ONCE again, it was Peter Gabriel who threatened to give the game away. Not content with revealing to the world, back in 2000, that Bush had become a mother, 14 years later Gabriel’s loose lips almost sunk the launch of the biggest bombshell in recent musical history.
Talking to this writer on February 26, 2014, about his new concert film, Back To Front, the conversation turned to Gabriel’s old friend and duet partner. “We send each other records and cards but I haven’t seen her for quite a while,” he said, adding, “Kate has been quite well buried away, but there are rumours that her hiding away might be interrupted for a little while in the near future.” He smiled. “It would be lovely.”
When pushed on the detail Gabriel, somewhat reluctantly, clammed up, but here was the very first public inkling, some four weeks prior to ‘Before The Dawn’ being announced, that Bush was already committed to the most ambitious undertaking of her career. As it was, her secret remained the preserve of a trusted few until the morning of Friday, March 21, 2014, when it was announced via her website that popular music’s most reluctant live draw would be performing 15 shows at London’s Eventim Apollo throughout August and September.
Even without Gabriel’s hint, perhaps with hindsight it might have been possible to see it coming. By her own recent standards, Bush had continued to be ‘present’ following the release of 50 Words For Snow. She made a public appearance, at the Dorchester Hotel, in June 2012 to pick up the Sky Arts Pop Award for her last album. Accepting the award from Tom Jones, who lurched painfully through the autocue with the aura of a man for whom reading aloud was indeed unusual, Bush was a beguiling bundle of nerves and gratitude. She produced a crumpled piece of paper to make a short, gracious speech, singling out Danny McIntosh and Bertie for particular praise. Her son, now almost 14 and with a vibrant crop of ginger hair, sat in the audience, chaperoned by Terry Gilliam.
To mark the 2012 London Olympics, which began a few weeks later on July 27, Bush subjected ‘Running Up That Hill’ to the Director’s Cut treatment, dropping it a semitone, extending the backing track to accentuate the rhythm and adding a new vocal. Even at this stage there were murmurings of a live comeback, persistent rumours that Bush would appear at the event’s opening or closing ceremony to perform the remix in person.
In fact, her participation extended to making a video involving Jude Law, to be screened at the closing ceremony. Bush was, however, ultimately unhappy with the results and pulled the film, proving that even A-list film stars weren’t spared the cutting room floor should her work not live up to her expectations. In the end, the new audio of ‘Running Up That Hill’ was played at the ceremony as drummers patrolled the arena, footage of great Olympic achievements was displayed on the screens, and a group of dancers assembled a huge pyramid of white boxes in the centre of the park.
“I called her up after the ceremony and she answered the phone,” says Brian Bath. “I was surprised I got through. I said, ‘I thought there would be thousands of people calling you,’ but she said, ‘No, you’re the only person who has bothered to call!’” The remix gave Bush her first top ten single since 2005, reaching number six in the UK charts in August 2012. By the time she had collected her CBE from the Queen during a Windsor Castle investiture ceremony in April 2013 – “Now I’ve got something really special to put on top of the Christmas tree,” Bush said in a prepared statement, though she swept past waiting reporters afterwards without comment – she was already in the early stages of planning ‘Before The Dawn’.
Bush gave no interviews following the announcement, nor in the run up to the concerts, during the shows themselves or in their immediate aftermath. As a result, the all-pervading ‘why’ which hung over this momentous undertaking was left largely to the mercy of idle speculation. She acknowledged the question only briefly, with glib good humour, in her programme notes. “In March 2013, I said to Bertie, ‘Shall we do some shows?’ He said, ‘Yes, absolutely!’ I really wanted to do something different from working on another album and felt a real desire to have contact with the audience that still liked my work.”1
And that was it. It was, deliberately, thin gruel for those who had waited 35 years for Bush to reach this decision, but her words contained crumbs of clues nonetheless. Bush’s vaulting leaps of creativity have most often occurred within strict and rather limited physical parameters. “Part of her really relies on the family, the protective cocoon, and yet another part of her is so adventurous creatively and so willing to just depart completely from the box that she’s been put in and stretch the fabric of time and space,” says Charlie Morgan. “It’s an interesting and total dichotomy [between] her day-to-day life, which is relatively cosseted, and yet her creativity being without boundaries.”
For the longest time that dichotomy raised the odds against her playing live. Now it seemed to encourage it. Her son’s involvement was key. With Bertie now in his mid-teens, performing live had become an endeavour which, far from taking Bush away from her family commitments, could instead enrich them. Bertie had firm aspirations to be an actor – he had recently sat exams for the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art – and part of Bush’s change of heart was wrapped up in her obvious pride in showcasing him publicly as an emerging actor and singer. ‘Before The Dawn’ was conceived as something that mother and son could embark upon as a shared adventure.
“I can see that Bush obsession working again in [Bertie],” said his uncle, John Carder Bush. “He wants to be an actor, I think, and he’s got the self-confidence to do it.”2 In a touching reversal of the traditional parentchild dynamic, his youthful confidence radiated reassurance to Bush. “He gave me the courage to push the button,” she told the crowd during the first performance of ‘Before The Dawn’. “Thank you Bertie.” The show, in many respects, was a very public demonstration of mutual devotion, a gift both from her to him, and from him to her.
Yet her stated desire to re-establish a direct connection with her audience was also significant. Bush has never craved adulation. She wants people to enjoy her music, but she genuinely does not have – and in this she is perhaps unique amongst performers at any level – the compulsion to be loved by a room full of strangers. Nevertheless, there was a sense that her need for privacy had bricked up the kind of ongoing creative dialogue with her audience which was far more positive than negative. Did her work now exist too much in a vacuum? If so, Bush felt compelled to break a spell of isolation that had worked perhaps just a little too well.
There was, certainly, no better time to consider restoring the myth to flesh and blood. With two recent records under her belt, both of which she had promoted heavily (if all but invisibly), she was match fit once more, and closer to the conventions of being a full time working musician than at any time since the early Nineties. Perhaps even more significantly, with her son now a young man and – as an aspiring thespian – actively seeking exposure rather than shying away from it, the need to form a protective shell around him had diminished. And, she may finally have pondered, if not now, then when? At least it would stop writers asking her about it whenever she consented to an interview.
