The Empty Bullring (Patreon)

The blog will update on Mondays from now on. Since I'm behind on paid posts, I'm going to split next week's essay on Never for Ever's B-sides into two paid posts on Patreon. Sorry if this is inconvenient, but the semester starting up and my weekend job are keeping me busy. We've got another commissioned piece from Ashley Watts coming soon, so bear with me.

The Empty Bullring

An ephemeral B-side, “The Empty Bullring” tells its story in under 2-and-a-half minutes. A short tragedy, the song takes the shape of a lament by a matador’s lover. The song’s opening line, “disappears through a window/out of my mind/trying to keep him at home,” is a choppy summation of Bush’s POV, but it’s followed by an intriguing literary reference: “leaving me here/like Tam Lin in her tower,” an homage to the Scottish legend of Tam Lin. While Bush’s recollection of this story is off — Tam Lin is a male character who isn’t actually trapped in a tower — and as a result makes the allusion incoherent, it’s still a marker of the song’s cultural literacy. The matador goes “out into Rome,” rather than Spain, the world’s bullfighting capital alongside Mexico. There’s some historical accuracy here — ancient Rome was known for its bullfighting. Yet the juxtaposition of Scottish folklore and the Roman Empire makes for a weird hodgepodge of settings, making history a backdrop on which continuous cultural battles are fought rather than a linear tradition of events.

So what battle is fought in “The Empty Bullring?” Obviously there’s the song’s focal image of a bullfight, which the matador loses: “the throw of the rose/it’s all you lived for/but you’ve lost it all.” The matador has a fatal obsession with “taking [his] red cloak/to regain something,” perhaps a sense of masculine pride which he’s been deprived of all his life. Rather than finding fulfillment at home in his relationship, he’s enraptured by “glory and gore,” seeking out a destructive lifestyle that took him away from the pleasures of life. Bush ends the short song with the bullfighting tragic hero losing everything, having prioritized a momentary victory over long-term happiness.

“The Empty Bullring” is most notable for being the first non-LP Kate Bush song to back one of her singles. It’s a minimalist track, with no instrumentation apart from Bush’s piano playing and little treatment in terms of production. Compared to its apocalyptic A-side “Breathing,” the track is considerably smaller in its scope, carrying a classicist tragedy on a catchy six-note riff. Constructed from bits of other songs, “The Empty Bullring” does what its protagonist never could, accepting its quiet place in Bush’s canon and eschewing quests for greater glory.