A Coral Room

Kate: "The song is really about the passing of time... I like the idea of coming from this big expansive, outside world of sea and cities into, again, this very small space where, er, it's talking about a memory of my mother and this little brown jug. I always remember hearing years ago this thing about a sort of Zen approach to life, where, you would hold something in your hand, knowing that, at some point, it would break, it would no longer be there." gaffa.org/reaching/iv05_bbc_front_row.html

'A Coral Room', ushering in Kate's uncanny gift for reporting from the emotion-boggling frontier where love and grief embrace. So few artists go there. Or, more precisely, take you there. A Coral Room requires you pack a big hankie. Mojo magazine

At other points, Bush uses the familiar to personalize a painful memory. The breathtakingly gorgeous, piano-driven "A Coral Room" lifts phrases from the old drinking song "Little Brown Jug" to illustrate an anecdote about a departed mother. Kalamazoo Gazette

'A Coral Room' is an epic map of the human heart.

The opening lines work like a snow globe. Perhaps the snow globe that draws Citizen Kane into its memories. He remembers being sent away by his mother when it was snowing, and this leads him to remember Rosebud. As he utters "Rosebud", his dying hand falls over the side, releasing the snow globe, which breaks, shattering into a thousand pieces... See it fall...

There’s a city, draped in net Fisherman net...

We are taken under water to a once towered metropolis. Scuba diving among underwater ruins in Mexico... A lost ruin of time, a micro-environment, an intricate crystal structure, a coral reef, something vast and Atlantean, a city of fallen memories...

KB lowers us into the collective unconscious, as in a diving bell, and we are instructed to focus on dimmed shadows, on the mystery between light and dark. (The diving bell spider, Argyroneta aquatica, is a spider which lives entirely under water, even though it could survive on land, maintaining an air reserve in a "diving bell" constructed from silk!)

And in the half light, in the half light It looks like every tower Is covered in webs...

IMHO, these lines can suggest New York in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the two WTC Towers. The dust and debris, the snow globe broken...

See it fall See it fall...

The buildings of New York Look just like mountains through the snow...

But the eternal heart continues to beat, the spider of time continues to weave, and the tapestry of life continues...

Moving and glistening and rocking It’s babies in rhythm As the spider of time is climbing Over the ruins...

Ruins... crashing down...

The song shifts gear like a mirror turning, or the camera zooming out, or the mists unveiling in a crystal ball...

There were hundreds of people living here Sails at the windows...

Sails... sales... fishermen and world trade...

The clear vision is one of life, loss, catastrophe, emergency... The World Wars... 9/11... the 2004 Asian Tsunami... the social and ecological crises of the 21st century...

And the speed boats flying above...

Kirsty MacColl was killed by a speeding powerboat while scuba diving in Mexico on 18 December 2000. Kirsty MacColl was the daughter of dancer Jean Newlove and folk singer Ewan MacColl. She is best known with The Pogues on "Fairytale of New York".

Put your hand over the side of the boat What do you feel?

The boat holds you up, safe above the watery unconscious ocean of feelings. You can ride above the feelings and be safe from them, but after a while you need to put your hand over the side of the boat and let go...

If the first part of the song deals with the macro, the second part deals with the micro. And by focussing on one personal grief, we focus on all distant voices, still lives...

In a room filled with coral...

The song plays like a photographic slide show or home cinema, weaving and conjuring up memories whose personal and intimate nature we can all feel. The family album - fishermen, seaside boats, sails and masts - history draped in the dust of time...

The jug, as a vessel and metaphor for life, is full of nourishment, pleasure, pain, joy, craic, etc., and it also becomes the snow globe to a sunken city of moments and memories that are somehow preserved from the ravages of time, like hidden treasure.

I hear her laughing She is standing in the kitchen As we come in the back door...

KB's description of the web of loss is extremely moving. It is both macro-expansive and micro-personal. The song is all of us; and the "little spider climbing out of a broken jug" evokes the eventual coming to terms and moving on from grief to healing. The spider represent time and fates, the universal weaver and the universal mother; and the 'little brown jug' is the finite, mortal, vessel inevitably broken by the 'ravages of time.'

A truly outstanding piece of work! ...

A Coral Room can be compared to "Atlantis" an early KB demo:

Kate Bush - Atlantis

In that ocean. Wide eyed and deeper in your gaze, And bluer than the bright that's in the cave.

There is a city, Came out from you, Atlantis In ruins, sunken below the waves

But in the city, Where there is no one. What's the point of being free, eh? When there is nothing there to tie me down, Oh, no more here.

The bluest city, Covered in coral and coral, On sea chests, And sealed Jamaician tales.

There is nobody, To count the soldiering meandering whales, With a shoal of herring amongst the sails.

But in the city, Where there is no one. What's the point of being free, eh? When there is nothing there to tie me down, Oh, no more here.

There is the city Atlantis.

The most famous of the early prophets of earth changes and Atlantis was Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), a medium, mystic, and founder of the Theosophical Society. She prophesied: "That the periodical sinking and reappearance of mighty continents, now called Atlantean and Lemurian by modern writers, is no fiction will be demonstrated. It is only in the twentieth century that portions, if not the whole, of the present work will be vindicated."

The Little Brown Jug 1958 the Clark Sisters youtube.com/watch