Typically, once she had committed to the venture she poured every ounce of her creative energy into it. Selecting the right framework within which to present the show was crucial. ‘Before The Dawn’ was meticulously planned to counter-act many of the negatives Bush still associated with playing live. An extended residency at a single venue allowed her to approach the production with complete dedication to her vision, without the need to concern herself with the practicalities of different stages, variable acoustics and lighting rigs, as well as having to dismantle a highly complex set and reassemble it at a new venue every other night. A residency also, undoubtedly, suited her temperament. Performing live again would be hard enough without the rigmarole of negotiating new cities, hotel check-ins, security drills and privacy issues; it also afforded a minimum of domestic disruption.
Though she could have sold out the O2 many times over, Bush sought a medium scale theatre venue for an intimate ambience. She revealed that early design prototypes based on a huge hangar-like venue had made her feel “physically sick”.3 There would be no jumbo video screens flanking the stage, no over-sized buckets of soft drinks, no aroma of hot dog and chips drifting in from the foyer.
Happily, the schedule for the completion of a major refurbishment programme at the previously rather downtrodden Eventim Apollo, formerly the Carling Apollo and before that the Hammersmith Odeon, coincided almost exactly with the timeline for the shows. As the location for her last full concert on May 14, 1979, it was also a space where she felt comfortable. For most major artists, returning to the same venue you played on your last tour would be a worrying sign of career stasis. For Bush, several decades beyond such considerations, it was “the perfect setting”.4 With its comfortable 4,000 capacity and revamped old school charm, the venerable theatre perfectly suited her needs. It was also handy. The Apollo is situated in west London, easily accessed by the M4 and M40 motorways that lead west out of the city towards her house near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. For the duration of ‘Before The Dawn’, Bush would be in familiar surroundings and a mere hour’s drive from home.
If the choice of venue turned out to be a nod to nostalgia, creatively it was clear that Bush viewed whole swathes of her past largely as another country. She decided early on that the focus of the show would be relatively narrow. All but three of the songs performed in ‘Before The Dawn’ were taken from Aerial and Hounds Of Love. She had said several times that she felt the two records were linked by certain similarities of sound and spirit, while their two conceptual suites – ‘The Ninth Wave’ and ‘A Sky Of Honey’ – lent themselves to a sustained visual experience. Dramatic, interlinked and already highly visual, they are the two pieces of her own work for which she has most often expressed satisfaction, a rare enough emotion for Bush, who tends to look back with exasperation rather than contentment.
As well as seeking a thematic fit, she must have also given consideration to what material would most suit her voice, something that counted against revisiting her first four records and weighted the show towards more recent work. In the end, songs from only two more of her nine studio albums were included – two tracks from The Red Shoes and one from 50 Words For Snow. ‘Never Be Mine’ was part of the set list for the opening night, slotted between ‘Top Of The City’ and ‘Running Up That Hill’, but it was never performed. Similarly, ‘Moments Of Pleasure’ and ‘A Coral Room’ were also rehearsed, intended initially to form part of the encore, but they were eventually cut. There were rumours that Bush had performed ‘Wuthering Heights’ during the warm-up show, held for family and friends on the Sunday before the opening night of ‘Before The Dawn’, but this was not the case. A photographer was present at this show and a carefully chosen selection of pictures was distributed to the media on opening night through the photo agency Rex Features. In every other respect, the warm-up concert mirrored every one of the public shows.
* * *
‘Before The Dawn’ was conceived by Bush as a three-hour immersive stage show split into two acts and three parts. To fulfil her vision, she handpicked individuals who had made an impression on her from her frequent forays into London’s theatreland. Lighting designer Mark Henderson, a veteran of some of the biggest productions in the West End and on Broadway, was a key early appointment, as was set designer Dick Bird, who boasted equally impressive credentials in the world of theatre, opera and ballet.
Old friends were also called into service. David Munns, her supporter and confidante for over 30 years, was on hand to offer advice and scout venues. David Garfath – who had directed ‘Running Up That Hill’ almost 30 years before – was hired to shoot the filmed sequences for ‘The Ninth Wave’, in which Bush would portray the real life ordeal of the suite’s protagonist, lost at sea and awaiting rescue.
These were some of the most fraught days of pre-production. Wearing a custom made life jacket, and with her “little light” shining, Bush spent up to six hours at a time in the 20-foot flotation tank at Pinewood Studios, growing cold, impatient and finding increasingly inventive ways to swear. Virtually anyone else would have lip-synced to a pre-recorded vocal, but Bush was insistent that the filmed sequences would show her singing live in real time while immersed in the water. The effect was eventually achieved using microphones hidden in two inflater tubes on the life jacket, although the Method approach left her with mild hypothermia and a ticking off from her doctor.
When it came to the music, Bush assembled a group of highly experienced session men notable for their impeccably understated professionalism, capable of providing a rock-solid musical foundation for her voice, as well as coping with the considerable nuances of these songs and the theatrics they often demanded. She recruited Peter Gabriel’s regular guitarist David Rhodes, long-time Bush bassist John Giblin, classically trained new age guitarist Frissi Karlsson and regular Pink Floyd collaborator Jon Carin on keyboards and programming. The rhythm, the beating heart of the show, would be supplied by larger than life French percussionist Mino Cinelu and redoubtable drummer Omar Hakim. The sole remaining links in the chain stretching back to ‘Tour Of Life’ were Irishman Kevin McAlea, on keyboards, accordion and Uilleann pipes, and Bush herself, who played piano on only two songs.
Of the five singers in the Chorus, who as Bush’s principal dramatic foils adopted various personae throughout the production, four were recruited from the stage and musical theatre. Sandra Marvin, Jacqui DuBois, Jo Servi and Bob Harms were experienced actors and session singers, with particularly strong soul, R&B and gospel roots. The other Chorus member was Bertie.
Her determination to shoot for the very best calibre of collaborator had not faded with time. She invited Adrian Noble, formerly creative director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, to co-direct with her. Rather than someone who would come in and seek to radically alter her overall vision for the piece, Noble’s role became that of genial facilitator, ensuring that Bush’s ideas reached the stage in the best shape possible, finessed with his own inspirational touches and creative eye for detail.
She also enlisted the help of acclaimed English novelist David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks, and a Bush fan of longstanding. “It’s so inspiring that an artist in her field just keeps getting better,” Mitchell told me shortly before ‘Before The Dawn’ opened. “I thought 50 Words For Snow was pretty much her best album, and I thought that about Aerial. Perhaps The Red Shoes and The Sensual World were just a little bit more hit and miss, but even then they’re brilliant albums. She fulfils the Three Great Albums rule. If you’ve got three five-star albums then you’re in the pantheon as one of the greats – there’s only a handful of artists who are there. She has Hounds Of Love, The Dreaming, Aerial, and 50 Words … That’s four!”
