FEATURE:
Under the Light of the Tawny Moon…
PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn at Twelve
__________
I am going to mark the…
tenth anniversary of its live album in November. In 2014, Kate Bush took to the stage in her first residency. Her first major live work since 1979’s The Tour of Life. When news was announced that Before the Dawn would take place in the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith, London, there was this rush for tickets. Extra dates were added and it was this sold-out extravaganza. I was unfortunate not to be able to get a ticket. Though I have the live album and know a few people who were there. All agreeing that it was a life-affirming and life-changing experience. I can believe that. For fans of Kate Bush who had known her for years and perhaps not seen her live, there was this emotional hit and expectation. Some had seen her in 1979 and noted how Before the Dawn even surpasses the incredible The Tour of Life. Before the Dawn ran from 26th August to 1st October, 2014. There are a couple of reviews that I want to come to. I am going to repeat things I have put in features previously, as I have discussed this stunning residency a far few times! I do want to start out with the Kate Bush Encyclopedia and their resource about Before the Dawn. The residency is significant because it pairs the suite from1985’s Hounds of Love, The Ninth Wave, with A Sky of Honey, the suite from 2005’s Aerial. Both very different but equally powerful, it is an extraordinarily visualisation. The Ninth Wave about a woman lost at sea and struggling to stay alive. A Sky of Honey is the course of a summer’s day. Separate tones and energies, they were paired and brought to life wonderfully. Before those acts, there are a few songs, including a couple from 1993’s The Red Shoes (Lily and Top of the City). The band she recorded with are phenomenal:
“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.
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.
Kate about Before The Dawn
I’d got to a point where I’d down two albums very quickly, one after the other and I didn’t want to go in and make another album. So I thought maybe I should do some live shows. (Laughs) That’s what happened. I didn’t want to do the shows without Bertie because I thought he’d be a very valuable part of the process, which he was, and it needed to fall at a time that worked around his schedule and that happened to be a good time for him.
I thought the whole idea of putting a show together would be a lot of fun. Not that being in it would be fun, that was very frightening. But putting a show together was something I thought I could do. (…)
I really liked the idea of trying to move from what seemed to be a straight rock concert into a piece of theatre. And what I thought would be fascinating – which I’d not seen done before – was moving from obvious rock show, rhythmic lighting to theatrical lighting.
Jim Irvin, ‘Waving… Not Drowning’. Mojo (UK), JaNuary 2017”.
I ended that section with an interview quote. I want to move now to a fuller one. Speaking about the live album with The Independent in 2016, Kate Bush recalled taking to the stage. Somewhere she originally performed at in 1979. Things had changed a lot since 1979. However, her talent, ambition and brilliance was as sharp and peerless. Mounting this stunning show for adoring fans. Putting it all together was a labour of love. Inspired by her son to come to the stage at a time when she would have been doubtful, we are all so glad that Bush delivered the masterpiece that is Before the Dawn:
“I’ve always loved birdsong,” says Kate, “and I suppose that was the starting point for that piece on the record, speculation about whether it’s a language. The key idea was this connection between birdsong and light, that singing seems to be triggered by the breaking of light, and in the absence of light, they stop singing.” She pauses. “Though there’s a few exceptions – nightjars, reed warblers, blackbirds. And of course, the owl!”
In that suite, an artist appreciates the changing light from sunrise through sunset into night, a progress musically evoked in green and golden tones and timbres. It’s balanced in the show by another suite, The Ninth Wave, from 1985’s Hounds of Love, which presents the drifting ruminations of a woman slowly drowning, alone in the ocean at night. The extraordinary staging for the work involved the skeleton ribs of a boat’s hull, a floating buoy, a helicopter, and a Caligari-esque room of odd angularity, while a huge back-projection of a life-jacketed, singing Kate presented her and her crew with one of the production’s more difficult challenges.
“We shot it in a deep water tank at Pinewood Studios,” she explains. “I’d never worked in water before, and we didn’t know, purely from a technical point of view, if we could find a microphone that could cope with being submerged. So a lot of research went into that. Also, lying on your back, it’s a different way to sing, and we weren’t sure we were going to achieve what we wanted, certainly from an audio point of view. What was probably most difficult, particularly on the first day, was that I was in the tank of water for so long that I actually got really cold. Hour by hour, it was becoming more realistic!”
It’s a measure of the dedication with which she approached the project, and of the degree of logistical control she exercised over proceedings.
“The big thing for me, and it has been from quite early on, is to retain creative control over what I’m doing,” says Bush. “If you have creative control, it’s personal. What I didn’t want to do was step into someone else’s show. Also, that was what was exciting for me, the idea of putting this big visual piece together. Though there was the most extraordinary team of people working on the show: there wasn’t a single person on that team that didn’t have very important input on what the show became.”
