FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s The Tour of Life at Forty-Seven
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performing at the London Palladium during the midway point of The Tour of Life on 19th April, 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Pete Still/Redferns
Thinking About the Preparation and Rehearsals
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ON 2nd April…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush pictured in Liverpool shortly before her The Tour of Life date at the city’s Empire Theatre on 3rd April, 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
it will be forty-seven years since the warm-up gig for Kate Bush’s The Tour of Life. I would first recommend you buy Max Cookney’s Kate Bush: On Location from last year, as it spotlights important locations that Bush filmed or performed in. Or just those significant in terms of her career. Whilst most discuss Kate Bush in terms of her music but we do not get to hear about the places and spaces that are vital, this book is invaluable and illuminating. Cookney writes about some of the venues for The Tour of Life (or The Lionheart Tour). One that struck my eye is The Rainbow Theatre. That is located on 232-238 Seven Sisters Road. I live right near there (is no longer open as a music venue, but the building still exists. It was acquired in 1995 by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) and converted into a church, which remains active there today), and this Finsbury Park’s spot was really important in terms of The Tour of Life. It was where the final rehearsals took place. Built in 1930, this was originally a four-thousand-seat cinema called the Finsbury Park Astoria. From the early-1960s, the Astoria was used for one-night concert. The Beatles and Frank Sinatra were among those who played there. The Astoria became the Rainbow Theatre in November 1971. The venue was then exclusively used for Rock concerts. I can imagine how Kate Bush attracted to it. It was sadly closed in 1981 because of license violations, running costs and poor maintenance. It was designated as a Grade II building in 1974 so was protected from demolition. It seems like the tour crew moved to the theatre on 15th March, 1979 and were there for a six-day-long period of rehearsals. Scheduled to begin on 18th March, everyone would get the weekend off and return on 26th to begin a further four days of dress rehearsals. The first public performance of The Tour of Life was set to start on 1st April, 1979.
The Rainbow Theatre was not the first choice. Richard Ames, Kate Bush’s Tour Manager, has kept a lot of the itinerary and paperwork from that time. You can see some of the archives here. The Duke of York’s (which was a lot smaller than the Rainbow Theatre) and Theatre Royal in Drury Lane (the 1976 production of A Chorus Line was about to close). The Rainbow Theatre was chosen because it did not have any long-running shows playing there and there were few restrictions. It was mostly empty. I can attest, living in a very old property with no central heating, that you do need heaters on pretty much all year round. That was doubly true in March of 1979, so Richard Ames did hire heaters to keep the crew (and Bush) warm. They cost £13 a week each…plus the gas. I am taking that from Kate Bush: On Location. Before talking about the locations and London spots that were used for preparation and rehearsals for The Tour of Life, I do want to quote from Richard Ames’s recollections. It is great that we have this archive. Also, read his memories of The Tour of Life coming to Europe:
“Billy Duffield was my friend. I saw him and his girlfriend socially as well working with him on previous tours. I tell this whole sad story as it happened on this audio clip but it's important to me that he's remembered for giving the whole show a massive boost of confidence as we went through the dress rehearsals at the Rainbow. Billy was not one of the original crew hired for the tour, it was deemed necessary to bring in a lighting desk operator at the very last moment with 2 or 3 days of rehearsals left before the first show. I suggested Billy be called and he was available, and between tours. He had worked last year with me on Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel and the band Sailor, and he was the LD for Peter Gabriel as well.
So he came in and got to grips with the show and instantly made the light show snappier and more dramatic. He had amazing reactions and could pull and push a fader in an instant. The management team were delighted and as I said, as we left for Poole Arts centre everyone was very excited.
We had decided before the tour began to have a spare room for "Mr Smith" at every hotel to meet up and chill out in after the shows. It was a communal room, band and crew alike just hanging out, having a beer and a smoke.
It was in this room at the hotel in Bournemouth after the Poole show that I got the awful phone call from Nick Levitt that there had been an accident, that Billy had fallen through a hole in the audience seating and landed on his head 15 feet below. I got down to the venue, walked through the scene and then went straight to the hospital. I spent the rest of the night there trying to locate the phone number of his parents, the only persons the hospital were interested in talking to.....
Well Edinburgh was just a little insane. The mess we made of Mr Smith's room cost a packet and I tell Paul the story in the audio clip above. It's not just rock and roll bands that get a little out of hand you know!!!
I must also tell the short story of our first night at the London Palladium. Kate had the 'star' dressing room and somehow, I just don't know how, the TV got stoved in, broken, it was an accident. Well, the staff there thought we were hooligans for some reason and very nearly banned Kate from the room for the rest of our stay. We begged and pleaded with them and it was forgotten about the next day, thank God.
Well, to play Oxford was truly amazing for me, my home town and I got to invite my mother to the show and have her meet Kate at the hotel for drinks after the show. It hasn't been often that I got to play in Oxford, I think was my second or third time, as in 1978 we played the Oxford Polytechnic with The Cars. Anyway we stayed there overnight at a little 3-star hotel called the Linton Lodge off of the Banbury Road.