It’s no surprise that Bush and Mitchell hit it off, and embarked on an occasional correspondence. They are both risk takers who share an uncanny ability to access different worlds, their imaginations unfettered by the limitations of binary absolutes: living and dead, male and female, past and present, reality and fantasy – all appear as liquid concepts in their work. As the idea of playing live was starting to formulate, Mitchell invited Bush, via her agent, to the opening night of Sunken Garden, a ‘3D film opera’ he had written with Dutch contemporary classical composer Michel van der Aa, performed at the Barbican between April 12 and 20, 2013. “To my great surprise she emailed me back, and said she’d love to go,” Mitchell said. “I think she was thinking of ‘Before The Dawn’ even then.”5
It was, Bush conceded, an “interesting bit of timing”6. Afterwards, she talked with Mitchell and Aa over a glass of wine. When the moment came to create the dialogue she felt was required to stitch together ‘The Ninth Wave’ into a more unified narrative, she sought out Mitchell for his input. He described himself as a co-writer, used by Bush largely as a sounding board. “She sent notes and ideas, I knocked those into a first draft, she knocked them into a second draft, we were pinging back and forth six or seven times until Kate was happy,” he said. “So I am her humble servant. I am an obedient cog in her majestic machine, no more than that, but it was so cool.”7 A purportedly humorous – though in reality, rather laboured – approximation of the pair’s creative dialogue was spread over two pages of the programme.
Mitchell was just one such “cog” in an undertaking that involved a full 18 months of plotting, planning, revising, rehearsing and performing. Actors and singers were identified and auditioned by key company members, often without knowing what they were auditioning for. Such sensitive information was kept secret until after they had been hired, at which point they were asked, politely but firmly, not to breathe a word.
‘Before The Dawn’ would be credited to the KT Fellowship, a nice nod back to the days of the KT Bush Band, and all of Bush’s discourse regarding the process made reference to “we” this and “our” that. At the end of the final performance, during ‘Cloudbusting’, the entire cast and crew came onstage for their curtain call, in recognition of their collective effort.
Putting the show together in a former school building, the warm, creative, familial atmosphere recalled the spirit that had fuelled ‘Tour Of Life’. Bush split the enterprise into distinct departments. The band rehearsed in one space, the designers worked up their ideas in another, while the technical team managed the logistics from their office in the same building. There were puppeteers in the old gymnasium, and costume fittings were held in the art department. One source recalls Bush obsessing over every detail, down to the design of the – beautiful – tickets. “Driving us mad,” they sighed, not unkindly. Even the programme was a glorious artefact, painstakingly created to resemble some ancient parchment dragged up from the depths of the ocean.
It was all classic Bush, obsessively detailed, utterly idiosyncratic and veiled in secrecy. In an age of full disclosure she somehow managed to retain the trump cards of mystery and surprise. Given the scale of the production and the number of component parts required, this may well have ranked as her most impressive piece of subterfuge yet. David Mitchell explains it thus: “People who work with her are persuaded by her wish for privacy and tend not to talk out of school.”
“It was a family secret we had to sit on for a long time,” added John Carder Bush. “But that’s always been how it is. She’s always very careful not to release any information about anything … [Even] I had no idea what to expect.”8
The pains taken to preserve the magic were not in vain. No ingénue when it comes to the machinations of the music industry, Bush has always understood the importance of making a full blooded impact, and the eventual announcement of ‘Before The Dawn’ in March 2014 blindsided everyone in the industry. The lack of PR overkill was a clever PR stratagem in itself, using Bush’s old school mystique as a unique selling point. And it worked. It would be hard to overstate the quivering excitement which accompanied the initial news of her return. Even five months before the opening night, ‘Before The Dawn’ had become the outstanding musical event of 2014, if not the decade. By comparison, David Bowie’s surprise return the previous year with The Next Day after a ten-year silence looked almost humdrum.
Even before the shows went on general sale, a further seven dates were added, stretching the run from August 26 to October 2. The tickets – which ranged in price from £49 to £135, with hospitality packages stretching into several hundreds of pounds – were subject to strict restrictions. No more than four could be sold to one applicant for each concert, and the buyer had to be present on the night with photographic identification. Intended to prevent scalping, it was much the same system that Tom Waits had used a few years earlier for his own, equally oversubscribed UK shows. Some 80,000 tickets went on sale to the general public at 9:30 am on Friday, March 28. Later that morning, Bush’s PR, Murray Chalmers, issued a brief statement to confirm that the whole lot had sold out within 15 minutes.
The media coverage was frenzied and somewhat relentless. For those who dimly remembered ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Running Up That Hill’ it must have all been slightly baffling. For those who felt that Bush had perhaps never quite received her due as one of the most significant artists of the past half century, the flood of attention was gratifying, if not always terribly profound. In the days leading up to the show itself the focus on all things Bush surged to epidemic proportions, a seemingly endless production line of profiles, commendations and archive pieces; lists of favourite songs, videos and costumes; tributes from writers, musicians, artists, old friends; glossy magazine features, radio pieces and speculative shots at what the shows may or may not feature; feminist critiques of her career, the odd dire warning that she could never pull it off, and one worried middle-aged male critic opining that it would be “unbecoming” to see a 56-year-old woman attempting to do something as subversive as dance.
The BBC broadcast a newly commissioned hour-long documentary, The Kate Bush Story: Running Up That Hill, featuring contributions from Elton John, David Gilmour, John Lydon, Tricky, Stephen Fry and a whole host of others. Two major photographic overviews were published: Kate Bush by Guido Harari and WOW by Gered Mankowitz, and their joint exhibition ran at Snap Galleries in London for the duration of the ‘Before The Dawn’ residency. Her songs were all over the radio and almost all of her albums found their way back into the charts. Bushmania is not too strong a phrase.
Throughout it all, Bush uttered not one single word to any media outlet whatsoever, though in the run up to August 26 a request appeared on her website. “It would mean a great deal to me if you would please refrain from taking photos or filming during the shows. I very much want to have contact with you as an audience, not with iPhones, iPads or cameras. I know it’s a lot to ask but it would allow us to all share in the experience together.” Back, again, to the importance of preserving that undiluted “connection” between her and her audience.
