WELCOME to the show. There’s something here for everyone, from the trench-coated, trilby-hatted gangsters frugging in a manner that suggests a close acquaintance with both Guys And Dolls and Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Races, to a wartime fighter pilot – a flying jacket for a shroud and a Biggles helmet for a burial crown – dying on foreign soil, wishing only that the idealised England of his past will become his future heaven. There’s a Lolitaesque seductress, winking outrageously at us from behind the piano; a ghostly apparition, up to her waist in mist and misery; a top-hatted magician’s apprentice; a souk-siren singing of her “Pussy Queen” beneath a golden coronet; a murderous gunslinger, and a leather-clad refugee from West Side Story.
There are 13 people onstage, 17 costume changes and 24 songs scattered over three distinctly theatrical Acts. At the centre of this wild, swirling, ever-changing musical circus, living out each song as though her life depended upon it, is one woman: 5? 3? in her bare feet (in which she appears throughout) and calling the shots on everything from the programme design to the veggie cuisine. She is still only 20 years old.
The Bush who unveiled her ‘Tour Of Life’ on the stage of the Liverpool Empire on April 3, 1979 and hauled it around Europe for the next six weeks appeared to be unleashing a new, exhilarating, hugely potent weapon in her artistic armoury. She was, it seemed clear, born to do this. Until Bush returned to the stage more than three decades later with ‘Before The Dawn’, however, the tour more closely resembled a compelling footnote, a brief but brilliant detour down a one-way street. Because the ‘Tour Of Life’ turned out to be the tour of half a lifetime rather than the beginning of a regular, unfolding dialogue between Bush and her songs, it’s tempting to conclude with hindsight that it was extraordinary simply by virtue of the fact that she would not repeat the experience for another 35 years. But it was extraordinary even to those who saw it with their own eyes.
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After the release – and dawning disappointment – of Lionheart Bush began pushing aside unwanted commitments like a snowplough carving a path through a blizzard, clearing the road ahead of obstacles, determined to focus her energy on the things that really mattered to her. She was helped immeasurably in this respect by Hilary Walker. Something of a poacher turned gamekeeper, as the head of EMI’s international division Walker had been instrumental throughout 1978 in breaking Bush outside of the UK; the glitzy Lionheart launch in Holland had been orchestrated by her. Shortly afterwards “she was invited to leave EMI by Kate to work with her, which she did very readily,” says her former EMI colleague Brian Southall. “Hilary worked very closely with her, they had a very close bond, and she knew the business backwards.”
At Bush’s side for most of the next 30 years, Walker was never quite a manager. She handled much of the day-to-day heavy lifting in the manner of a PA, but contracts and financial matters were still handled by Novercia in conjunction with their trusted accountant and solicitor. Walker was primarily a buffer, someone to field the endless enquiries, say ‘no’ on Bush’s behalf and keep unwanted distractions at bay. As such, she was not always popular. The ‘Tour Of Life’ set designer David Jackson recalls her “confrontational, dog-in-a-manger management style,” while Brian Bath remembers moments when “she started pushing her weight around and it wasn’t very comfortable.” Charlie Morgan, who perhaps has a little more distance, admits, “she was pretty tough, [but] she was good.” Above all she was necessary, and the final piece in the management structure.
As 1978 closed The Kick Inside was named the tenth best selling album of the year in Britain and ‘Wuthering Heights’ the eleventh best-selling single. Bush was harvesting gold and platinum discs from around the globe and had picked up armfuls of awards from the industry and music magazines. To cope with the deluge of fan mail, the Kate Bush Club was created, based in Welling and entrusted to Lisa Bradley, who still runs it today. Bush continued to make appearances on the promotional treadmill, but they were gradually becoming less frequent. Mostly it was UK radio and TV, plugging ‘Wow’ and the forthcoming tour, with the odd jaunt to Italy and Switzerland to perform on television.
Some interesting opportunities came her way. She was offered, and declined, roles in two horror films – one playing a vampire – and was also invited to record the main title theme for the next James Bond film, Moonraker, composed by John Barry and Hal David; she politely passed on the grounds that she didn’t feel the song suited her, and Shirley Bassey did the honours more than capably. She did, however, return briefly to the studio in February to record ‘Magician’ for The Magician Of Lublin, Menahem Golan’s so-so celluloid interpretation of Isaac Beshevis Singer’s 1960 novel. Written by Maurice Jarre and Paul Webster and all but inaudible in the film, the song was a fleeting but lovely fairground waltz, reminiscent of Tom Waits’ circus songs, and a much more satisfying take on queasy, slightly sinister Weimar cabaret than her own ‘Coffee Homeground’.
This was all very gratifying but essentially extracurricular. Everything was leading towards playing live. The ‘Tour Of Life’ was intended to be a hydra-headed beast with several distinct faces: music, movement, poetry, mime, burlesque, magic and a continuous parade of eye-popping visual stimuli. Ever since she had started conversing with the media Bush had been steadily talking herself-into undertaking a tour, promising something beyond the run-of-the-mill. “Bands that do nothing, that just go out and … play their latest album, or sing it and then just walk off, are boring,” she said with disarming emphasis and scant regard for the sensibilities of regular rock fans.1 It was another illustration of how little she was prepared to conform to the rock model. This was the age of new wave, when the no-frills ethos of punk still held sway and turning up, tuning up and singing your songs straight was very much what bands did. In the era immediately following the act of symbolic regicide performed on prog rock pomp, anything other than a display of unfussy, conspicuous passion was viewed with extreme suspicion by most quarters of the highly influential rock press. The escapist Technicolor fantasy world of the New Romantic movement – arguably the logical destination of punk’s Be Yourself ethos – was awaiting around the corner; Bush was already far ahead of the pack in this respect, at least visually and conceptually. It would take her music a little time to catch up.
The tour had originally been scheduled to start in March but was shunted back to April as Bush struggled to ensure that the hugely ambitious undertaking would gel to her satisfaction. Although the dates were officially announced on March 3, preparations had begun in earnest immediately after Christmas 1978. In her first meeting with set designer David Jackson at EMI’s offices, many of the visual aspects were thrashed out in an impromptu, open-ended brainstorming session which started with a businesslike handshake and ended up in a huddle on the floor.
“She entered the room with a coterie of management types, smart, successful, and I thought: ‘heavy hitters’,” says Jackson. “Because Kate is so petite I had the impression of a precocious child surrounded by heavily protective parents. We shook hands, we made eye contact, and there was a bit of light chit-chat. I don’t think we even looked at the fat portfolio of stuff I brought to show her. She was totally friendly, like we’d known each other for years, and just buzzing with enthusiasm. I had a huge scratch pad and some pencils with me, the pad was too big for any of the desks in the room so we sat on the floor and scribbled and talked and scribbled. When I looked around the management types had all wandered off, so there we were like two kids on the floor with our crayons. At some point one of my scribbles reminded her of an ankh*: ‘Looks like an ankh!’ ‘It does doesn’t it? That’s what it is then!’ The design for the physical stage set was pretty much done right there, and I fell in love with her right there. She was gorgeous, personable and very smart. After that it was, ‘Anything I can do to make you happy, Ma’am!’”
In the coming days, between January 2 and 4, she and Jackson met again at Wickham Farm to pin down the general look and feel of the set and the lighting. Like most aspects of the tour, it was a fully collaborative process, albeit one conducted within her strict guidelines. Bush would explain – not always clearly; she tended towards opaque, abstract inspiration – what she wanted and then allow her colleagues a degree of autonomy in executing her vision. She was not dictatorial, but given full artistic control for the first time her imagination tended to run riot. “Kate would just go off and I would jump in now and then and say, ‘Yes, OK, I think that one is just within the range of possibility,’” says Jackson. “It was out of control from the moment it began. Not literally, [but] the stuff we scribbled on the carpet was out of control.”
This was not atypical. For someone whose productivity is hardly the stuff of legend, the sheer pace at which Bush comes up with ideas in all aspects of her work, and the constant supply of new and occasionally outlandish concepts, has struck many of her collaborators. “She was a great person to work with, incredibly energetic and frenetic,” says Gered Mankowitz. “I used to feel absolutely exhausted after every session, because she has this effect of jumping from one idea to another. You have to continually pull her back and say, ‘No, this is going to be great.’ If it doesn’t seem right straight away she’d want to jump to another idea, and that was exhausting, trying to keep her on the rails. But the next day you’d see the film and there would just be shot after shot after shot, just wonderful.”
She spent further time in January with wardrobe assistant Lisa Hayes working on ideas for costumes and visual themes. Meanwhile, she had to orchestrate both the song and dance elements of the show. After the disappointment of being sent down from the mountain, Brian Bath, Del and Paddy had been drafted back in to form the nucleus of the touring group. Vic King was now firmly off-radar, and Charlie Morgan had amicably left the band of his own accord, somewhat weary of the piecemeal nature of the work. They needed a new drummer and, to recreate accurately the sound on the records, they also brought in a piano player, a keyboard player and another guitarist.