In the morning as it wasn't so far to Southampton, we took a small detour and went 2 miles up the road to my favorite pub, The Trout in Wolvercote. As a schoolboy I used to work there in the summer holidays, a beautiful place right next to the river. It's still going strong. Anyway we stopped there for a pint of beer before legging it down to Southampton for the next show”.
I do think that we the preparations for The Tour of Life are so interesting. The same with 2014’s Before the Dawn. In terms of London and the locations Bush worked in through her early career, there should be this new map or podcast. From Covent Garden to Elephant and Castle to the pubs and clubs the KT Bush Band played in through 1977, it is really fascinating looking at these areas and spaces. I want to bring in Dreams of Orgonon, and their words around The Tour of Life. Thinking about Kate Bush moving between these London locations. Slowly bringing together The Tour of Life:
“Planning for Bush’s tour (known then and during its existence just as the Kate Bush Tour) began at the end of December 1978 with a brainstorming session involving Bush and set designer David Jackson at EMI’s headquarters. Further preliminary meetings were held at East Wickham Farm in January, and shortly afterwards Bush was meeting wardrobe consultant Lisa Hayes. Rehearsals then began in earnest: Bush spent mornings at The Place performance center in Euston, preparing the tour’s dance routines with choreographer Anthony Van Laast (now of Mamma Mia! and Harry Potter fame) and dancers Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst. These sessions were as collaborative as they were instructive: Bush had worked with Van Laast before, as he’d appeared in the “Hammer Horror” music video as her masked dancing partner. They spent the mornings designing routines for the show, informed by Van Laast’s seasoned dancing skill and Bush’s mime training. It was a positive union: the resulting concerts have notable dancing which is inseparable from the songs it’s set to. As Bush had to both sing and dance onstage, she and Van Laast worked out choreography that would both work as dance and allow her to sing without losing her breath. The minimalism of “Moving” and Bush’s all-limb gesturing during it is one such careful work of planning, as is her most frenetic gun-happiness during the extended bridge of “James and the Cold Gun,” where she doesn’t sing.
Rehearsals for the tour’s music were staged initially at Wood Wharf Studios in Greenwich, before moving to Surrey’s eminent Shepperton Studios in March. The shows were precisely outlined, retaining the ideas of The Kick Inside and Lionheart while developing them further onstage. Lionheart is at its core a work of musical theater, and its stage incarnation helped it to be the best version of itself. Out was the ill-paced sequencing of the album, supplanted with a solid theatrical structure. Bush also had a different lineup of musicians than her two albums so far: she’d begun sneaking the KT Bush Band into the studio by including them on “Wow” and “Kashka from Baghdad,” but a proper reunion of the old touring group was mostly in swing onstage. It wasn’t the exact same band (drummers Charlie Morgan and Vic King declined to return), but the quartet of Bush, bassist (and her partner) Del Palmer, guitarist and bandleader Brian Bath, and stalwart polymath Paddy Bush were playing music together again. Preston Heyman, Bush’s best drummer to date, joined the group and brought a percussive explosiveness to the concerts that the albums lacked (“when he hit the cymbal Kate used to blink,” said Brian Bath). Keyboardist Ben Barson, saxophonist and pianist Kevin McAlea, and guitarist Alan Murphy were the other new additions to the group, assuring that the shows would sound as lush as Bush’s albums”.
I want to include words I wrote in 2024, and how another venue was considered for the London leg of The Tour of Life: “Although not explicitly named at the time, instead of the Hammersmith Odeon – where she ended the run -, there were plans to use a beautiful venue that was hanger-like. The only one that logically fitted the description is Alexandra Palace in London. Bush felt sick when she released how small she would be compared to the vastness of that space! There were plans at one point to incorporate robots into the set”. Whilst Bush and her crew toured the U.K. and Europe in some amazing venues in 1979, I am thinking about the humbler foundation. The rehearsals and preparations that mainly took place in London. I guess there would have had to be some secrecy around the rehearsals. So that the press did not intrude and spoil anything. Bush had a big hand in everything about the tour. I can imagine that she was keen to rehearse in locations that felt comfortable and private. The Rainbow Theatre was a great choice for those final rehearsals. Imagining her rocking up in Finsbury Park in March 1979. Forward a few days to that warm-up gig at Poole. Performing at the Wessex Hall, which Richard Ames described as being a “live rehearsal for the big theatres”, and a show that “went just absolutely beautiful”, things rolled on from there. The first official date was 3rd April, 1979 at the Liverpool Empire. You can read more about the tour here. As we mark forty-seven years of Kate Bush’s only tour, I did want to spend a bit more time looking at the rehearsals and the preparation. The final moments before the rave reviews came in and she was being cheered by loving crowds each night, it would have been exciting putting the final touches on. What would come was this…
EXTRAORDINARY live experience.