At the venue itself, the application of this charmingly worded ‘request’ was somewhat more stringent. Prior to the show’s commencement an announcement repeated the entreaty over the PA system, and anyone wielding a camera or phone during proceedings (as well as before the concert and during the interval) was swiftly admonished by Apollo staff. But the desired affect was achieved. This was one post-millennial event that really rewarded physical presence and total, non-virtual immersion; only a few, very brief snippets of footage of the shows eventually leaked on to the internet, and they were a pale echo of the live experience. For once, the combined forces of the internet and social media could not even begin to hint at the real thing.
* * *
For 22 nights over the late summer and early autumn of 2014, the residents of Hammersmith grew used to having Bush around. Hotels reported roaring trade. Local pubs like The Swan became impromptu fan HQs. On show nights the theatre was encircled by an ad hoc community of fans, touts, chancers, celebrities, crazies, fast food sellers and unofficial merchandise vendors. A maze of crash barriers guided the audience in a zig-zagging line towards the doors, while above their heads the marquee proclaimed: THE KT FELLOWSHIP PRESENTS BEFORE THE DAWN SOLD OUT.
For opening night, Tuesday, August 26, the agents and enablers who had been so quiet in public had, in private, done their job. Among those in attendance were David Gilmour, Bjork, Grace Jones, Lily Allen, Marc Almond, Chrissie Hynde, Holly Johnson, Michael Ball, Frank Skinner, Gemma Arterton and Anna Calvi, the latter pair whisked immediately afterwards to the BBC’s Newsnight studio to attempt to explain what they had just witnessed. There were rumours on live blogs and Twitter that Madonna had slipped in and out unnoticed, although David Bowie was definitely not there, despite whispers to the contrary.
The A-list love-in continued at every show throughout the run. Elton John, Paul McCartney, Johnny Depp, Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Page, Daniel Craig and Kylie Minogue were among the hundreds of famous faces who lined up to attend, many more than once. Some nights Bush lingered to mingle in the VIP room; other nights she left straight away. “I was reassured Kate is a night owl and she wanted to say hello,” said one visitor, the singer Toyah Wilcox. “It was almost overwhelming to see her after such an incredible performance. She wrapped her arms around me and kissed my face. We had a bit of catching up to do, the last time I saw her son Bertie he was six years old, now he is a man.”9 Bush remained less than enamoured of any opportunist photographers, who saw only the top of her head, wrapped in a scarf, as she arrived at the venue each day in the back of a black car, slipping into the building in mid-afternoon.
Each night the doors opened at 6:15pm and business was brisk. Inside, fans stocked up on official merchandise. Alongside the usual T-shirts, posters and programmes were somewhat more imaginative items. A Hounds Of Love mug selling for £13.50; a ‘Cloudbusting’ pendant at £30; a ‘Before The Dawn’ Rescue Kit for £45.
The foyer was an eager, edgy crush. After all the months of hype and speculation, the moment of reckoning was nigh. The nervous tension was acutely palpable, as though 4,000 people were about to watch a cherished family member walk across a high wire. As the stage time of 7:45 approached, the audience filed into the auditorium, soothed by the languorous sound of Eberhard Weber’s ambient bass. The imposing stage, bathed in a deep blue wash of light, displayed an impressive array of instruments, amps and microphones; the drums seemed to dominate, as they would on much of the music to follow.
At last, the house lights dimmed and the sampled voice of Bush’s late healer, Lily Cranford, spilled from the speakers, reciting the modern variation of the Gayatri Mantra, one of the oldest Vedic Sanskrit mantras. The seven-piece band walked on and kicked into ‘Lily’, the plush, deep, rhythmic groove, sleek yet punchy, setting the musical tone for the early part of the show.
‘Lily’ is a banishing ritual, a song of protection, throwing out a “circle of fire” from which Bush could draw strength to perform. More prosaically, it was the kind of song that perfectly suited her richer, fuller, more soulful voice. As the pulse of the song steadied and began to throb, and without toying overly long with the audience’s hunger for gratification, Bush emerged from the rear right of the stage leading a kind of spiritually enlightened conga line, heading up the Chorus, the five-strong ensemble of singers and actors who would collectively act as her foil through the subsequent three hours. She was dressed in a black silk shirt, a long black coat, extravagantly fringed and tassled, and loose black trousers. A silver necklace with a pendant hung around her throat. Her feet were bare, and her tousled hair tumbled down her back. She looked both entirely ordinary and utterly remarkable: powerful, fierce, radiant, a benevolent Gothic goddess, stretching out her arms to the crowd in a gesture of welcome and inclusion.
Predictably, her mere physical presence earned the first of numerous ovations. She grinned, stepped to the centre of the stage, opened her mouth and, at long last, sang. Though early on there were clear traces of nerves in her singing voice – which quickly dissolved as she hit her stride – it was immediately apparent that her vocals remained astonishingly potent. As she drew sparks from the words “fire” and “darkness”, the first two killer notes of the show, the anxiety in the audience – as least as pronounced as that of anyone on stage – dissolved. Suddenly everybody knew that this would work, and that it promised to be magical, and a wave of euphoria swept over the room.
When ‘Lily’ ended, a clearly delighted Bush shouted “Where’ve you been!” Her interaction with the audience each night was low key but finely judged. Her words were simple but heartfelt, and she articulated her gratitude and acknowledged the significance of the occasion without recourse to either cheap sentiment or gushing indulgence.
In any case, her face spoke more eloquently than her brief speeches. The theatrical distance deployed throughout ‘Tour Of Life’ was again in evidence on ‘Before The Dawn’ whenever the dramaturgy demanded it, but during the opening six songs in particular – performed straight, without any artifice, against a simple display of diamond lights – Bush appeared unguarded and guileless, reacting genuinely to each moment and allowing her joy to spill out. She smiled and joked with her band, slipped to the side of the stage to glug a bottle of water, and responded disarmingly to the energy of the crowd.
After ‘Lily’ came the familiar cry: “It’s in the trees, it’s coming!” ‘Hounds Of Love’ breezed rather than burned, its sense of quivering urgency never as taut as it might have been, but it still sounded rapturous. She tinkered slightly with the chorus melody and threw in a new line, an entreaty to “tie me to the mast”. The phrase, pickpocketed from Greek mythology, underlined the enduring power of love’s siren call, while acting as a piece of subliminal scene-setting for the upcoming ‘The Ninth Wave’.