Ben Barson, the brother of Madness’s Mike Barson, joined on synthesiser. London-born session musician Alan Murphy came in on lead guitar on the recommendation of drummer Preston Heyman, who had played on Bryan Ferry’s 1978 album The Bride Stripped Bare and knew Murphy from gigs and studio sessions around London. Northern Irishman Kevin ‘Eggs’ McAlea, a pub rock veteran and a seasoned session player, played piano and saxophone.*
“We needed extra musicians, so the group just got bigger,” says Brian Bath, who was de facto bandleader. “Preston showed up and he was great, a really loud drummer: when he hit the cymbal Kate used to blink, she couldn’t help it! I remember Dave Gilmour’s younger brother coming along, but then Alan Murphy turned up and I thought, ‘My God, this guy’s good, and so positive,’ so we started working on guitar parts. Kevin came along, got on the piano and said, ‘Can you play that bit again, Kate?’, and he copied straight away what she played, note for note. He was so brilliant, never made a mistake.” Bush revealed that a major part of the attraction with McAlea was the fact that she had “never met anyone else who plays the piano – or can play it if he wants to – so like me. [He] was an incredible find.”2 So much so that he was the sole musician from ‘Tour Of Life’ who would be invited to return for ‘Before The Dawn’.
The idea was to play all 23 songs from the first two albums – in the end only ‘Oh, To Be In Love’ wasn’t performed – along with new material. There would be no idiosyncratic renditions of ‘Honky Tonk Women’ or ‘Nutbush City Limits’. Accustomed to getting her music played exactly as she wanted it, Bush drilled the band over and over again until there was no margin for error. She had not long returned from her appearance on Saturday Night Live in New York, where she had briskly informed house drummer Billy Cobham, a jazz-fusion legend who had recently worked with Miles Davis, that his playing on ‘Them Heavy People’ was all wrong: “No, no, no, no, no,” she chided, “You don’t do it like that….’
The band rehearsed for a full three months, much of that period spent simply trying to come to terms with the structures of the songs, negotiating and logging their many unexpected twists and turns. “It took us so long to learn them because they were so complicated, I just worked at it day and night,” says Bath.
It’s safe to say that Bush was working even harder. Throughout most of January and February she spent her mornings at contemporary dance centre The Place in Euston, central London, putting together routines and rehearsing for the show. Anthony Van Laast had been hired by director Keith MacMillan for the ‘Hammer Horror’ video, and she subsequently invited him to help her choreograph the entire tour. Van Laast went on to work on a number of high profile productions, including Chess, My Fair Lady and Abba’s Mamma Mia! movie, and is now a knight of the realm. At the time, rather more humbly, he was a member of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, and when not touring he would often teach evening classes at the school attached to the company. It was from these classes that he recruited Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst, two young, black dancers who would become Bush’s principal partners onstage, in videos and in studios over the next decade and more. There was perhaps a degree of gentle provocation in her decision to choose – at a time when racial divisions in the UK were still pronounced – to dance with two black men. “She does think about cultures a lot – black culture, Irish culture, Aboriginal culture,” says Avon Arnold. “She’s very aware of colour and creed.”
Whereas Bush was now confident enough in her musical vision to call all the shots, when it came to her dancing she still felt more like a student and was therefore willing to take direction from Van Laast, despite the fact that it was his first major job. “It was six-to-eight weeks of five days-a-week work and rehearsal,” says Avon Arnold. “Kate was telling Anthony what she wanted, but sometimes we’d all work together on a movement, and Anthony would basically stage it and direct it, because she was in it. Other times he’d completely put the steps together himself. It would vary from song to song. He might say to her, ‘Look, on this song it’s better that you don’t get up from the piano’, or whatever. She was still very young then, and she hadn’t had a lot of experience in stagecraft, so it needed Anthony.”
“I can’t emphasise the word ‘collaboration’ enough,” Van Laast later said. “The choreographer is usually very much the master, but part of Kate’s fascination is her idiosyncratic way of moving, and you can’t take that away.”3 A daily routine emerged. Gruelling mornings at The Place and cold, misty afternoons spent with the band at Wood Wharf studios down by the waterfront in Greenwich, on the other side of the city though handily located for Welling and her flat in Wickham Road, where she would return late in the afternoon and continue working on her dancing – often with her partners in tow – until the early hours. It was a punishing schedule. To make matters worse a BBC film crew, headed by the laconic reporter Bernard Clark, dropped in periodically to record the historic proceedings for a Nationwide special. Del Palmer recalled, “She was getting up in the morning, going dancing, coming back, rehearsing with the band, going home, in a meeting ‘til three in the morning, then getting up, going dancing …”4
While the artists were all knuckling under, the nuts and bolts of the set were put together in a hair-raising six weeks under the supervision of tour manager Richard Ames. It was high concept but low tech. There were no hydraulics – the ramp, which rose up vertically on ‘Strange Phenomena’, was made out of aluminium and hand-operated – and nothing was computerised. The rear projections were executed manually in real-time each night. It was built like an old fashioned theatre set, which is precisely what it was. Looking at the stage from the auditorium Bush’s fans would see a large circular screen, intended to represent an egg, at the back of the stage, onto which slides and film images – clouds, a desertscape, waves – could be projected, and into which a circular flap was cut at the bottom through which Bush could enter and exit. From this concealed doorway the central ramp sloped down to the front of the stage, with the band tucked away on either side. It did indeed give the structure a vaguely ankh-like shape, though it was hardly obvious. A huge three-dimensional egg, upholstered in red satin like an Easter chocolate box, made sporadic appearances onstage: one of its primary purposes was to allow Bush to conduct her many costume changes out of sight inside it, without constantly running back and forth from the stage.
Most of the set, including the large back projection screen – which in reality more closely resembled a ribbed kite than an egg – shared key characteristics with The Kick Inside sleeve concept and the themes of many of those songs. The egg motif symbolised the womb, the beginning of life, but ultimately Bush had more ideas than could easily be accommodated within the available space, time and budget, and the result was a set design sufficiently fluid to act as backdrop to a series of short musical skits but lacking a clear visual identity. In the end, much of the show’s momentum and sense of drama was generated by the costume changes, the innovative lighting from both the back and the front, and above all the dramatic energy which Bush and her dancers invested in the songs.
In early March the production moved to The Who’s sound stage at Shepperton Film Studios, where huge mirrors were installed at the back of the room so everyone onstage could see what was going on and how they were projecting themselves. This was the scene of the coming together of two very different cultures: dance, still a marginal, rather esoteric pursuit, and popular music. “It was the first time, I think, that the musicians saw the dance, and vice versa,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “There was one point where Del was like, ‘What are they doing? Where have they got their hands?’ He didn’t realise it was ‘art’! Kate wasn’t doing anything that was new in terms of pure dance, but in terms of applying it to rock it was very new.” Palmer remembered that he spent most of the time at Shepperton “with my back to those mirrors because it was too freaky…. I remember looking over at Brian and going, ‘What the hell is going on?’”5
It was a febrile atmosphere. This large group of young, highly creative but relatively inexperienced people worked very hard to make Bush’s vision come alive, and their efforts resulted in equal measures of innovation and frustration. At all times, Bush was forced to negotiate the conflicts between creative control and financial and practical realities. Often, many of her more outrageous ideas were by necessity compromised. Having dreamed up dozens of concepts for the content of the rear projections, the crew shot thousands of feet of film footage of pool balls and wave machines and rotating six-shooters, nine-tenths of which were never used. “In fact, we totally ran out of time,” says Jackson. “When we got to first rehearsal we were using footage she’d never seen, the film was still wet from the lab. What you’re looking at [onstage] often is not the idea but the solution to the idea. If we’d had the Rolling Stones’ budget at that point we could have got really silly. We thought we were being quite restrained!”
At other times, necessity proved the mother of invention. Towering sound engineer Gordon ‘Gunji’ Patterson devised the head microphone as a solution to the question of how Bush could sing and dance at the same time. The tiny microphone was attached to a wire headset which left both her hands free for dancing and expressive movement (although she didn’t use it all the time; often she sang into a hefty canary-yellow hand-held mike). It was a genuinely pioneering innovation but fraught with problems, most of which involved getting it to sit correctly in front of her mouth so it picked up her voice clearly.
It was all terribly exciting, conducted in a warm, familial environment. Given the stakes and the scale of the production it was an amazingly organic, home-grown enterprise from top to bottom. Jay and his wife Judy were cooking the food, unwrapping little parcels of vegetarian fare as though servicing some over-subscribed family picnic. Bush’s mother and father often popped in, and of course Paddy was playing a central role as musician and occasional dramatic foil. And, loyal to a fault, she had delivered on her implied promise to the KT Bush Band after the disappointment of Lionheart. Del and Brian were present and correct, at the heart of the music.
