FEATURE:
Oh Thou, Who Givest Sustenance to the Universe
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during the shooting of the video for And Dream of Sheep, a song that is part of her suite, The Ninth Wave/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn at Eight
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ON 26th August, 2014…
Kate Bush performed the first night of a twenty-two-date run at the Evetim Apollo. Before the Dawn was Bush’s most extensive set of live dates since 1979’s The Tour of Life. I was not lucky enough to get a ticket to see her, but I have a vinyl copy of the residency. I don’t think people had an inkling Bush was returning to the stage. I know, in an interview long before she announced the news, Peter Gabriel almost let slip that something of this sort was happening. Bush announced her plans to perform via her website on 21st March, 2014. One can only imagine the nerves and excitement in her bones just before she came out on that first night to an adoring and anticipating audience on 26th August! I am going to come to a review of Before the Dawn. I will also give my thoughts about the residency, and whether Bush will ever do anything live again. Before that, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia provided some details about the band, dates and setlist:
“Band
The band playing with Kate Bush on stage consisted of David Rhodes (guitar), Friðrik Karlsson (guitar, bouzouki, charango), John Giblin (bass guitar, double bass), Jon Carin (keyboards, guitar, vocals, programming), Kevin McAlea (keyboards, accordion, uilleann pipes). Omar Hakim (drums), Mino Cinélu (percussion). Backing vocalists were Sandra Marvin, Jacqui DuBois, Jo Servi, Bob Harms and Albert McIntosh. Some actors were involved as well: Ben Thompson played Lord of the Waves, Stuart Angell played Lord of the Waves and the painter's apprentice, Christian Jenner played the blackbird's spirit, Jo Servi played witchfinder and Albert McIntosh appeared as painter. Supporting actors were Sean Myatt, Richard Booth, Emily Cooper, Lane Paul Stewart and Charlotte Williams.
Act 2
A Sky Of Honey
Prelude
Prologue
An Architect's Dream
The Painter's Link
Sunset
Aerial Tal
Somewhere In Between
Tawny Moon (lead vocals by Albert McIntosh)
Nocturn
Aerial
Encore
Dates
26 August 2014 (Before The Dawn, Before The Dawn From Apollo)
27 August 2014 (Before The Dawn, Before The Dawn From Apollo)
29 August 2014 (Before The Dawn From Apollo III)
30 August 2014
2 September 2014
3 September 2014
5 September 2014
6 September 20149
9 September 2014
10 September 2014
12 September 2014 (Before The Dawn From Apollo XI)
13 September 2014 (London Eventim Apollo, 2014-09-13)
16 September 2014
17 September 2014
19 September 2014
20 September 2014 (The Sixteenth Wave)
23 September 2014
24 September 2014
26 September 2014
27 September 2014
30 September 2014
1 October 2014 (Before The Dawn Live On Stage)
Attending celebrities
During the run of the show, several celebrities were spotted in the audience, while others took to social media to confirm they saw the show. Some of the names of celebrities that have seen the live show are Lily Allen, Marc Almond, Gemma Arterton, Bjork, Peter Gabriel, Dave Gilmour, Guido Harari, Holly Johnson, Lauren Laverne, Annie Lennox, Paul McCartney, Caitlin Moran, Frank Skinner and Ricky Wilde.
Recordings
While Kate requested there was to be no photographing or filming during the evenings, many members of the audience have recorded the sound of the concert instead. Sound recordings from the audience exist from 10 of the 22 dates. On September 16 and 17, some seats were moved in order "to film the show for a DVD release", according to an e-mail to some fans who had bought tickets for these two shows. In 2016, the album Before The Dawn was released, with live recordings from the shows”.
It is amazing that it is only eight years since Kate Bush came back to the stage for Before the Dawn. By all accounts, there was huge excitement and celebration on the first night. With famous actors, musicians and fans pouring in to see their idol on stage, this was a concept and show that would never be repeated or bettered. Before concluding, the review I want to bring in is from D.J., author, label boss and writer, Pete Paphides. He writes beautifully about his feelings when he saw Kate Bush wow a Hammersmith crowd:
“So this is where epiphanies happen, and few people are better placed to tell you about that than Kate Bush. On July 3rd 1973, she came here, to the Hammersmith Odeon, with her brothers to see David Bowie declare on stage that Ziggy was about to die and he was taking The Spiders From Mars with him. In that moment, she cried (as she later recalled, “it looked like he was crying too”) and the dramatic expiry of one pop star acted as the catalyst for another. Six years later, Bush concluded her Tour Of Life in Hammersmith. Between Ziggy’s swan song and what for the longest time people imagined to be her own live swan song, punk had happened, leaving seemingly little impression on Kate Bush. In truth, it had nothing to offer her.