It’s fair to say that ‘Joanni’ would not have been high on most people’s dream Kate Bush set list, but even a middling, somewhat hesitant song from Aerial gained vigour in this context. The sampled peal of the bells of Rouen cathedral chimed as Bush hummed and declaimed in French. The message conveyed – not for the first or last time – was one of feminine power and strength. ‘Top Of The City’, another unlikely inclusion, had undergone a far more remarkable metamorphosis, transformed from a largely overlooked track on a widely unfancied album to a high-stepping highlight. Bush sang it with extraordinary versatility and passion, rising from a serene whisper to a soulful howl, throwing herself into the song with raw, transported physicality. She did not dance during ‘Before The Dawn’, at least not in the manner that she once had, but she swayed, swooped and side-stepped, her movements still animated by a supple grace. The entire show was put together with a dancer’s understanding of space and spectacle.
The still sleek ‘Running Up That Hill’, cleaving closely to the 2012 remix, sounded wonderful. As the musicians located its rolling rhythm and quicksilver synthetic pulse, Bush waggled a coaxing finger and purred “Come on, baby.” Her other post-Millennial hit, ‘King Of The Mountain’, was another early high point, its chimeric reggae churned up into a thick, satisfyingly propulsive broth.
The song marked a key moment in ‘Before The Dawn’, a hinge between the straight gig and the theatrics to come. As ‘King Of The Mountain’ pushed onward, the atmosphere turned increasingly inclement and Bush evolved from smiling earth mother to lowering Prospero, summoning the coming tempest. At the tumultuous, drum-heavy climax – “the wind is whistling”, and then some – percussionist Mino Cinelu stepped forward to the centre of the stage and began whirling a traditional Maori wind instrument, the purerehua, on a rope around his head. Bedlam ensued. Lights flashed, thunder crashed, an immense storm rolled out from the four corners of the theatre and the sound of some terrible collision engulfed the audience. Those in the rows closest to the stage were showered with hundreds of scraps of yellow tissue paper, a rain of golden confetti, each piece adorned with the verse from Tennyson’s The Coming Of Arthur, the poem which had given ‘The Ninth Wave’ its name.
An emergency signal rent the darkness, and a curtain fell in front of the stage. The switch in mood was abrupt, unsettling and hugely effective. From something close to a conventional rock show, ‘Before The Dawn’ had adjusted its priorities. Even the terrain had shifted, lurching from the sky-scraping peaks of city, hill and mountain to the darkest depths of the ocean.
‘The Ninth Wave’ began with a brief piece of film, written by Bush and Mitchell and titled ‘The Astronomer’s Tale’. Projected on to the curtain, it was partly a technical necessity, allowing the stage to be prepared for the coming drama, and partly a piece of slightly clumsy exposition. In a call to the coast guard, an amateur astronomer, played by Kevin Doyle (known to many as Molesley from Downton Abbey), explained that he had picked up a distress signal from a ship called Celtic Deep. Somewhere off the coast there was, we learned, a vessel sinking fast.
When this short monologue ended and the curtain rose, the stage had been spectacularly reset. The band and Chorus were now framed within the skeletal ribs of a sunken ship, the lighting shadowy and subaquatic, throwing out deep greens, blues and misty shafts of silvery light. Bush appeared on the screen at the back of the stage singing ‘And Dream Of Sheep’ live to camera, one of the sequences filmed months earlier at Pinewood. Surrounded by sea, spot lit by watery moonlight, she looked appropriately vulnerable as she sang one of her most bewitching ballads. Through it all her emergency beacon bleeped, like a tiny heartbeat.
For ‘Under Ice’ the stage floor was transformed into a rippling sea of waves and Bush returned to the stage in the flesh, now clad in a Navy greatcoat, liberally buckled, buttoned and belted. The band locked into the song’s oppressive rhythm, perfectly articulating its chilly claustrophobia. Bush was alternately swallowed and given up by trapdoors in the stage, while on screen her likeness remained in the water, highlighting the duality of ‘The Ninth Wave’. Throughout the piece, the filmed portions represented the reality of the woman in the water, watching, hoping, waiting, drifting, not quite alive but not yet dead. Onstage, her visions of the past, present and future were played out.
Chainsaw’s burred and axes cut into the water, but rescue proved short lived. The Chorus – transformed into Lords Of The Deep, a cabal of sinister, skeletal fish people clad in bony masks and heavy netting, their forked tails somehow demonic – spirited Bush into the hands of the Witch Finder for ‘Waking The Witch’, a piece of vividly disturbing theatre. Jo Servi excelled as the grand inquisitor, masked and dreadful. Surrounded by a terrifying cacophony of condemnation, Bush lurched, screamed and gasped for air, before repeated cries of “get out of the water!” brought the diabolical persecution fantasy lurching back, once again, to reality, as a rescue helicopter thundered overhead.
The pilot’s radio communication, written by Mitchell and voiced by Paddy Bush, explained that the crew of the Celtic Deep had been picked up safely, as well as “all but one of the passengers”. For several minutes a virtual helicopter strafed the audience in the stalls, the deafening roar of its blade rotation and its harsh white search spotlight pinning people to their seats. The woman it was seeking in the darkness was more than just an anonymous face on the screen. The dramatisation of ‘Watching You, Without Me’ radically extended the remit of the song by painting in some of the crucial details of her life. This sad, subdued lament now made explicit the uncomfortable truth that even as one person is battling through their own dark night of the soul, life around them continues in all its staggering and glorious mundanity.
The song was now framed by a comic vignette in which Bertie, as the woman’s brattish son, Ben, and Bob Harms, as her husband and his father, played out a scene of domestic normality in their living room. The pair niggled over a lost work portfolio, watched football, cooked (and burned) dinner, teased, taunted and sofa surfed. Bush seemed to be aiming at something akin to the everyday fly-on-the-wall humour of the hit BBC TV show Outnumbered, while much of the dialogue betrayed her fondness for the very English wordplay and ribaldry of Blackadder and The Young Ones – “Captain Hilarious strikes again!” – but, in both its script and execution, the scene fell flat.
Eventually, mercifully, Bush drifted into view, hovering ghostlike behind her family to sing ‘Watching You, Without Me’, present but unheard and unseen. The skew-whiff mini-set created for this tableau was wonderful. Lamps flickered and a television slid from one end of the building to the other, as though the room were acutely attuned to Bush’s electric, poltergeist aura even if the human occupants remained oblivious.