The ‘Tour Of Life’ was sold out by mid-March, assisted by the progress of ‘Wow’, which was climbing the charts to an eventual high of number 14. Between March 18 and March 29 the cast and crew moved to the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, north London, for full technical, musical and, finally, dress rehearsals. Right until the last minute at the Rainbow final additions were being made, suggestions tried and discarded. The content of the show was shrouded in secrecy, with all memos marked as highly confidential. The BBC film crew was usually left filming closed doors; behind them, strange things were occurring, some in the realm of Spinal Tap. The wagon-on-wheels which allowed Bush to be spun around by the dancers while still playing piano arrived back-to-front: with the glue still sticky, the decking was prised off the frame and stuck back on the opposite side, the wheels turned over, and the whole thing repainted. Afterwards, one of the running tour jokes became, pace Bush’s much-loved Fawlty Towers, ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention the piano wagon!’
Simon Drake was a relatively late arrival. A former record plugger at Decca, back when he was plain Simon Alexander, and an old friend of Bush’s ex-boyfriend Steve Blacknell, Drake came on board to provide mime, illusion and magic, adding an impish, more theatrical flavour to the proceedings. In common with almost every other element of the show, however, there was insufficient time to incorporate all his ideas. “There was a lot that Simon wanted to do that never got done,” says Jackson. “He arrived too late to integrate. It was great to have him involved, if he’d have turned up a month earlier it would have been terrific.”
By nature a perfectionist, Bush kept a watchful eye on the integrity of each element of the show. Right down to the last detail, every aspect of the production had her direct creative input and required her approval. The artist Nick Price, a friend of Jay’s, was commissioned to design the tour programme, a beautifully realised full colour booklet with postcards, writing paper and an application to join the fan club. The cover image was a stylised painting of Bush’s face, full frontal, with the hair as multi-coloured clouds; when you looked through her eyes you could see night skies, studded with twinkling stars. “She was very particular about what she wanted,” says Price. “But she didn’t nit-pick after I’d done it, which was very nice.” Inside, heightening the aroma of greasepaint, the musicians, artists and dancers were showcased simply as The Cast.
The total cost was reputedly between £200,000 and £250,000. To the best of Bob Mercer’s recollection, EMI was not involved in any aspect of the financing. “Normally, I would have been asked for a tour subsidy, and in her instance I would have given it,” he says. “It may have been that there was nobody in her camp that thought to come to me and say, ‘Look, this is going to cost £10,000 a night, can you help us?’ In which case I would have done, but as the head of EMI I wasn’t really in the habit of going around to my acts and saying, ‘Are you making money on your tour? Do you need any help?’ I was a pretty generous MD, but I wasn’t that generous!”
Jay, who was handling many of the financial aspects of the tour, such as paying wages and dealing with insurance, recalled that EMI eventually stumped up some “token support funds”.6 However, in the days before Live Nation, tour sponsorship from commercial brands and ‘360 Degree’ deals with record companies that encompass all areas of an artist’s earning potential, Bush was effectively financing the concerts direct from her own pocket. Hard and risky enough if you’re simply transporting a four-piece band around the country for a month, but a different proposition when there’s an entire set to build, months of rehearsal time in a number of vast studio spaces to pay for, and a 13-piece ‘cast’ and an overall crew of 40 to employ and take on the road throughout Europe. It was a show with arena-production values deliberately booked into more intimate theatres, which meant it would always be a struggle to make the sums add up. The price of creative autonomy was that the buck stopped with her. “The battles were endless,” says Jackson. “I tried and tried to get a bigger budget and a bigger lighting system, which would have meant more trucks, more people, more time and lots more money. It became clear to me at the Rainbow that my intense efforts to get a bigger budget were starting to upset Kate, potentially putting her off her stroke, so I shut up.”
Cast and crew were exhausted before they even started, but charged with excitement. As they were picked up outside Hammersmith Odeon by the tour bus on April 2 everyone felt like they were embarking on the mother of all school trips. Following a low-key run-through that night at Poole Arts Centre in Dorset, the tour officially opened in Liverpool on April 3, 1979. The first live performance from the biggest – not to mention the oddest, the most divisive – pop star of the past 12 months brought an enormous amount of media and audience interest. It was a true event in the British pop world, an occasion to be observed microscopically. With every date sold out and more being added as the tour rolled on, opening night came with layers of conflicting emotions: excitement, nerves, anticipation, dread and expectation from all sides. Hilary Walker admitted tersely beforehand that it “means a lot”.7 Bush was not afraid of her audience, nor was she performing for the approval of the media. Instead, the pressure she felt was the need to meet her own almost impossibly exacting demands. As much as her fans and the press needed to see her sing, dance and play piano with their own eyes before they would truly believe in her gifts, she too seemed to need to convince herself that she really was capable of being the kind of artist she wanted to be. This was her chance to illustrate exactly what she could do, that she was not a record company puppet, that she was not contrived. “It has simply taken all this time to stage things the way I want to,” she said in the run up to the tour. “And to match up to the standards I have set myself. It’s a culmination of two years planning and six months solid rehearsal.”8
As the BBC’s Bernard Clark noted, hanging around the Empire foyer like an extravagantly moustachioed portent of doom, awaiting either a hoedown or a wake, “even parts of the audience were nervous.”9 EMI’s Brian Southall was there to “fly the flag” for the company on opening night and “buy dinner, nut rissoles or whatever.” He recalls that Bush “was incredibly nervous. Terribly, terribly nervous, I remember that, but the show was just extraordinary. We didn’t quite know what we were letting ourselves in for, this extraordinary presentation of her music.”
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To the amplified keening of whale song the band began playing ‘Moving’. The gauze curtain hanging in front of the stage was swept away, revealing a henna-haired Bush in a sea-green leotard, swishing dreamily as though beneath the waves, lost in an underwater waltz. The beauty and power of her voice was instantly apparent, as was her magnetism: it was immediately clear she was blessed with the performer’s ultimate gift, that of innate watchability. “I’d never felt anything like it,” Del Palmer recalled of the atmosphere. “It was electric. It almost made me stop dead, it was overwhelming.”10 Next came ‘The Saxophone Song’, with Bush on piano and Kevin McAlea playing the eponymous horn, after which a thudding amplified heartbeat announced ‘Room For The Life’, for which Bush emerged from the huge egg which had rolled on to the stage.
The first major production number of the show was ‘Them Heavy People’, for which Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst joined Bush. It was Guys And Dolls as directed by Bob Fosse: trenchcoats, trilbies, shoulder-shaking cartoon menace. There was more than a little Humphrey Bogart in there, too. “We both loved the lighting in Casablanca, we talked about that a lot,” says Jackson. “She tended to think cinematically, rather than theatrically.”
The routine was great fun, a tremendous rendition of one of her most ebullient songs, but the choice of costumes and choreography neatly encapsulated the wider difficulty of representing the depth of meaning of many of Bush’s songs in a visually comprehensible, empathetic way. Onstage, the routine for ‘Them Heavy People’ pivoted upon the conceit of interpreting the word ‘heavy’ to mean noir-style ‘hoods’ rather than – as the song intended – serious, weighty teachers. Somewhere down the line the purity of the song’s message was in danger of being scrambled.
“I can remember trying to figure out what the [hell] she was talking about,” says Jackson. “At the start she wanted ‘egg’ images, and babies, the big red satin lined egg we built was supposed to be the womb and she was supposed to arrive onstage inside of it, but then choreography and costume had to translate the line ‘them heavy people’ and wound up with MI5, or the Mafia. The point – her point, I think – is that we’re born and sometime later somebody, some inspired guru – Gurdjieff in her case, at the time – rolls us the ball of knowledge and we either catch it or unknowingly pat it back. Did it have to do with childbirth or enlightenment, or both? Nobody knew. And how the [hell] are you supposed to present a concept like that live onstage? Did anybody in the audience have the slightest idea what that song was about? I doubt it. One in one hundred. But it didn’t matter cause it was Kate!”
The mixed messages mattered not a jot in terms of the audience’s enjoyment, nor did they in any way detract from the richness of the spectacle, but for someone as keen on preserving emotional resonance as Bush, the yawning gap between the song’s initial intent and its visual expression must have been apparent, and may have later led her to the conclusion that it was easier to be true to her overall artistic vision via the more malleable medium of film and video than onstage.
There followed a tender ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, just voice and piano, and then a new composition, ‘Egypt’, which Bush – dressed in a glittering, flowing Arabian skirt – sung from beneath a simple golden crown. It was a terrific version of the song, markedly different and unquestionably superior to the one that later appeared on Never For Ever. Driven by Preston Heyman’s taut bongos, this ‘Egypt’ was snappy and lean, fast and fiery, like some distant cousin of Nina Simone’s ‘Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter’.