In the foyer of the Hammersmith Odeon before the third of Kate Bush’s first shows in 35 years, it’s hard to make generalisations. But I’ll allow myself this one about the guy next to me who, despite never having met me, keeps passing his binoculars to me so I can see what he’s seeing. And the male twentysomething fan who will brave the tube home dressed in a white cotton tunic, black tights, face painted in white and silver, his hair wreathed by leaves and twigs. And the woman who has gone to the trouble of having a dress made just like the one festooned with clouds on the sleeve of Never For Ever. And the woman who rushes from her seat during the encore of Cloudbusting to hand a bouquet of lilies to Bush (who, in turn, receives it between bows). “Too much” is why we came. There’s nothing more antithetical to Kate Bush’s music than sensory temperance. For three hours, it’s like finding out there was a Dolby switch pressed on your consciousness. The moment that Bush, draped in black and barefoot, marches in a soft, shuffling procession, flanked by her five backing singers, you turn it off. You might need it for the journey to work on Monday, but it’s of no use to you now.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features
She smiles beatifically throughout Lily — the invocation to guardian angels which originally appeared on The Red Shoes and, in 2011, The Director’s Cut — apart from when attacking the top notes, which she does with the phlegm-rattling zeal of a seasoned soul singer. The love in the room is unlike anything I’ve seen at a live show. Given free rein, it would surely result in an instant surge to the stage, but it’s tempered by a deference which extends to uniform acceptance of Bush’s stated no-cameras request. As a consequence, the first three songs are bookended by a total of six standing ovations. Hounds Of Love is exactly what it should be given the passage of three decades: drummer Omar Hakim and perma-grining percussion talisman Mino Cinelu hold back the rhythmic landslide, creating space for a vocal pitched closer to resignation than combativeness. Eighteen months ago, when Bush’s son Bertie McIntosh (then 15) finally persuaded her to return to live performance, the first two people she pencilled in for the project were the lighting designer Mark Henderson and Hakim. Within the opening section, it isn’t hard to see why Bush wanted to assemble her band around Hakim. Running Up That Hill is every bit as unyielding and startling as it was the very first time you heard it: doubly so for the incoming storm whipped up from the back of the stage. On King Of The Mountain, he reprises the freestyling pyrotechnics of his turn on Daft Punk’s Giorgio By Moroder. Everything about King Of The Mountain, in fact, is astonishing. Bush navigates her way around the song’s rising sense of portent with a mixture of fear and fascination that puts you in mind of professional storm chasers. When they’re not singing, her backing vocalists dance as if goading some unholy denouement into action, before finally Cinelu steps into a misty spotlight. On the end of a rope which he demonically twirls ever faster is some sort of primitive wooden cyclone simulator.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is that this — King Of The Mountain and the preceding songs — is a preamble to the first act. In 1985, as Hounds Of Love was being readied for release, Kate Bush sketched out a putative film script for The Ninth Wave — the 30 minute suite of songs, which shared its title with Ivan Aivanovsky’s 1850 painting of a group castaways clinging to floating debris as dawn approaches. But, as she writes in the programme, “In many ways, it lends itself better to the medium of stage.” She’s referring to the conceit at the heart of The Ninth Wave and, yes, she’s right. What would have been impossibly confusing on film is only occasionally confusing when played out on stage. On a screen, we see the stranded protagonist in her lifejacket in palpable distress, relying on scenes from her past and future to keep her from slipping under. On stage we see those feverish visions played out before us. If Bush’s distress looks unsettlingly convincing on the screen, that might be because the 20ft deep tank at Pinewood Studios in which she had to be immersed for several hours pushed her to method actor extremes: singing live whilst gradually succumbing to a fever which was later diagnosed by her GP as “mild hypothermia.”
