The American had arrived direct from Bali, landing in London the previous day with nowhere to stay. He had watched the sun rise over the Thames at four o’clock that morning, and had no idea where he would sleep tonight. His worldly possessions were in storage, his life was in flux, his face was etched with exhaustion, yet he had made it to Hammersmith and the Eventim Apollo to see Kate Bush return to the stage, after an absence of 35 years, to perform ‘Before The Dawn’.
Before and during the show I kept an eye on this man. He was sitting three or four seats along from me in Row K, almost within touching distance of the stage. He shook hands with some strangers around him, embraced others. He cried, he sang along, he punched the air, he slumped exhausted in his seat. At one point he disappeared entirely. He said later he had been compelled to dance, although I’m not sure where he found the room – or permission – to do such a thing.
At almost any other seated concert in a theatre venue his antics would have attracted disapproving attention, and perhaps some concern for either his sobriety or well-being. On this night, such extreme and eccentric levels of commitment were the norm. So, to a greater extent, was the journey he had undertaken to be here. On this night and 21 others the Apollo was filled not just with Londoners, or Brits, but with Americans, Canadians, Swedes, Dutch, Germans, Italians, Australians and representatives of scores of other nationalities, all of whom had made the long trip – some more than once – to witness what had become the most eagerly anticipated and widely reported music story of the new millennium. People wept. Strangers hugged and hi-fived. Some wide-eyed, nervous, child-like energy seemed to have taken hold of the theatre. It was easily the most emotionally charged, keyed-up, expectant and downright odd atmosphere of any concert I have ever experienced. And all this before Kate Bush even stepped onstage.
When the first edition of this book was published in April 2010, the kind of drama that unfolded in west London over 22 summer and autumn nights in 2014 belonged firmly in the realms of fantasy. I know I wasn’t alone in finding it all but inconceivable that Kate Bush would ever perform in concert again. Not only had she not done so since 1979, she had released only one album – albeit a double – in a little under two decades. For all that the persistent tittle-tattle about her being a recluse was reductive, lazy and wrong-headed, it was still the case that she made official public appearances only slightly less frequently than Haley’s Comet. When Aerial arrived in 2005 her fans hoped that further records would emerge at some indefinite future point, but to imagine her shrugging off her happily domesticated private existence to embrace all the awkward intrusions that singing in front of a gawping audience would necessitate seemed utterly fanciful.
Quite quickly after this book appeared, however – not for a second to suggest a case of cause and effect – Bush’s work rate began to pick up pace. In 2011 came Director’s Cut, and then 50 Words For Snow. If she could release two albums in the space of a single calendar year, all bets were off. She recorded a new version of ‘Running Up That Hill’ for the London Olympics in 2012. She publicly collected a Sky Arts award. By the time she received her CBE from the Queen in the spring of 2013, behind the scenes the prospect of doing some shows was already gathering momentum. Fast forward to March 2014, and fans from all over the world were spending hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds on tickets, flights, accommodation. The seemingly impossible had become reality.
Whether ‘Before The Dawn’ will be remembered as an unforgettable one-off or the start of an-going engagement between Bush and her music in a live environment, her return to the stage throws new light on much of what has come before, as well as changing the expectations of what may yet be to come. With that in mind, the existing text of Under The Ivy has been revised and rewritten where appropriate, and the narrative of Bush’s career – happily and seemingly robustly moving forward – has been brought up to date.
Graeme Thomson, Edinburgh, November 2014