Simon Drake appeared plucking a series of metal balls from thin air on ‘L’Amour Looks Something Like You’, and then made an unforgettable appearance as a fiddling dervish on ‘Violin’, another unrecorded song that ended Act One. This abandoned declaration of musical freedom demanded a suitably untethered performance and Bush delivered, leaping around the stage as though tip-toeing over electrified stepping stones; it’s not a great song but it’s notable, containing the first hints of the deeper, darker, more visceral vocal style she would develop on parts of Never For Ever and particularly on The Dreaming. While she was singing, Paddy and a stage hand donned huge, floppy violin costumes and flanked Bush onstage in a final, full scale fruition of the ‘duelling basses’ idea that first saw the light of day at his show at his Whitechapel Gallery back in 1976. As their long bows tipped back and forth, they looked both comic and eerie, resembling something from The Day Of The Triffids, another of Bush’s favourite novels.
Act Two began with Jay fiercely declaiming his poetry, entering into a dramatic call and response with his sister on the line “two in one coffin”. Vegas this was not. She then sang ‘The Kick Inside’ and ‘In The Warm Room’ at the piano, a neat erotic one-two, both dripping with heightened sensuality, before launching into ‘Full House’. For ‘Strange Phenomena’ the sloping ramp at the centre of the stage reared up, its underbelly sending a barrage of pink fluorescent lights out towards the audience while Bush donned a top hat and tails against an astral backdrop, like a feline magician-cum-ringmaster intent on realigning the planets as Avon Arnold and Hurst floated around her looking like extras from Blake’s 7.
The extended guitar solo at end of the song bridged the gap between yet another costume change, as Bush and Anthony Van Laast prepared to reprise their thrilling video routine for ‘Hammer Horror’. This was the only song in the set not played or sung live. Instead, Bush and Van Laast danced to a newly recorded version of the track (this was deemed necessary to circumnavigate Musicians’ Union regulations, and also to give the audience something with at least the whiff of live ambience) in order to allow her to perform a routine of which she was very proud; clad in black, the hooded Van Laast leapt out to shadow Bush on the choruses, a stark embodiment of both sexual need and a guilty conscience. Very physical, very powerful, very Flowers.
This routine – along with Jay’s poetry – took the humble pop show into the realms of contemporary performance art, but most of the other dance elements in the ‘Tour Of Life’ were very cleverly and consciously choreographed to give the impression that more was happening than was actually the case. “The movements we were doing through Anthony were very simple,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “If you look at it as bare movement without the costume and the sets, it’s very simple – Step Ball Change, kick a leg, stand behind Kate – but at that time in the rock world very few of her audience had seen dance. She was very good. She had been trained, she had worked with Lindsay Kemp and done ballet and was doing classes before we met her, but it wasn’t until later on that Kate started really exploring movement: ‘Rubberband Girl’ is very different to what she was doing on, say, ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’.”
Although Bush had by no means reached the standard of a professional dancer, this simplicity wasn’t primarily down to her lack of ability. “It’s incredible how far she’s got,” said Van Laast at the time. “I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.”11 Rather, it was a matter of practicality. It is impossible to dance full tilt and simultaneously sing live for even ten minutes, never mind for two hours, and early on she had organised her priorities. “It’s not a dance show,” she said. “It’s a music show that’s being illustrated with movement.”12 Yet it was another compromise, a further example of the limiting nature of live performance and another head on collision with the problem of how best to present her music to the public. Robin Kovac, her old dance teacher, was unconvinced that all the routines – ‘Wuthering Heights’, particularly – translated effectively from the screen to the stage.
‘Kashka From Baghdad’ began with the band chanting as though shuffling slowly on some Arabic chain gang, building up momentum like a steam train puffing down the track, a highly effective and atmospheric entrée to one of her most exotic, melodically satisfying songs. It was followed by a punchy ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’, which owed plenty to West Side Story and perhaps a little to Grease, Bush clad in black leather in a dusky city street, all flashlights and wire-mesh fences.
She had fully embraced the idea, learned from Kovac, Adam Darius and perhaps most of all from Lindsay Kemp, of presenting herself fearlessly onstage with a rather brash assurance not at all evident in her character off-stage. “When I’m onstage I’m performing, yes, and projecting, and to do those things well I have to be big and bold and full of confidence,” she said. “And I am, but it’s still little me inside. You can’t go onstage and simper, and be timid and shy. You’ve got to be big and strong, and give your audience everything you’ve got: reveal your emotions, be romantic, transport them into another world, so they’re in tune with you. That requires an awful lot of hard work, and an almost calculated force, I suppose.”13
These controlled acts of letting go were a kind of possession, a high wire balancing act between losing one’s inhibitions yet remaining absolutely in command. “She was Kate the whole time, but Kate being whoever she was being,” says David Jackson. “You just suspended disbelief. They weren’t always personalities – on ‘Kite’ she is being a something.” It wasn’t as simple as someone playing a part. It was more mercurial than that, an almost inexplicable alchemy, a subtle blending of her core traits and her dramatic alter egos. Adopting a series of roles onstage wasn’t hiding; it simply allowed her to be bigger, brighter, deeper – more. Forgetting for a moment the physical effort involved, it was an intensely draining mental process to undergo each night.
There was another break before Act Three, which began with a beautiful, understated performance of ‘Wow’, featuring Bush in the same elegant long dress she had worn in the video, flanked by the two male dancers, naked from the waist up, twirling gracefully in their flowing white skirts. Her voice was stunning throughout these shows, but something about this song allowed it to truly cut through: clear, forceful and hugely expressive. ‘Coffee Homeground’ was played as a dark pantomime, Simon Drake reappearing as Hugo the Mad Poisoner, with more than a touch of Sweeney Todd in the mix, trying to entice Bush into a barrel marked ‘Pork’.
An appropriately gentle strain of Jay’s poetry – urging us “down the bluebell path” – ushered in ‘In Search Of Peter Pan’, with Drake as a Puckish Pan figure darting elfishly around the stage. ‘Symphony In Blue’ and ‘Feel It’ followed, the later performed solo at the piano in a teasing caricature of eroticism, all fluttering eyelashes, darting tongue and moistened lips. For all the flash and grab of the theatrical spectacle, in the end the show really was all about her extraordinary face. One minute she was Douglas Fairbanks, the next Lillian Gish, the next Lolita.
For ‘Kite’ she was transformed in blue, winged and ready to take flight. Wind effects whistled through the theatre as the dancers twirled umbrellas in a clear homage to Singin’ In The Rain. The song’s reggae inflections were adapted into a circus-like arrangement, with an extended outro that allowed Simon Drake to mime battling his way across the stage in the teeth of a gale.
‘James And The Cold Gun’ marked the climax to the main body of the show. Bush strutted around the stage in a black, figure-hugging spacecowboy suit as the rear projection screen filled with a classic death valley movie vista, bathed in a glorious orange sunset, a pre-echo of an image Bush would use again on the same stage in 2014, albeit in a very different show and in a very different context. The Wild West theme was a hangover from her pub performances of the same song in 1977, where she had dressed up as a cowgirl. During the song’s long climax, where the meaty beat dropped to a sluggish, proggy half-pace, Bush picked up a rifle and, with some relish, gunned down the two dancers and finally Paddy as he swaggered menacingly down the ramp, scarlet ribbon shooting out of the muzzle. It was a wonderful set piece, and highly eroticised, a riveting dramatic enactment of female sexual power. Never mind the bodies piled up onstage – Bush killed everyone in the room.
There had been some good-natured debate about how to stage the final shoot-out. “Kate and Paddy wanted to use liquid movie blood squirting everywhere, like Monty Python, when she shoots,” says Jackson. “But the set was painted white and that stuff stains. We even tested it at rehearsal, and the ramp had a pinkish hue for the rest of the tour. They compromised with red silk until the last night when of course we had to have ‘real’ blood.” On the final night of the tour, instead of Bush facing off against just Paddy and the dancers, the entire stage crew dressed up as cowboys and Indians and by the time the scene finished Bush was knee deep in ‘corpses’ and red liquid.
For a first encore she performed a fragile rendition of ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’, the set inspired by old war films like A Matter Of Life And Death and Reach For The Sky. Dressed in an old, oversized flying jacket and air helmet, she sung her exquisite lament for the lost land of youth as her dying comrades lay around the stage. The coat belonged to David Jackson and, according to him, “she was naked underneath it. Somebody found that out and offered me £1,000 for [it] but I turned him down. He was so besotted that he wanted to buy the coat. I was so besotted myself that I wouldn’t sell it to him!” His mother eventually threw it out, much to his dismay.