At times you imagine every prog-rock star who reluctantly had their wings clipped by punk feeling a sense of unalloyed vindication at the scenes being played out here. After the release of 2011’s 50 Words For Snow, I interviewed Kate Bush and asked her about recent musical inspirations. I figured that someone must surely have played her Joanna Newsom’s Ys whilst exclaiming, “Look! A kindred spirit!” (they hadn’t) But actually, she probably has no need of new input. It’s increasingly apparent that Bush’s musical hard drive was full by the time she made her first record. As Watching You Without Me modulates into Jig Of Life, I try and pin the musical sense of deja vu to an actual memory. Finally it comes to me. This sort of spectral somnambulant ceilidh was precisely the sort of thing which arty stoners in the early 70s — arty stoners such as Bush’s older brothers — would have sought out in the albums of Harvest Records outliers Third Ear Band. Except, of course, the one thing that Third Ear Band lacked was a cosmically attuned sensualist to act as a smiling Trojan horse to her own avant-garde sensibilities. And so, here we are. A generation of pop fans suckered by Wuthering Heights, Wow and Babooshka. And we’re watching four people in fish heads wheel in a floating bit of rig illuminated by red flares. In a moment, she will climb aboard before the fish people claim her, carrying her aloft away from the sea, and among us through the aisle before, finally, The Morning Fog. This is perhaps as beautiful as anything we have seen up to this point. Dancers and singers take their partners. and, bathed in golden light, Bush exchanges glances with her fellow players. Everything you have seen in the preceding hour is the result of more than a year of drilled, deliberate meticulous planning. And yet, on the back of such vertiginous terrain, Bush gazes at her fellow performers with the relieved air of a trainee pilot who had to land a Boeing Airbus after the rest of the cabin crew had passed out.
It could end there. It really could. That was a whole show, right there. But on the other side of the intermission, it’s all change once again. Comprising the second half of 2005’s Aerial, A Sky Of Honey emerged from Bush’s fascination with the connection between light and birdsong and then, as she puts it: “Us, observing nature. Us, being there.” Without realising it, with those last three words, Bush may have propelled us to the essence of our connection with much of her most affecting music (The Sensual World, Breathing, Snowflake). The Ninth Wave is really about the miraculous, ungraspable nature of human consciousness. And, if the subtext — intended or otherwise — of that piece is that only we humans can reflect upon what it means to die, then the subtext of A Sky Of Honey is that only we humans can reflect upon what a gazillion-to-one miracle it is to be alive. Us, observing nature. Us, being there.
Few musicians are more adept at conveying a sense that something good is going to happen than Kate Bush. We know what Nocturn sounds like on record, so a certain sense of expectation is unavoidable. On either side of the stage, we see arrows fired from bows into the firmament, where they turn into birds. For reasons I couldn’t honestly fathom, we see the painter’s model sacrificing a seagull to no discernible end. Over a rising funk that defies physical resistance, Bush makes a break for transcendence and effectively brings us with her: “We stand in the Atlantic/We become panoramic,” she sings, with arms aloft. Like the rest of the band, guitarist David Rhodes has donned bird mask. As Bush is presented with vast black wings, she and Rhodes circle elegantly around each other, before finally, briefly, she takes flight.
Just two songs by way of an encore — which, after what has preceded them, seems generous: Among Angels from 2011’s Fifty Words For Snow is performed solo at the piano, before the entire band return for Cloudbusting. Once again, we’re reminded that, almost uniquely among her peers, Kate Bush goes to extraordinary lengths in search of subjects that hold up that magic of living up to the light for just long enough to think that we can reach it. But, like the beaming 56 year-old mother singing, “The sun’s coming out”, that too dissipates into memory. And, after another 19 performances, what will happen? In another 35 years, Kate Bush will be 91. Even if she’s still here, we might not be. Perhaps that’s why tonight, she gave us everything she had. And somehow, either in spite or because of that, we still didn’t want to let her go”.
Many ask whether Kate Bush will ever do another stage show. I don’t see that happening. At sixty-four, perhaps the physicality of performing such a demanding show for so many nights would be too much. Also, as Bush has explained, which songs would she perform!? A residency now would need a theme and arc like Before the Dawn. You can read Pete Paphides’ words. It was such a personal and powerful show that touched everyone in attendance. Bush would not come back and put together a greatest hits package. In terms of albums that have either never been played live or have only had the odd song played, it would leave Never for Ever (1980), The Dreaming (1982), The Sensual World (1989), The Red Shoes (1993), and 50 Words for Snow (2011). Some of those albums have had some material featured, but it would be hard to pair albums into concepts.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features
I was thinking that, if ever see did do something live, it would be more intimate. I asked whether a stripped-back concert at Abbey Road Studios would work. Maybe her at the piano, it would almost return her to her roots. Even if, early in her career, Bush was asked about performing live at a piano and she said that it would have little point and not give much value to fans (as she had much grander ambitions and knew that small-scale would not be a good option), it seems like a more suitable decision today. Bush has enjoyed such a long and successful career, one feels her attitudes are different now. In any case, it seems that new music is much more likely than live work. Above all, fans hope that we have not heard the last from Kate Bush. I thought Before the Dawn was this bridge between the 2011 50 Words for Snow album and another album. It has been eight years since the first night of Before the Dawn, so you do wonder whether anything will follow it. Rather than speculate, let’s look back – and buy the album if you do not own it – at an event few thought would ever happen. To have been there at one of the twenty-two nights must have been otherworldly! It was clear that there was…
SUCH magic in the air.