‘Jig Of Life’ was a musical tour de force, all hard Celtic rhythm, with Kevin McAlea excelling on the Uilleann pipes. Jay, Bush’s eldest brother, made an appearance in black and white on a video screen, reciting the Irish-toned poem he had written for the original track. For ‘Hello Earth’ a huge buoy, bathed in the red light of emergency flares, ascended from the waves. In one of the most unforgettable images of ‘Before The Dawn’, Bush tried again and again to escape the water and reach its refuge, only to be pulled back each time by the Lords Of The Deep, determined to drag her below the surface.
While this was happening, a couple of stagehands assembled a short ramp that led up from the floor of the auditorium to the right hand side of the stage. As the song’s stunningly sombre choral passage rang out, an inert Bush was lifted from the waves, carried slowly down the ramp and into the audience. The funeral procession then paused in the aisle. Any member of the audience lucky enough to be in the first few rows on this side of the theatre was thus afforded an intimate view of Bush, lying prostrate, six foot in the air, so close you could see her thick make-up drenched in a sheen of sweat. As a voice implored her to “go deeper”, her eyes suddenly snapped open, and she was lead through the side door of the auditorium and out of sight. The crowd, as one, seemed to exhale. It was spellbinding, genuinely operatic, and as darkly dramatic (and strikingly contemporary) as any modern staging of The Ring or Parsifal.
The buoy slipped away and the stage flooded with the golden light of a new dawn, both literal and metaphorical, setting the scene for a lilting, truly lovely acoustic rendition of ‘The Morning Fog’. When Bush re-entered the auditorium and made her way back to the stage, she was no longer in character. Behind and around her the musicians and Chorus, shorn of their fish heads, tails and all sense of menace, swayed to the music and danced gracefully with one another, their smiles and their song acting as a balm to all that had come before.
‘The Morning Fog’ was a gift of gratitude which transcended ‘The Ninth Wave’, reaching out to reflect on the entire experience of staging ‘Before The Dawn’, and her return to performing. When Bush sang “I love you better now” she gestured to the audience and smiled. To the list of family members included in the lyrics at the end of the song she added “son”, and when she talked of her “brothers” and “sisters”, she held out her arms to the men and women around her onstage, extending the embrace of family to include the KT Fellowship. It should have been corny. Perhaps on one level it was. But experienced at first hand, it was also deeply felt and undeniably moving.
Within the song’s warm, beatific glow the terrible spell cast by ‘The Ninth Wave’ receded and was broken, bringing an end to one of the most extraordinary pieces of imaginative theatre ever staged by a popular musician. And that was only Act I.
* * *
During the 20-minute interval, the stage was hidden behind a lush red curtain adorned with a feather motif, an early clue that the mood of the next phase of ‘Before The Dawn’ would be very different from the first.
The band had now shifted to the left hand side, with Bush among them, seated at the piano. Trees had sprouted around her, and the effect was of some kind of magical, Narnian forest. Though she had changed clothes she was still all in black. Now she wore a long and rather mystical looking overcoat, embroidered on the sleeves and cuffs with gold, amber and silver patterns and topped off with feathered epaulettes. Her hands, feet and forehead were bejewelled. She could have passed for Persian royalty.
A vast set of Moorish doors, 30 foot high, now dominated the stage, like the gateway to a fairy tale. They creaked open and a wooden artist’s mannequin and its puppet master entered, both central figures in ‘A Sky Of Honey’. (Only at the end of the final show did Bush reveal that the ‘puppet’ was actually played by an actor, Charlotte Williams, hidden inside the suit. “She kept saying to me, ‘We’ll make a fuss of you on the last show,’ and she did,” said Williams.10 Bush described her that night as “our secret weapon”.)
The sound of birdsong, piano and the sampled voice of the young Bertie – taken from Aerial – ushered in ‘Prelude’, which half way through shifted key from the major to the minor, introducing the aura of vague disquiet which constantly threatened to unsettle this otherwise perfect summer’s day.
As a vast screen stretching across the rear of the stage projected slow motion images of birds in flight, Bush began ‘Prologue’, transformed into a ten-minute tour de force. The music was stunningly beautiful, dominated by her rippling piano and John Giblin’s airy, lyrical bass, and lifted by a new, jubilant coda which featured Bush singing “Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong / Shake it down, break it down” and harmonising with the peal of distant bells.
Before ‘An Architect’s Dream’, the huge doors were removed. A vast canvas screen descended stage right, in front of which Bertie appeared as the artist, taking over the role played on the album by Rolf Harris. Clutching his palette and brushes, with his smock, straw hat and ragged red beard (which he had been allowed to grow only with permission from his school), he appeared to be channelling his inner Van Gogh. As he grappled with his painting on the canvas, the puppet, Chorus and Bush weaved around him, “watching the painter paint”.
The mood, now established and sustained throughout the majority of ‘A Sky Of Honey’, was slow, stoned, dream-like. The lighting cast the stage in rich, golden tones, translucent blues and deep reds, nature’s bounty blending with the glorious smudge of a Turner painting. The music demanded something different from Act I, and the band duly played with lithe, bright nuance and extraordinary grace, while Bush wrapped herself around the songs, her voice a perfect fit for the relatively recent material.
Dramatically, where ‘The Ninth Wave’ was a complex series of set pieces, the shift in mood, media and perspective constant and deliberately jarring, ‘A Sky Of Honey’ was a truly unified piece of work, the songs eliding in a seamless progression. It allowed for full immersion. For the audience, this was an hour in the presence of an intense stillness, punctuated by the occasional flurry of activity or arresting image. Nothing much happened for most of it. The puppet child skittered around anxiously, Bertie wandered about with his brushes, birds trilled, suns sank and moons rose as the texture of the day shifted. The effect was hermetic and hypnotic, like being lulled into a serene trance where every sense still remained highly attuned. It was a pitch-perfect realisation of one of her most sublime pieces of work.