Afterwards, Bush left the stage and returned for the inevitable final encore of ‘Wuthering Heights’, played straight and true, the choreography following the template of the video, the stage swathed in mist and cloud. And then she departed for the final time, backing up the stage, waving as the cheers rang out and the curtain closed, underlining that this was pure theatre rather than a standard rock experience. Indeed, she had spoken not one word throughout, a fact picked up by many critics and fans as evidence of an aloof and impersonal onstage persona, and perhaps just a little pretentious. “I saw our show as not just people onstage playing music but as a complete experience,” she explained. “A lot of people would say, Poooah! but for me that’s what it was, like a play. That’s why I didn’t speak: ‘For our next song …’ and all that. You are a performer, you are projecting and exaggerating things and if you break the illusion you break the whole of the concept.”14
Those who wanted to see her open up, to let her guard down and invite the audience to share her insecurities and uncertainties were inevitably disappointed. Bush never lost control onstage, nor did she veer off-message or allow the events happening in that room – right here, right now – to overtake her or divert her from the show’s preordained course. It was a rigidly planned and executed exercise, but there was plenty of emotion on display, built into the songs and the performances. Anyone who saw her backing up the ramp at the end of ‘Wuthering Heights’, at first waving rather formally as she collected the gifts thrown at her over the footlights from the audience, then becoming more animated, her smile widening, her gestures becoming less studied, and finally reaching the top of the ramp and leaping up and down like an over-excited child, bubbling with glee and gratitude, couldn’t fail to be convinced – and rather moved – that for Bush the ‘Tour Of Life’ was an intensely visceral experience. There was nothing cool or detached about it. It was emotional connection without speech, a la Lindsay Kemp, and all the more powerful for it. A few breathless hollers of ‘How ya doin’, Liverpool!’ would not have added to the experience.
* * *
Backstage there was champagne, flowers and much laughter, a palpable sense of relief and excitement that they had pulled off a clear triumph on opening night. From Liverpool, the tour rolled out across the UK and mainland Europe throughout April and the first half of May. Because of its intricate nature, the details changed little from night to night and city to city. She might throw in the name of the place she was visiting – ‘Oh Oxford, my Lionheart …’ – but that was about it. The set list was curtailed in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Amsterdam because she was suffering from ‘flu. In Holland, for example, she dropped ‘Violin’, ‘In The Warm Room’, ‘Full House’, ‘Kite’, and ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’ from the concert, shaving about 25 minutes from its length, which may have actually been a blessing: playing virtually every song she had recorded to date made for a very long night. Parts of the German and Swedish performances were recorded for TV broadcast and reveal a little vocal grittiness, but hardly anything notable. “She was faultless,” says David Jackson. “I don’t remember her ever fluffing a line or hitting a bum note on the piano.”
The audiences tended to agree, acclaiming most of the shows with lengthy ovations. The critics were generally persuaded as well. Many of the reviews were euphoric, uniting the tabloids, the broadsheets and the music inkies in gushing praise. “Full of poise and in complete control of her vocal dexterity … it was the ultimate rock’n’roll extravaganza,” ran Record Mirror’s review of the opening night in Liverpool.
Sounds caught the show in Birmingham the next night and concluded, “It’s so finely realised that it’s beyond rational criticism because she’s created her very own universe on a stage … Rock turkeys the world over have forever played around with stage concepts, but apart from a smoke machine here and a thunderflash there it’s all come to naught. Kate Bush, however, has put her dreams into actual flesh.” Melody Maker reviewed the same show and simply deemed it “The most magnificent spectacle I’ve ever encountered in the world of rock.”
There were many more eulogies along similar lines in the local press as the tour wound through the north of England and Scotland. When it landed in London for five straight nights at the Palladium, the superlatives went into overdrive. “A dazzling testimony to a remarkable talent,” said the Daily Telegraph. “Bush lines up all the old stereotypes, mows them down and hammers them into their coffins with a show that is – quite literally – stunning,” raved the Daily Mail. “What an ambitious adventure it is for a singer on her first concert tour – and how mediocre does she make most of her pop contemporaries seem.”
“Her performance was risky, teetering often on the brink of the perilously overblown, but a nerveless triumph of energy, imagination, music and theatre … I was bushwhacked,” said Melody Maker, back for another taste. Only the NME were unmoved, dismissing Bush as “condescending” but – with the kind of proud and rather wonderful perversity that defines the rock press – praising the magician.
Unsurprisingly, it was not a tour characterised by off-stage hi-jinks. Indeed, it began with a truly tragic epilogue during the preview show at Poole Arts Centre. After the concert, while scouring the venue to make sure nothing had been left behind, lighting engineer Bill Duffield was killed in a freak accident.
“Evidently Bill had taken it on himself to go back into the already darkened building to perform this completely redundant ritual we used to call ‘idiot check’,” remembers David Jackson. “You run around the theatre one last time to make sure nothing got left behind. The brand spanking new Poole Arts Centre had spiffy seating that could be retracted to the walls to change the shape and use of the space but before it would retract the staircase landings had to be taken out, basically creating a 6ft × 4ft cavity over a [huge] drop – in the dark. Bill ran up the stairs and landed on a landing that wasn’t there. Probably didn’t even touch the sides. There should have been flashing lights, there should have been guard rails, there should have been beeping warning things, there should have been all sorts of safety stuff. But there wasn’t.”
Duffield fell 17 feet onto hard concrete. He survived for a week on a life support machine, but there was little hope. He had only been involved in the tour for a matter of days, drafted in during final rehearsals to assist the over-extended Jackson on lighting duties, but such was the nature of the ‘Tour Of Life’ party that he was already one of the gang. He was just 21. The band were already back at the hotel when they got the news, and Bush was absolutely shattered. “It was terrible for her,” says Brian Bath. “Something had happened to her little baby. Kate knew everyone by name, right down to the cleaner, she was so like that, she’d speak to everyone. I suppose it’s something you wouldn’t forget, but we just carried through it. We got into the mood of the show and the [tour] just kept rolling.”
The option of cancelling the entire tour was discussed but the decision was made to carry on – at such short notice, what else could they do? – and organise a suitable tribute to Duffield. His death cast a heavy pall over the proceedings for several days, although it also strengthened the existing familial bond, the feeling of everyone pulling together for one another. The mood lifted as the shows gathered momentum and reactions continued to be ecstatic. Birthdays were celebrated with gifts; elaborate in-jokes and old war stories were shared. “It’s one of those things you don’t appreciate until you look back in hindsight,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “‘Well, that was amazing, new, exciting!’ We earned good money, always stayed in five-star hotels. At the time you take it for granted.”
Bush was an amiable, if often distant presence. It was an energy-sapping tour for everyone, but especially for her, and she was not often seen in the hotel bar after the show. “We were all exhausted, so tired,” says Brian Bath. “There might be a party in the TBA room, the spare room, and we might pile in there for a noisy get-together. Kate might make an appearance, [usually] it was just the band with the roadies.”
“If we had a day off we slept,” recalls David Jackson. “There might be some get-togethers in hotel bars, but there were no big party scenes or anything like that. There was one night I remember in Edinburgh when we thought, ‘What do rock’n’roll bands do when they’re on tour? They wreck hotel rooms!’ The party was in some room and I went up and as I walked towards the door the carpet beneath my feet squelched, the whole thing was wet. I knocked on the door and stepped out of the way and this bucket of water came flying out, and then Kate came out soaking wet, covered in little white feathers from a burst pillow. She had these little feathers on her eyelashes and she looked at me and went, ‘Wow! Amazing!’, and trotted off down the corridor. I never did go in the room.”
This was the notorious water-bottle-and-pillow-fight fracas at the five-star Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh, following the April 13 show at the Usher Hall, later reported in Sounds as ‘Kate Bush (Not) In Wild Orgy Of Hotel Destruction Shock’. EMI footed the bill for damage, estimated at around £1,000, but that was about as rock’n’roll as it got. An after-show party on April 20 at the Dial 9 Club in Chelsea to mark the end of the initial run of UK dates was notable for its lack of excess: no “pie fights, drink fights, fist fights” grumbled Record Mirror, reporting that the entire Bush clan huddled together in the gloom.
Extra UK dates were added a fortnight into the tour, with three additional London concerts arranged at the Hammersmith Odeon to finish, one of which was advertised as a benefit for Bill Duffield’s family. It was held on May 12, after Bush returned from 10 shows in western Europe, and featured Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley, for whom Duffield had also worked. They joined in on ‘Them Heavy People’ and sang ‘The Woman With The Child In Her Eyes’ [sic], while Bush and Gabriel duetted on Gabriel’s ‘I Don’t Remember’ and added backing vocals when Harley sang his own big hit, ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)’. The pair joined Bush on a closing – spirited, if rather ramshackle – rendition of The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’, where she broke the no-speaking spell by announcing, ‘This song is for Bill. I want you all to give a big cheer for him, OK?’ The crowd duly obliged. All the money raised was donated to a fund for Duffield’s family.