This includes people like novelist David Mitchell, who wrote the dialogue for some scenes, and her son, Albert McIntosh, who not only acts and sings in the show, but was crucial to its conception and realisation.
“Bertie’s input was absolutely huge on this show,” she says. “His input of ideas was very creative and intelligent, he was a large part, creatively, of the show. I would run all my ideas past him. For instance, I had this idea to have this helicopter flying over the audience, and he said, ‘Maybe it could be more abstract, maybe it should just be a light’, and I thought, ‘Oh yes, that’s so much better’, and from there we took the design further with the lighting designer.”
As writer, producer, star and director of the show, Kate was often required to wear different hats, figuratively; during rehearsals, she would sometimes sit out in the stalls, checking the production worked, while one of her keyboardists stood in for her on vocals.
“Sometimes it was frustrating for some of the band, but I genuinely had to spend a lot of time out in the stalls, watching it, so I could check it all works,” she says. “It was like putting a huge jigsaw puzzle together, and it took a long time to get it all put in place. It was probably about 14 months from deciding to do it, to the first night.”
She was helped, as director, by her experience making videos and short films, an interest which effectively supplanted her interest in live performance. Despite being one of pop’s more naturally gifted and inventive stage performers, Kate had not done live shows since her initial tour in 1979, a hiatus that led to her reputation as something of a recluse.
“It wasn’t designed that way, because I really enjoyed the first set of shows we did,” she says. “The plan at the time was that I was going to do another two albums’ worth of fresh material, and then do another show. But of course, by the time I got to the end of what was The Dreaming album, it had gone off on a slight tilt, because I’d become so much more involved in the recording process. And also, every time I finish an album, I go into visual projects, and even if they’re quite short pieces, they’re still a huge amount of work to put together. So I started to veer away from the thing of being a live performing artist, to one of being a recording artist with attached visuals.”
It must have been quite difficult, then, to return to live performance after such a time away from the stage?
“Yes, I was very nervous,” she says. “I wasn’t sure if I would be any good, that was my concern. I knew that I would enjoy putting the show together – in a lot of ways, I approached it as if I was making a really long video, because a lot of my visual work is quite theatrical, so this theatrical work would be quite filmic, it would be a natural progression. But I was very nervous about going onstage and performing. But the response was just beyond anything I could have wished for, every night, the audiences were so excited and so responsive.”
The initial impetus for the show, she explains, came from the balance between the two suites.
“What made it an interesting project for me was that there were these two narrative pieces, very much in opposition to each other, and that would allow me to create a piece of theatre, rather than just be a concert with added theatrics. And I felt they were so contrasting: one is full of deep, dark water, and the other one is full of golden light”.
I will finish off with a couple of reviews. Those fortunate enough to see one of the twenty-two shows. That first night on 26th August, 2014 brought celebrities and embers of the public together. It was one of the most anticipated live shows ever. I can only imagine the excitement in the air! Even though DIY acknowledge that Before the Dawn is overblown and prosperous in places, it is a unique and captivating experience:
“Barefoot and dressed in elegant black, she strolls around the stage gently, occasionally twirling. It begins with ‘Lily’ as she leads a small group of backing singers that includes her son Bertie (who, she says, has given her the "courage" to return to the stage). The band that line up behind her are as tight as you would imagine. They play ‘Hounds Of Love’ and ‘Running Up That Hill’. They sound huge, they sound brilliant. If there’s one thing you notice most it’s that her voice is remarkably powerful and it’s brilliant on ‘King Of The Mountain’ which brings the opening ‘scene’ to a close, heralding a storm as a bullroarer fills the air and cannons fill the theatre with confetti.
It's now time for the drama of 'The Ninth Wave', the second half of 'Hounds of Love'. Here we see a story of resignation and resurrection played out in the most theatrical of ways. We see Bush in a lifejacket floating in water, looking up at the camera as if waiting to be rescued (she’s reported to have spent three days in a flotation tank at Pinewood Studios to create the special effects). At one point fish skeletons dance across the waves, at another a helicopter searches the crowd, before a living room (yes, a living room) floats across the stage in which a son and his father – played by Bertie and Bush's husband Danny McIntosh – talk at length about sausages.
It’s hard to comprehend exactly what’s happening but the band skilfully navigate the pastoral prog and Celtic rock. Even when the music isn’t captivating, the sheer sense of spectacle means you can’t avert your eyes for a second. As the ‘The Morning Fog’ brings the performance to a close with another standing ovation.
After a twenty minute interval – during which time the bars buzz with delirium – the third act sees her play out ‘Sky of Honey’, the entire second half of 'Aerial'. It’s so intricately detailed that you get the feeling Bush had always planned to perform these two scenes live.