‘Sunset’ was simply outstanding. Kevin McAlea’s accordion casting a richly romantic spell, its organic push-and-pull meshing with Giblin’s burbling bass as it climbed towards a rattling climax. Cinelu’s percussive power pushed the song “all the way up to the top of the night”, and as Bush’s sang in her sultriest, most headily perfumed purr, it was impossible to conceive that her voice had ever sounded better. Her risk-taking instincts, too, remained primed. On ‘Aerial Tal’ she mimicked the song of the blackbird, head bobbing, elbows wide, lips pecking, every inch of her a bird. ‘Somewhere In Between’ was revealed conclusively to be one of her great pop compositions, a gliding kiss of a song and a sensuous exploration of an enduring preoccupation with the liminal spaces.
As the blood red sun sank behind her, Bush slipped away in its wake, leaving her fine new song, ‘Tawny Moon’, to be performed by Bertie. A bluesy, rhythmic construction, it was at odds with the rest of ‘A Sky Of Honey’, and closer to something Bush might have recorded in the mid-Eighties. Bertie declared, “Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you tonight: the moon!” and a vast, silver orb rose slowly on the screen behind him.
Paying homage to the “queen of bedlam”, the song marked the point at which ‘A Sky Of Honey’ began to hurtle towards its climax. The sunshine had engendered an atmosphere of sensual lassitude; nightfall brought new, more dangerous forces to the fore. Since ‘Sunset’ the trajectory of the music had been rising again, circling back towards the elevated terrain explored in the show’s beginnings. As a deeply rhythmic ‘Nocturn’ gave way to ‘Aerial’, a new day had broken and the morning bells were ringing out (there were a lot of bells in ‘Before The Dawn’). Bush was roused from slumber, impatient, ready to “get up on the roof”. The band and Chorus were by now decked out in startling bird masks. Welcome to the dawn chorus.
There was a new tension to the music, which at one point throbbed like some New Age interpretation of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’. Over an angry squall of guitar and a heavy artillery of drums, Bush and David Rhodes engaged in a haughty, erotically charged stand-off, circling each other like hunter and prey, lover and killer. As Rhodes strutted, Bush wailed about her “beautiful wings”, which she indeed now had, big, black things fixed on to her epaulettes by members of the Chorus. As the music pushed harder and harder, up and up, on the final stroke of the final song she was hitched up and suspended above the stage. Airborne at last.
For the encore Bush returned alone, as herself. After thanking the crowd for their “wonderful, warm and positive response”, she sang ‘Among Angels’ at the piano. It took a few moments to realise that following the extraordinary drama at the denouement of ‘A Sky Of Honey’, the piano now had a tree growing out of it. It was an impeccable rendition, note perfect, the utter purity of her voice reducing the theatre to silence. It was also a timely reminder that, for all the theatrics, if Bush were ‘just’ a singer she would still be unique. That she was so much more besides seemed almost unfair on everyone else.
As the applause receded she spoke. “We hope you enjoyed the show.” Uproar. “Does that mean yes?” The band returned for ‘Cloudbusting’, transformed now into a martial clap along, slack with the collective release of tension but buoyed by sheer goodwill. Bush grinned and waved, perhaps allowing herself to finally savour the feeling of being surrounded by something that seemed very, very close to love. And one wondered, not for the first time, just why she would spend 35 years denying herself – and us, dammit – access to such a uniquely uplifting experience.
* * *
It was almost impossible to write about ‘Before The Dawn’ without getting wrapped up in the emotion surrounding its wider narrative. The immensity of the occasion did not lend itself easily to the subjective critical view, especially for writers filing overnight reviews. The critical response was overwhelmingly positive. The Independent called it “stunning, undoubtedly the most ambitious, and genuinely moving, piece of theatrical pop ever seen on a British stage.” The Guardian described it as “spellbinding”, the NME “phenomenal”. And on and on and on, wave after wave of adulation from around the globe. It might well have been the most widely reviewed performance of all time. Despite the occasional equivocations, the heady expectations, it could safely be said, were more than met.
For those who wished to seek out codes, messages, threads and influences, there was plenty to chew on. ‘Before The Dawn’ touched upon angels, Celtic myth, reincarnation, motherhood, circadian rhythms, saints, birds, steampunk, The Tempest, Ulysses, War Horse, Hammer Horror, Doctor Who, witchcraft, JMW Turner, Pinocchio, The Hogsmill Ophelia, the end of childhood, and much else besides. For those who simply wanted to sit back and goggle at the sheer spectacle, the rewards were no less rich. Like the best theatrical experiences, it did not just live on as a fond memory but took on new shapes, expanded and realigned itself as the extent of its ambition sunk in.
Was it flawless? Not remotely. Was it sometimes ridiculous, baffling and borderline embarrassing? Of course. For all its use of cutting edge technology and its corps of high end collaborators, there was still room in ‘Before The Dawn’ for the defiantly home grown, the slightly half-baked, the deeply, defiantly personal. Bush did not return to the stage after so long a time only to impose limits on the extent to which she could give free rein to her imagination.
Musically, some quibbled over the lack of ‘hits’ in the set list, but what was actually delivered was something deeper and surely more satisfying. The lack of spontaneity in the set and its inflexibility from night to night was hardly a surprise, given the theatrical nature of the show and Bush’s determination – unchanged in the 35 years since ‘Tour Of Life’ – to leave nothing that happened onstage to chance. Still, the solo piano slot in the first encore, where she performed ‘Among Angels’ each night, might have provided an opportunity to air a different song from time to time. Perhaps the already rehearsed ‘Moments Of Pleasure’ or ‘A Coral Room’, or ‘This Woman’s Work’, ‘Breathing’ or ‘Under The Ivy’.
Many fans would have been delighted to have seen a whole show performed this way, but her desire to deliver much more than simply a conventional rendition of her best known songs was, in her mind, precisely the point of playing live. The fruits of her ambition didn’t always hit the sweet spot. The purpose of the mannequin which darted nervously – and pleasingly enough – around the stage throughout ‘A Sky Of Honey’ was never quite apparent, nor would it have necessarily been to the detriment of the piece had it got lost in the woods. ‘The Astronomer’s Tale’ felt similarly extraneous, while the kind of dialogue that works so well in David Mitchell’s novels did not translate particularly effectively to a theatrical production.
There was evidence to suggest that Adrian Noble ceded to Bush on the major directorial decisions, otherwise the hammy am-dram domestic scene which prefaced ‘Watching You, Without Me’ would surely have been cut or rewritten. “HP and Mayo” might have been “the badgers’ nadgers” chez Bush, but her attempt to transpose the lively cut and thrust of domestic badinage to the stage was a flop. Coming directly after the overlong helicopter interlude at the end of ‘Waking The Witch’, the skit contributed considerably to a momentum-sapping, tension-leaking lull in the middle of the otherwise superb ‘Ninth Wave’.