The following night, the second of the three Odeon shows was professionally filmed for later release. It was a case of second time lucky. The Manchester Apollo show on April 10 had been recorded by Granada for their On The Road programme, but the results were never broadcast. The lighting used in the ‘Tour Of Life’ was deliberately subtle, mostly using deep, saturated colours, a theatrical ethos at odds with the flashy pyrotechnics of the standard rock’n’roll stage show but appropriate to the nuances of Bush’s music. It was designed with the naked eye of the live audience in mind, but such muted hues made it devilishly hard to capture the show on film without adding vast amounts of extra, ultra-intense lighting, which would have made the stage look like an over-bright television studio.
At Manchester, the Granada film unit turned up without any prior consultation with the stage crew, and the results were awful. “Their cameras were so insensitive and the stage lighting was so dark and blue, you couldn’t see anything,” says John Henshall, who worked with director Keith MacMillan’s production company KeefCo and was director of photography on many of Bush’s early videos. According to Henshall, Bush’s ‘people’ threatened Granada with an injunction in order to prevent them transmitting the results. “Keith sent me a pneumatic tape of the Manchester recording and it was useless,” he says. “I told Keith, ‘It’s fucking dire!’, and Keith said, ‘Yeah, they’ve stopped them using it, they want us to reshoot it at Hammersmith Odeon.’”
MacMillan, Henshall and the KeefCo team scoped out the show twice before the Odeon taping, but the lighting problems were never quite overcome. What worked onstage never really translated to screen and the film footage is a little murky, lacking punch and dynamics. Some ground was recaptured in post-production through double imaging and posterisation and reinserting most of the rear projections which had been washed out on the night by the added film lights, but the video, released in 1981 as Live At Hammersmith Odeon and featuring 12 songs from the show, was never felt to be a truly satisfactory souvenir of an extraordinary step forward in the evolution of the way in which popular music could be represented onstage. There was also a little local difficulty and residual resentment over the credits for the film, which read: ‘Conceived, written, produced and choreographed by Kate Bush, with the assistance of …’
“Everything was done by Kate Bush,” laughs John Henshall. “Did you not notice? I know that a lot of people were pissed off with that. It was like, ‘Oh yeah, darling? You should bloody try it!’ I think a few people were annoyed by that and I’m not surprised. By that time she was definitely The Star.” Publicly acknowledging the roles of others in her endeavours was a courtesy Bush rarely overlooked. The ungenerous accreditation on the film was the result of an over-zealous assertion of her desire – as a young woman in a notoriously male-dominated industry, and following the compromises of The Kick Inside and Lionheart – to have, and to be seen to have, full creative autonomy for the first time. The credits ended with ‘Produced for the stage by Kate Bush Visuals’.
“The whole thing is a little bit diminishing of other people’s contributions, when I don’t think Kate needed anyone to be diminished at all,” says Jackson. “Lisa Hayes wasn’t just the ‘costume design consultant’, she was running back and forth like a thing on a string, saying to Kate, ‘What about this, what about this?’ until Kate had what she wanted. Then she built them all, then she toured them all and maintained them and dressed Kate every night. And she gets ‘consultant’, on the same page as choreography ‘consultant’ Anthony Van Laast – a serious, respected choreographer. That insults him a little bit. Of course Kate’s name is the biggest, but come on! It just seemed a little ungrateful. I’m sure that wasn’t much to do with her at all, I’m sure it was management and marketing and all that.” She subsequently learned to assert her authority with a lighter touch.
* * *
It should have been the beginning of something truly wonderful. Audiences had grown accustomed to the preposterous bombast of a typical rock or progressive rock concert – which was all about beating fans into submission through volume and the vastness of the spectacle rather than exploring the intricacies of an integrated performance – but no one had taken the humble pop show into quite such daring and epic theatrical territory. David Bowie could certainly lay claim to some key innovations in this field, particularly on his 1974 Diamond Dogs tour, which shared several characteristics with the ‘Tour Of Life’ and set a precedent for theatrical presentation of rock. Restricted to North America and filmed only for a seldom-seen BBC documentary directed by Alan Yentob entitled Cracked Actor, Bush would not have seen the show with her own eyes – but had she done so she would have observed Bowie as the ‘character’ Halloween Jack, ‘acting’ out his songs on a stage that featured all manner of gantries and props, and never stopping to acknowledge the audience or his band of hired guns that was located well to the rear of the action. “I think Bowie will always be looked upon as a landmark in pop theatre, and I think Kate was the next mark after that,” said Anthony Van Laast. “It broke a lot of barriers.”15
With the ‘Tour Of Life’, Bush rejected the orthodoxy of a rock’n’roll show while at the same time suggesting a template for its future: theatrical, dance-based, creating an aesthetic beyond the immediate context of the songs and the music. She even performed to playback, an entirely unheard of conceit at the time but nowadays almost the norm for a show with significant visual stimuli; the head-mike, too, is now virtually ubiquitous. It was groundbreaking on all levels. Within a few years Bowie’s ‘Serious Moonlight’ and ‘Glass Spider’ tours continued the thread, later joined by Prince’s ‘Lovesexy’ tour, Madonna’s ‘Blond Ambition’ tour, Roger Waters’ staging of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and U2’s ‘Zooropa’ extravaganza, each one a true event in which the theatrical spectacle (although none of these acts went as far as adopting an aloof onstage character to be maintained throughout) was arguably as important as the music.
The ability of these acts to harness the enormous technological advances made in the Eighties and beyond eventually made the ‘Tour Of Life’ look rather quaint and old fashioned by comparison, particularly given its relatively small scale and the fact that it didn’t transfer onto the screen quite as well as it might have. But make no mistake: all the elements marking the tour out as a hugely significant step forward in the evolution of live performance were evident.
“I do smile when I hear the current generation of show designers talk of ‘convergence’ – the supposed blending of projection and video and special effects and moving lights into one cohesive thing – as if they’d just thought of it,” says David Jackson. “We had moving lights, eight of them, they were called follow spots. We had scenic projection and multimedia and song and dance and all the bells and whistles in 1979. Convergence, phooey! These new guys have computers doing everything for them, we had to drive by the seat of our pants.”
So, yes, it should have been the beginning of something wonderful. Instead, the next time we saw Kate Bush in any meaningful sense as a live performer she was 56 years old. There was talk after the final Hammersmith Odeon show of taking the tour to America, and much excited discussion among the cast and crew about all the things they could do ‘next time’ given a longer period of preparation and a bigger budget. Everyone involved felt they had prised open the door leading to a brave new world of possibilities for Bush and her music. Yet it took 35 years for ‘next time’ to arrive. “I thought we were going to go around the world,” says Brian Bath. “[But] it just fizzled into doing bits and bobs for TV shows and then doing songs for a new album. It was such a shame, really. The Americans would have loved it, but it never materialised.” As Del Palmer drolly observed, “We went into the studio and never came out again.”16
What are we to make of her absence from the stage between 1979 and 2014? How to make sense of it? Many time in interviews during that period Bush spoke of her intention to tour again, and there is no reason to doubt that each time she was being at least partially sincere. Prior to ‘Before The Dawn’, she came closest to making it happen in the early Nineties, following the release of The Sensual World. She and Del had gone to see Prince on his ‘Nude Tour’, during his long residency at Wembley Arena, stretching between June and August 1990. She was there not just to see the show – though she was a fan and he was becoming a clear influence on her music – but also to case Wembley as a potential venue for her own concerts. The early versions of the songs for her next record, The Red Shoes, were travelling in a direction that seemed to suit a live band, and at the Kate Bush Fan Convention at Hammersmith Palais at the end of that year she went as far as to announce to the 1,000 people present that in 1991 she was going to play some shows. The room, predictably, erupted. But, perhaps inevitably, she got wrapped up in the recording process – and encountered some choppy water in her personal life – and the plans faded away, replaced by the idea of doing a film, The Line, The Cross And The Curve.
Instead, an occasional series of brief, tantalising cameos provided meagre sustenance. Later in 1979 she performed three songs, one of which was ‘Blow Away (For Bill)’, a new composition dedicated to Bill Duffield, at the Royal Albert Hall on November 18 to celebrate 75 years of the London Symphony Orchestra. In July 1982 she stepped into David Bowie’s shoes at the last minute to perform ‘The Wedding List’ at a concert at the Dominion Theatre for the Prince’s Trust with a band that included Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Midge Ure. She wore big boots, a peach tutu and a flimsy satin halterneck, on which the strap snapped while she was singing. She finished the song grinning sheepishly, her left hand pinning her plummeting blouse to her breast. Ure later recalled it fondly as one of the highlights of his life; Townshend simply acknowledged the “power of prayer”.
There was, relatively speaking, a rash of live activity following the release of Hounds Of Love. Between April 4 and April 6, 1986, she performed ‘Breathing’ live each night at the Shaftesbury Theatre for a Comic Relief fundraiser. Sung solo at the piano, it was a truly extraordinary and emotionally charged reimagining of one of her finest songs, proving beyond all doubt that there is scope within her music for great change, for various versions, different paths: listen to this marvellous song take on another life and you can’t help be filled with sadness that she hasn’t explored at least some of them; it’s a rather sobering reminder of the countless moments of potential brilliance we have never been permitted to witness.
