just like it was meant to be. The words fitted - they just fitted. The whole thing fitted, it was ridiculous…”
The music was recorded at Windmill Lane studios in Dublin, arranged by Bill Whelan. The featured players were Davey Spillane on uillean pipes, Donal Lunny on bouzuki, John Sheahan on fiddle, Charlie Morgan on drums and Del Palmer on bass. Kate’s brother Paddy would be credited on the sleeve-notes with playing ‘whips’ on the record, an error he quickly rectified. “I’m actually playing a pair of fishing rods. I wanted to get the impression of a beautiful Irish lakeland and the swishing sound of the rods should conjure the atmosphere of fly-fishing, tweed hats and long Wellingtons.”
Kate’s good cheer at this progress was short-lived however. The Joyce estate would not grant her permission to use the words directly from the book. Attempts to change their minds continued for about a year. “We approached the relevant people and they just would not let me use them. No way. I tried everything. Obviously, I was very disappointed. It was completely their prerogative, but it was very difficult for me, then, to re-approach the song. In some ways I wanted to just leave it off the album. But we'd put a lot of work into it. The Irish musicians had worked so hard.”
Despite this frustration Kate set about completely transforming her song. “I gradually rewrote it, keeping the same rhythm of the words and the same sounds but turning it into its own story.” The piece, now titled The Sensual World, became about Molly Bloom the character stepping out of the book world, a black and white two-dimensional world, into the real world. “The immediate impression was the sensuality of this world. The fact that you can touch things, that is so sensual - the colours of trees, the feel of the grass on the feet, the touch of this in the hand, the fact that it is such a sensual world. I think for me that is an incredibly important thing about this planet, that we are surrounded by such sensuality and yet we tend not to see it like that. I'm sure for someone who had never experienced it before it would be quite a devastating thing.” Later in her career Kate returned to this theme, a euphoric appreciation of everyday experience, on her ‘Aerial’ album in 2005 to huge critical acclaim.
The song opens with the sound of church bells, perhaps echoing Leopold’s proposal to Molly on Howth Head. “I've got a thing about the sound of bells. It's one of those fantastic sounds: a sound of celebration. They're used to mark points in life; births, weddings, deaths, but they give this tremendous feeling of celebration. In the original speech Molly's talking of the time when Leopold proposed to her, and I just had the image of bells, this image of them sitting on the hillside with the sound of bells in the distance. In hindsight I also think it's a lovely way to start an album. A feeling of celebration that puts me on a hillside somewhere on a sunny afternoon.”
A piece of traditional Macedonian music (called ‘Antice’) was re-worked to fit the ‘stepping out…’ chorus in the song’s new structure. The song would become the lead single for her new album, also titled ‘The Sensual World’. The accompanying promotional video had Kate, swathed in a velvet gown, dancing hypnotically through woodland as the sunlight turns to dusk, moonlight and back to sunrise again. In interviews in the autumn of 1989 Kate explained that the song and album contained the most positive female energy of her work to date. “In some ways, like on Hounds Of Love, it was important for me to get across the sense of power in the songs that I'd associated with male energy and music. I didn't feel that this time. I wanted to express myself as a woman in my music, rather than as a woman wanting to sound as powerful as a man. And definitely the song The Sensual World was very much a female track for me. I felt it was a really new expression, feeling good about being a woman musically.”
Just as Kate had ignited a renewed interest in Emily Brontë’s novel with the global success of the song Wuthering Heights, it is also likely that many curious souls have taken the plunge into the extraordinary pages of Joyce’s Ulysses (and beyond) upon hearing a woman at the height of her musical powers interpret Molly Bloom’s rich inner life in such a unique and perfect way.
Two excerpts from Ulysses by James Joyce
“…the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes…”
“….and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
The Sensual World by Kate Bush
Mmh, yes,
Then I'd taken the kiss of seedcake back from his mouth
Going deep South, go down, mmh, yes,
Took six big wheels and rolled our bodies
Off of Howth Head and into the flesh, mmh, yes,
He said I was a flower of the mountain, yes,
But now I've powers o'er a woman's body, yes.
Stepping out of the page into the sensual world.
Stepping out...
To where the water and the earth caress
And the down of a peach says mmh, yes,
Do I look for those millionaires
Like a Machiavellian girl would
When I could wear a sunset? mmh, yes,
And how we'd wished to live in the sensual world
You don't need words--just one kiss, then another.
Stepping out of the page into the sensual world
Stepping out, off the page, into the sensual world.
And then our arrows of desire rewrite the speech, mmh, yes,
And then he whispered would I, mmh, yes,
Be safe, mmh, yes, from mountain flowers?
And at first with the charm around him, mmh, yes,
He loosened it so if it slipped between my breasts
He'd rescue it, mmh, yes,
And his spark took life in my hand and, mmh, yes,
I said, mmh, yes,
But not yet, mmh, yes,
Mmh, yes