That scene, and Bertie’s West End rendition of ‘Tawny Moon’, gave some credence to the suspicion that ‘Before The Dawn’ was partly designed as a vast shop window display for the talents of Bush’s son. If Bertie McIntosh was a slightly too-shrill presence in his principle dramatic roles, and perhaps not yet the singularly gifted actor and singer he may well become, the self-possession, professionalism and sheer chutzpah exhibited by a 16-year-old in the face of such intense scrutiny could not fail to impress. And after all, had it not been for him, it’s entirely likely the show would never have been staged at all.
It would be all too easy to adopt a default position of contrarian cynicism in the face of the undiluted gush that defined much of the discourse surrounding ‘Before The Dawn’, but in the end this was a show of such sustained quality it reduced any nominal competition to rubble. Like many of Bush’s landmarks, its minor failings were woven into its wider triumph, inextricably linked to the unique vision that dreamed it all up.
Though ‘Tour Of Life’ seemed by comparison a somewhat callow and charmingly analogue undertaking, there were some echoes to be heard in ‘Before The Dawn’. When Bush took flight at the end of ‘A Sky Of Honey’, she picked up the distant thread of ‘Kite’, during which she was winged and borne aloft by her dancers. (The wind effects at the end of the same song now seemed like a gentle zephyr compared to ‘The Ninth Wave’’s mighty roar.) A fat, blood-soaked sun had now hung heavy over both her live shows, and on the same stage. Jay once again read poetry, Paddy had a dramatic part, and her love of costume, spectacle and absurdist British comedy had not diminished over time. And as she had done 35 years previously on ‘Hammer Horror’, she was not averse to prerecording her vocals if the visual context demanded it.
One of the most pleasing aspects of ‘Before The Dawn’ was the way it united so many aspects of her career, and renewed public interest in the broad sweep of her work. In the week that the show opened, Bush became the first woman to have eight albums in the UK’s Official Albums Chart at the same time. Two were in the top ten: The Whole Story compilation at six, and Hounds Of Love at nine. 50 Words For Snow (20), The Kick Inside (24), The Sensual World (26), The Dreaming (37), Never For Ever (38) and Lionheart (40) were the others. It was historical feat; only The Beatles and Elvis Presley had charted more albums simultaneously.
‘Before The Dawn’ also had the effect of reanimating much of her recorded work. Bush reclaimed Hounds Of Love from the dread grasp of ‘classic’ album status, bringing it vividly to life at last. Many listeners would now be inclined to give the neglected The Red Shoes fresh attention, while Aerial was starting to be more recognised as one of her major works, and ‘A Sky Of Honey’ arguably her masterpiece.
If the shows were significant in moving the critical focus of Bush’s career away from the early albums and towards more recent material, they also, at last, created a vibrant new visual frame of reference for a woman who had often felt constrained by the difficulties of living up to the striking series of creative personae she developed as a younger artist. The shows felt like a declaration of sorts: this is who I am, and it is not who I was. The mix of elevated art and unabashed humanity and vulnerability felt unforced but also important. ‘Before The Dawn’ very publicly reaffirmed her existence as a living, breathing, very physical entity after years – decades – of rarefied quasi-invisibility.
Performances on September 16 and 17 were filmed for posterity, and at the end of the final concert on October 2, amid the bows, bouquets and ovations, Bush said, “This is our last show – for a while, anyway.” A couple of weeks later she wrote about the “surreal journey” she had been on. The emotional charge seemed to have taken her by surprise. “The really unexpected part of it all was the audiences,” she wrote on her website. “Audiences that you could only ever dream of. One of the main reasons for wanting to perform live again was to have contact with that audience. They took my breath away. Every single night they were so behind us … I just never imagined it would be possible to connect with an audience on such a powerful and intimate level; to feel such, well quite frankly, love.” It turned out she had created a piece of work with a social function. ‘Before The Dawn’ prompted strangers to interact, encouraged numerous displays of naked emotion, and simply made those who saw it feel better.
All the indications suggested that she enjoyed the experience and regarded it as a success. It opened up a host of future possibilities. One useful comparison is with Leonard Cohen, whose return to the live arena in 2008 after an absence of 15 years heralded a triumphant third act which delivered two superb studio albums, two live records, a DVD and a new Greatest Hits collection. His live comeback revived and recontextualised a career which was revered but somewhat dormant, and in need of a little post-millennial polish. Unlike Cohen, whose business manager had embezzled all his money, Bush was not forced onstage by unfortunate circumstances, but the impact of her return was, potentially, similarly seismic.
The shows were an event in themselves, but also a major fork in the road. ‘Before The Dawn’ forever altered the narrative surrounding Bush. Coming relatively hot on the heels of Director’s Cut and 50 Words For Snow, it was no longer inconceivable to imagine her performing on Later With … Jools Holland, or again making videos in which she starred, or appearing on television to talk with a sympathetic arts journalist, or popping up onstage at large public events, or even contemplating a summer festival appearance. When ‘Before The Dawn’ won in the Editor’s Choice category at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards on November 30, Bush not only turned up at the London Palladium to collect her award from Sir Ian McKellen, but posed happily for photographers before and after the event. What seemed fanciful shifted to the spectrum of plausibility. She had released three albums (one a double) in nine years – not so shabby by modern standards – and ‘Before The Dawn’ sealed the perception of Bush moving towards the territory she inhabited during the first decade of her career: a supremely gifted artist who does not hide in the margins, but is capable of regularly delivering her unique vision into the nation’s theatres and living rooms. Having filmed two shows, there would surely be a DVD – and very possibly a cinematic – release of ‘Before The Dawn’, while a new Best Of collection was well overdue. Both would further invigorate her oeuvre for existing fans and deliver it anew to younger generations.
At 56, Bush appeared in her prime. 50 Words For Snow contained passages as remarkable as anything she had ever done, and ‘Before The Dawn’ was not just a discrete triumph, but also potent with the promise of an ongoing period of creativity which could rival the extraordinary peaks of the past. Perhaps in time, rather than a defining hiatus, the silence that fell upon Bush between the mid-Nineties and mid-Noughties would come to be seen as a healthy pause, a reinvigorating gap, between two imperial phases. The whole story, it was clear, had not yet been written.