‘Honey’ is a grandiose daydream moving through a summer's day. Again the scope of her vision is immense – even when the songs don’t enthral the enormous paper planes and human birds do, as we see a wooden mannequin finding himself lost and alone. Bertie plays a major part throughout dressed as a 19th-century artist – and at one point telling the mannequin to "piss off". It ends, as only it could, with Bush gaining wings and flying.
She returns to earth to perform a solo version of ‘Among Angels’ on the piano, before the band return to help close the show with a joyful ‘Cloudbusting’. "I just know that something good is going to happen", she sings as a now even more euphoric crowd jump to their feet.
Then she’s gone. You’re left with the image of a singer who has managed to retain her mystery and surprise. An enigma, the mythic artist who is intensely human. It’s overblown and preposterous and brilliant. All its startling achievements, magical highs and am dram faults – its relentless ambition and human imperfections – make it the only document you could possibly have asked for from such a unique artist. Before the Dawn is everything you would expect but couldn’t imagine”.
I am going to finish with a review from PROG and their review. It would be, as they suggest, no exaggeration to say that Before the Dawn is one of the most important music events of this century. It does make it all the more painful that I was not there! However, I am dropping in songs from the Before the Dawn live album. You can get a sense of the sense of awe and wonder at the Eventim Apollo twelve years ago:
“On the opening night of the run, the applause as Bush and band walk on is deafening. Luckily our hearing returns to register that the 56-year-old, barefoot, wearing black, is singing Lily, Hounds Of Love, Joanni, Running Up That Hill, Top Of The City and King Of The Mountain. It’s a conventional – if uncommonly adept – set-up for this introductory spell, the musicians (two guitars, two keyboards, two drummers, bass, five backing vocalists) vigorous yet smooth. We acclimatise to the fact that Kate Bush is onstage, confident and potent.
Then comes the evening’s pinnacle: the ground is swept from beneath our feet and things get giddy. The Ninth Wave is performed: an epic production, almost an opera. The narrative is enacted, gliding from film of a floating-in-water Bush, singing in a life jacket, through the tale of a woman lost at sea as her life flashes before her. This includes stunning trickery (the stage becomes the sea bed, peopled by fish skeletons and other surreal creatures); visuals not witnessed since Pink Floyd’s stadium heyday (a lighting rig posing as a helicopter swoops in and out of the crowd, emitting lasers and voices); and some distinctly odd acting cameos (Kate’s son Bertie plays prominent roles).
At one point Kate appears from nowhere, Houdini-like, in a mock living room, complete with sofa, lampshade and TV. In another scene she’s rescued from beneath the ice, in a hole carved from the stage. There’s a jig, there’s a wake as the fish-people carry her away, and there’s catharsis. Everyone emerges for the intermission blinking, a bit speechless and completely overwhelmed.
Clearly, performing The Ninth Wave is something the singer’s envisaged for a long time. You have to deduce she feels it’s her masterpiece. The total absence of any early-career hits here may bother some (those who wanted Wuthering Heights or Babooshka have come to the right venue in the wrong decade), but this is a legacy-redefining appearance by pop’s Maria Callas. There can never again be any argument that she isn’t prog..
Can the second half live up to the first? Almost, if not quite. Giving us A Sky Of Honey (the second disc of Aerial) in full, it’s (relatively) a more relaxed affair. Loaded with imagery nonetheless – birds, paintings, moons, mannequins – it ripples through its course, Bush in exquisite voice, her musicians dextrous, until its extraordinary crescendo. Now the rhythms get manic, guitars squeal, and to top this chaos of multifaceted motion, Bush grows wings and soars – albeit momentarily – into the air. The audience gape.
After she thanks us profusely for our “warm response”, there’s an encore of Among Angels performed solo at the piano, followed by a euphoric full-band singalong of Cloudbusting. The crowd are still roaring five minutes after the house lights have gone up.
‘Big concept’ shows like this have hidden away since Bowie’s Glass Spider tour took a kicking. It may be that Kate Bush has brought mannerisms often reductively labelled as prog back to mainstream acceptance. Or it could just be that Britain’s most gifted female star can do anything she wants, such is the love and adoration displayed here. The young girl who once yelped ‘Wow’ is now a mature woman confirmed as the genius godmother of art rock. Thirty-five years on, the moment is hers again”.
On 26th August, it is going to be twelve years since the first date of Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn. One of the most acclaimed concerts in decades, fans got to see The Ninth Wave and A Sky of Honey brought to life. Backed by a phenomenal band and crew, Bush wowed audiences and critics alike. Before the Dawn has its flaws, though it is a masterpiece. You can see artists today who stage these incredible productions who were clearly nodding to Kate Bush in a way. By what she did in 2014. Her staggering residency is one of the greatest live events…
IN music history.