There were three further live appearances in 1987. Two consecutive nights in late March with David Gilmour and his band at the Amnesty International benefit The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball, where she performed ‘Let It Be’ and a thrillingly rough and ready version of ‘Running Up That Hill’. The scene onstage was the Eighties in micro: blue neon signs flashing ‘PIZZA’, huge overcoats, shoulder pads, rolled up suit jackets – and everybody was having a bad hair day, not least Bush, who looked distinctly puffy and uncomfortable. Gilmour proved a reassuring presence, flashing her several sweet smiles during the performance. Later the same year she made a last minute, unannounced appearance during Peter Gabriel’s June concert at Earls Court, descending from the top of a staircase to sing her part in ‘Don’t Give Up’, the only time she has ever done so live. The thunderous ovation prompted by her unexpected arrival onstage spoke more eloquently about the genuine love and warmth with which she is regarded than a thousand words ever could. It was also an acknowledgement that, eight years after the ‘Tour Of Life’, a sighting of Bush onstage, however fleeting, had already become an event to treasure.
The same roar of surprise and delight greeted her equally unexpected appearance with David Gilmour in 2002 at the Royal Festival Hall. She sang the part of the ‘Evil Doctor’ on Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’, perched somewhat self-consciously at the right of the stage, dressed all in black with her hair worn straight and long. She sounded a little tentative and only broke into a smile as the song ended, whereupon she waved at the crowd, hugged Gilmour, kissed the grateful piano player and made a swift, probably rather relieved exit.
These were pleasing reminders of her presence and her ability as a live performer, and it was always a treat to hear her voice ringing out, but it’s an insubstantial legacy for the years when Bush was at her most vibrantly creative and commercial. The euphoria that surrounded ‘Before The Dawn’ cannot obscure the extent to which the world has missed out on enjoying Bush as a live performer. What might have been a semi regular occurrence became a once in a generation event, confined to a mere 46 performances, bunched at opposite ends of her career and in relatively confined geographical locations. It’s certainly hard to think of another artist of comparable stature who has taken such a prolonged leave of absence from the stage while still producing a – more or less – steady stream of records. Her non-appearance onstage was not an accident. “Nothing happened for 30 years, so that’s a very, very active decision that was made there,” says Tony Wadsworth. For almost her entire career, Bush has been in the privileged position where she can pursue almost any creative whim that interests her. Given her tenacity and her dedication to her vision, if she had truly wanted to play live more often she would have done so. She consciously chose not to – but why?
Many of those who know Bush well plead a simple case of cause and effect, convinced that the experience of organising and then performing the ‘Tour Of Life’ was so unbelievably draining that for so long it outweighed any desire she may have had to repeat the experience. “I think it was just too hard,” says Bob Mercer. “I think she liked it but the equation didn’t work, it was too exhausting. I’ve seen that happen to other people but nothing like as severely as it did to her. These are not conversations I recall ever having with her, it was just I could see it. I went to a lot of the shows in Britain and in Europe, and particularly in Europe I could see at the end of the show that she was completely wiped. She danced and she sang and did the whole number, and it wiped her out.”
Brian Bath tends to agree. “When she finished ‘James And The Cold Gun’, the last number [before the encores], I’d see her walking up the ramp in the middle and she was finished,” he says. “Absolutely finished, sweat pouring off of her. Then she’d have to change costume, catch her breath, and come out to sing the big number, ‘Wuthering Heights’. I don’t know how she did it. She used to just collapse, really, at the end of the show, and I’d have to carry her back a few times. It was not … it wasn’t really good, you know.” Some of Bush’s comments tended to back this up. “The idea is so unattractive when I think about what the tour took out of me,” she said in 1989. “I haven’t wanted to commit myself since.”17
The tragedy of Bill Duffield’s death is often mooted as another conclusive factor. “She did discuss playing live, and she said she never wanted to embrace that experience ever again,” says Haydn Bendall, an engineer and friend who worked with her over four albums. “She never said, ‘I’m not touring because of the accident’, but she said, ‘This poor guy died and it was a terrible experience’ and one was left to make one’s own conclusions. She felt absolutely awful about that.” But while Duffield’s accident was a horrendous piece of ill fortune that undoubtedly deeply affected her, it is unlikely to have been a tipping point. Other friends insist that the experience of touring was, on balance, a joyous and rewarding one. “She absolutely loved the tour, really she enjoyed it so much,” says Jon Kelly, who mixed the On Stage EP, recorded at Hammersmith Odeon, and then co-produced Never For Ever with Bush. “All her dance and her theatre and her music came together in one place. The audience reaction was phenomenal, people loved it. It’s not as if the tour was a disaster or things had gone wrong, it was the complete reverse. It was so pioneering.”
Success came at a clear price, however. Afterwards she described herself as “a drained battery, very physically tired and also a bit depressed.”18 Most worryingly of all, she struggled to write. The sheer cost involved, meanwhile, was prohibitive and left her with a bloody nose and empty pockets. “It certainly wasn’t [a] financial success,” she said. “Much more a loss thing than making money … With 40 people to look after it was astronomical.”19
In the immediate aftermath of ‘Tour Of Life’ it was glaringly apparent that any future tour would involve an enormous commitment of time, money and energy. Not only that, but it would have to be a truly spectacular event, something that not only combined her love of dance, theatre and music but also moved her story forward from the 1979 shows and incorporated the great strides being made in technology. “It did pose the problem: follow that,” says Brian Southall. When she announced her intentions to play concerts in 1991 there were rumours that she had contacted the Jim Henson Company with a view to inviting them to work with her on a new stage show; Bush, of course, was a lifelong Muppets fan. She also wanted to embrace film and video. “I cannot help but feel it is very important to give people something visually special,” she has said. “I don’t think, by any means, that the tour which we did some years ago was perfect, there were a lot of things that were experimental, and we didn’t know if they were going to work, but I think we did explore new territory, visually speaking, and the reaction was so positive. And I do feel that, when eventually I get the time and money to do another show, I hope we will continue working along those lines of combining music with dance and with theatre and it would be even better and much more interesting than the last time. I think that is a very untouched area in rock music, and it has great potential.”20
Someone with Bush’s streak of perfectionism and extraordinarily creative ambition could not hope to combine the conception, planning, rehearsing and performing of a major stage show in conjunction with writing and recording in the studio. “I need five months to prepare a show and build up the strength for it, and in those five months I can’t be writing,” she said;21 the thought, she admitted, was “daunting … it scares me a bit.”22 When it came to making hard choices regarding further significant investments of her own time and money, in the Eighties and Nineties she opted to make films and videos, and to build and install her own 48-track studio at Wickham Farm. “At some point she must have sat down and thought, ‘Do I really want to put myself through that again, because if I do it again I’ve got to make it bigger and better, and it’s only me,’” said Del Palmer. “‘It’s not like there’s a band, it’s just me. I’m responsible for the whole thing.’”23 Then came motherhood, and a whole other set of priorities emerged.
More generally, the mechanics of touring have never appealed; it is no surprise that ‘Before The Dawn’ was an old-fashioned theatrical residency at a venue close to her home, rather than the traditional travelling circus of the rock world. Bush has a deep seated fear of flying which, though never quite phobic (she has flown to America and elsewhere several times), nonetheless has been an active ingredient in her decision not to perform on a global stage. She certainly dislikes intensely the grind of sustained travel, having endured a promotional whirlwind throughout 1978 and much of 1979, and no other aspect of the music industry so relentlessly drives the machinery of stardom and the distancing effects of fame as touring; the lifestyle and inbuilt stress that comes with it – airports, hotel rooms, press calls, bulletproof itineraries, swift getaways, a phalanx of PAs and advisors, precious little solitude – sits entirely at odds with how she chooses to live her life.
