FEATURE:
Kate Bush: The Iconic Shots
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay
Before the Dawn, 2014 (Ken McKay)
___________
I wanted to return to this feature…
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay
for one more outing. I have been looking at photographs that, I feel, capture Bush in extraordinary situations. Iconic because of the composition or setting, this part takes me back to 2014. Her Before the Dawn residency in Hammersmith was the last real time anyone heard anything live from Bush. In fact, it is the most recent time we heard music from her at all. 2011’s 50 Words for Snow is her latest album, and she followed it with an incredible and unexpected return to the stage in 2014. I have already included a very nice shot from her first huge live outing, 1979’s The Tour of Life. In 1979, Bush was very much a musical pioneer. I don’t think the world had really seen a Pop concert like this. Madonna is often credited with reinventing what a Pop gig could be with her 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour. In fact, a lot of factors that people pick up can be traced to The Tour of Life! The wireless headset/mic was something Bush and her team pioneered. The thing about changing outfits and sets for each songs was also something Bush did. She also, before Madonna in 1990, mixed magic, mime, theatre, cabaret and dance. We do not credit Bush and her crew with what other artists are being credited for! Because of that, I think the photos from The Tour of Life are really important. Also, as that same innovator was still blowing people away and raising the bat thirty-five years after she first did, the shots captured during those twenty-two Hammersmith dates are vital.
The one I have chosen is from Ken McKay. I am going to come to a review for Before the Dawn, as it helps frame and contextualise the image. There were some great shots taken at Hammersmith (Bush returning to the same venue she was at in 1979, despite the fact it is the Eventim Apollo). I really like McKay shot, as the set and colours behind Bush are like the sun rising. She is almost welcoming in the day, at the same time as commanding the stage. I know she said how nervous she was when she was performing each night. The lift and warmth from the audience touched her. I am not sure which number Bush is performing in the photo, though you can tell that she is in her stride and drinking it in. Capturing her in an arena at a very special time for a live event that we will never see her repeat, it is one for the memory chest for sure! I was not quick or lucky enough to get a ticket…but, as Alexis Petridis notes when writing for The Guardian, Kate Bush and her musicians/cast pulled off something remarkable:
“Backed by a band of musicians capable of navigating the endless twists and turns of her songwriting – from funk to folk to pastoral prog rock - the performances of Running Up That Hill and King of the Mountain sound almost identical to their recorded versions - but letting rip during a version of Top of the City, she sounds flatly incredible.
You suspect that even if she hadn't, the audience would have lapped it up. Audibly delighted to be in the same room as her, they spend the first part of the show clapping everything she does: no gesture is too insignificant to warrant a round of applause. It would be cloying, but for the fact that Bush genuinely gives them something to cheer about.
For someone who's spent the vast majority of her career shunning the stage, she's a hugely engaging live performer, confident enough to shun the hits that made her famous in the first place: she plays nothing from her first four albums.
The staging might look excessive on paper, but onstage it works to astonishing effect, bolstering rather than overwhelming the emotional impact of the songs. The Ninth Wave is disturbing, funny and so immersive that the crowd temporarily forget to applaud everything Bush does. As each scene bleeds into another, they seem genuinely rapt: at the show's interval, people look a little stunned. A Sky of Honey is less obviously dramatic – nothing much happens over the course of its nine tracks – but the live performance underlines how beautiful the actual music is.
Already widely acclaimed as the most influential and respected British female artist of the past 40 years, shrouded in the kind of endlessly intriguing mystique that is almost impossible to conjure in an internet age, Bush theoretically had a lot to lose by returning to the stage. Clearly, given how tightly she has controlled her own career since the early 80s, she would only have bothered because she felt she had something spectacular to offer. She was right: Before The Dawn is another remarkable achievement”.
In a career spanning nearly five decades, there have been so many iconic and unforgettable images of Kate Bush. I want to finally end this feature with a shot from the last time Bush performed in public. It is one of the more recent photos of her. After 2014, there is the odd shot, though none of her performing. It is almost a time capsule and end of a chapter looking at the snaps from the 2014 residency. Ken McKay helped immortalise a national treasure delivering music that, to many, was akin to a sermon or prayer! One can almost feel the electricity, atmosphere and sheer passion that would have been in the London night back in 2014. Like she was in 1979 (paving the way for the likes of Madonna in terms of spectacle and busting the boundaries of the live experience), Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn in 2014 proved that she was…
SUCH an innovator and ground-breaker.