Of course, touring and playing live are not the same thing, and her reluctance to embrace the latter more frequently is the greater puzzle. Anyone who saw her sing ‘Wuthering Heights’ in 1979 or ‘Top Of The City’ in 2014 would be left in no doubt how much unadulterated joy Bush derives from the physical act of singing, but the pay-off has not been sufficient for her to embrace the experience more often. On a fundamental level, she was not brought up in an environment where singing in public was the norm, and she has had to steel herself to perform in even the most informal of public situations. She is also immensely self-critical. Although most objective observers would agree that she acquitted herself spectacularly on the ‘Tour Of Life’, she was pursued by a feeling that she was not as good as she could have been. “Kate said to me one time that she had somehow lost confidence in performing, which I could never work out because she was such a staggering success on that tour,” said Del Palmer.24
Some of those present during the making of Bush’s 1993 film The Line, The Cross And The Curve recall her acute unease at performing on set. Bush approached ‘Moments Of Pleasure’ several different ways, and on one occasion she tried singing it solo at the piano. It did not escape the attention of the cast and crew that her legs were visibly trembling throughout the entire rendition. Even playing live in front of no more than 40 people, all of whom she was accustomed to working with on a daily basis, appeared intolerably nerve-wracking. For most of her career, she has found it incredibly difficult, and perhaps not terribly interesting, to perform ‘straight’, as herself. “If I can be the character in the song, then suddenly there’s all this strength and energy in me which perhaps I wouldn’t normally have,” she said. “Whereas if it was just me, I don’t think I could walk on the stage with confidence. It’s very hard for me to be me on a stage.”25 It’s notable that even the brief cameos she made in the time between ‘Tour Of Life’ and ‘Before The Dawn’ were in the company of close friends whom she knows well and trusts implicitly: David Gilmour, Peter Gabriel, Midge Ure. When she did finally return in 2014 it was at a time when her son had grown old enough to provide advice and considerable creative and moral support. All of them offered empathy, protection, cover.
But it cut much deeper than simple nerves. At its core, Bush’s reluctance to perform live for 35 years was an active aesthetic choice. Perhaps the least innovative aspect of the ‘Tour Of Life’ was the music. On the sidelines and in shadow throughout, a pit orchestra in all but name, the band’s virtually invisible profile was another deliberate concession to the theatrical bent of the show. Professional and highly polished rather than spectacular, the superb musicians gave Bush exactly what she needed – a largely unobtrusive, completely solid platform from which she could project her voice and her performances with total confidence, although it proved impossible for backing vocalists Glenys Groves and Liz Pearson to recreate Bush’s superb, stacked vocal harmonies. However, the tour did throw open the vital question: just what do you do with your songs when you play them live? As little as possible, seemed to be the answer.
“I saw one of the last shows,” says Ian Bairnson. “She basically made everyone in the band learn exactly what was on the records. Alan Murphy did all my solos pretty much note for note, and it worked. I think it was the right thing to do.” She has never been one for improvising or, heaven forbid, flying by the seat of her pants when it came to public exposure. The increased chance of something going wrong – though, of course, it might just as easily go gloriously right – clearly unnerves her. “The worst thing is not being prepared,” she said. “I have to know, before I go onstage, exactly what I am going to do.”26 The studio is the place where her imagination takes flight. Onstage, she wanted to be locked in tight.
This may have been the decisive realisation when it came to her long term plans. In some deeply ingrained sense playing live seemed to rub against the entire purpose of her music, which at its best is an attempt to dematerialise, to liquefy the physical self until all that’s left is pure sensation and feeling; to achieve some degree of personal and very private transcendence. From as far back as her early years at St Joseph’s Bush displayed a clear reluctance to let any light fall upon her working process; even talking about it seemed like it might somehow break the spell. Even today, in the studio she tends to sing her vocal parts entirely alone. In playing live – an environment with defined parameters where self-consciousness and an over-awareness of one’s surroundings can easily take hold of a performer as sensitive as Bush – she may have felt she was somehow obstructing rather than aiding her connection to her music. Perhaps it is no surprise that it took time, experience and a more relaxed attitude to reach a more amenable accommodation with performing.
* * *
On the ‘Tour Of Life’ Bush had showed she could do it. Why rush to do it again? “People said I couldn’t gig,” she said, “And I proved them wrong.”27
Perhaps the primary purpose of the ‘Tour Of Life’ was simply to force people to take her work seriously, to allow her subsequent records to be given a fair hearing. The experience certainly seemed to clarify something fundamental regarding her future path. Director’s Cut notwithstanding, for which the motivations turned out be complex and, ultimately, oddly progressive, she does not have the nostalgia gene when it comes to her music and has displayed little enthusiasm for anything that hints at retrospection: reissues, Best Ofs, box-sets and ‘deluxe’ remasters, all recycled product that is highly profitable for both artist and label, have been thin on the ground. Playing live seems to fall into the same category: yesterday’s news. “I can’t possibly think of old songs of mine because they’re past now,” she said shortly after the tour ended. “And quite honestly I don’t like them anymore.”28 Playing those songs over and over again would only stunt her creativity as a writer, she concluded, not feed it. Her music does not evolve that way. Unlike Dylan, who seeks to write a new page onstage each night, or perhaps just tear up an old one and throw it away, by the time Bush went onstage the story was already finished and she was desperate to dream up a fresh one. Similarly, ‘Before The Dawn’ featured only two songs she had sung live before, and nothing that had been performed on ‘Tour Of Life’. Its primary purpose was to stage two conceptual suites rather than revisit the ‘hits’.
After the ‘Tour Of Life’ she went into an almost immediate reinvention: ‘I’m not going to do it that way, I’m going to do it this way.’ She embarked on the tour just at the moment when she had become powerful enough to begin moving away from the notion of her albums being aural documents of what had occurred in a room between a handful of musicians performing more or less live; that kind of interaction interested her less and less. Instead, she was fully smitten with the possibilities of stretching reality in the studio, of exploring what could be constructed rather than merely captured. “We went back into the studio,” said Del Palmer, “And she discovered that she could say a lot more there.”29
And yet despite all these attempts to explain it logically, and despite the profoundly joyful surprise of ‘Before The Dawn’, her reticence to perform live for 35 years remains the great lack in Bush’s career. It is not simply a conundrum, or a disappointment; it is a decision that has shaped her music and the way she was been perceived to a profound degree. In her personal life Bush is no more of a recluse than dozens of other pop stars, but her unwillingness to play live has made her seem so. Her refusal for so long to embrace one of the record industry’s articles of faith set her out as a truly independent spirit but, less positively, it also fed the myth of a woman who was somehow detached and otherworldly.
More importantly, it has meant that her audience has been denied direct and sustained access to one of music’s most innovative artists, while she has denied herself the traditional indulgence of reinventing her music anew as the years progress and her perspective changes. One of the key derivatives of performing live is to pull together the disparate strands of an artist’s work in an easily digestible form, to shuffle the pack and provide new narrative threads, but her prolonged stage absence ensured that many of her finest albums – among them Never For Ever, The Dreaming and The Sensual World – remain unexplored. They remain strangely fixed in time, as, in a sense, are many of the various representations of Bush herself, embalmed and perfectly preserved. Perhaps that’s why she has continued to hold such a strong fascination. Each album reinforces her status as a unique artist floating entirely out of time. “She is still producing music, but it’s not today’s music,” observes Stewart Avon Arnold. There is undeniably something rather lovely about this.
And yet. And yet. “It’s a tragedy she didn’t go back out touring [sooner], an absolute tragedy,” says Jon Kelly. “A huge loss to the world, like a star dying early.” It is indeed impossible, looking and listening back to the ‘Tour Of Life’, or hearing her sing ‘Breathing’ alone at the piano, not to feel a sharp pang of regret at the enormity of what we may have missed; in a sense, ‘Before The Dawn’ only served to make the loss even more keenly felt. Who would not have loved to hear a live version of ‘Night Of The Swallow’ from 1986, or ‘This Woman’s Work’ remodelled in 1994?
But it’s a dangerous game, idealising the unknown. Her decision to shun the stage during some of the peak years of her career shouldn’t necessarily be viewed entirely as a negative. Unequivocally, a Bush who was touring the world every three or four years would not have been able to record the body of work she has. “If she was the kind of person who would be happy to tour and go on TV shows then you could say [the album] might have sold better, but would it actually have been the same piece of work in the first place?” says Tony Wadsworth. “If you become an artist who has to slog around the world there is an argument that that activity starts to have a negative effect on the art itself.”
The question never went away, and Bush never ruled it out, but for decades the odds on her returning to the stage seemed absurdly long. As the years passed, and Bush’s profile faded into near invisibility, it seemed ridiculous to imagine that she would have any desire to fly the coop for any length of time, or expose herself to the physical rigours, intense media scrutiny and knee-knocking terror of live performance. And though her fans would have happily paid through the nose just to watch her sing for 45 minutes on an old pub piano, the simplicity of this would have never satisfied her. “I would feel that that was such a cop-out,” she once said. “I don’t think I’d be able to feel that I had any effort or sense of challenge left in me. I don’t really feel that happy doing something, in a way, unless I’ve really pushed myself to the limit … otherwise it doesn’t feel like you’ve put enough effort into it.”30
We now know that it never quite slipped off her to-do list. “There have been lots of times we’ve talked about this,” said Del in 2007. “We’ve gone through the whole thing of doing a massive spectacular production, to have her doing it on her own, and we just go round and round and round … I still have my fingers crossed. You can never say never.”31
In the end, it came down to timing. When Bush became a mother in 1998, there seemed even less imperative than ever for her to inflict the intense upheaval of playing live upon herself. And so, for a long spell, it proved. Yet in the end it was motherhood that brought her back. Her son was, it seems, the one person who could persuade her to do what for 35 years no one else could.