FEATURE:
It’s Always Darkest…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during her Before the Dawn residency at the Eventim Apollo, London in 2014/PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features
Why the Live Album of Kate Bush’s 2014 Residency, Before the Dawn, Is Especially Important to Me Now
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I have another…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a publicity photo for Before the Dawn/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
feature scheduled to mark ten years of Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn live album. It was released on 25th November, 2016. Not to place it in the savagery and bleakness of 2016, but it was a year when we lost more than a few music icons. Two of whom, David Bowie and Prince, Bush had either worked with (Prince) or was a massive fan of (she attended the final Ziggy Stardust gig in 1973 and was a massive Bowie fan). George Michael died on Christmas Day. It did seem to be this unrelenting year where we lost so many great artists. One brief flicker of light came in the form of one of the greatest live albums ever. I have said before how one of the biggest regrets of my life was not being at Before the Dawn in 2014. Twenty-two dates at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith, this is a venue important to Kate Bush. Aside from witnessing that seismic Ziggy Stardust farewell in 1973, she also performed there several times during 1970 for The Tour of Life. It was obvious that this venue would be the place her residency would be held! Not wanting to tour, and conscious of the tire of travelling, she could easily access this venue, and there was not the upheaval of moving sets and people from venue to venue. Also, the Eventim Apollo is one of the best and most amazing venues in the country. For anyone who has been there, it is right opposite the Tube exit. You come out and across the road is this wonderful venue. I am not sure whether there is a word for it. The sensation of trauma that you get for missing out on this life-affirming event. Rather than it being P.T.S.D. (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), it is this hyper-mega F.O.M.O. (Fear of Missing Out). I am not sure exactly why I did not get a ticket in 2014. I can blame the fact everything sold out within minutes and I would have had to have been late for work in order to get a ticket. The honest answer is that I don’t think my fandom was as huge in 2014 as it is now.
If it were repeated now, I would grab a couple of tickets and pay anything for them. I would get V.I.P. tickets, and I would be the first person to the venue. Hours before anyone else, I would be drinking it all in and ensure I was the first through the door. Whilst that may seem extreme, it is impossible to overstate how transformative these gigs were. Everyone who I know who was in one of the audiences says it was one of the greatest moments of their lives. I would gobble up all the merchandise and ensure that I had an armful of Before the Dawn swag! I would also be the final one out of the venue. Standing there agog and exhausted after what could only be a soul-enriching and unforgettable experience. I have the live album. It is great that there were some interviews around the release (such as this and this). The best is with Matt Everitt for BBC Radio 6 Music. I hope, when Kate Bush releases a new album – it is a case of when and not if now -, he gets to chat with her. It seems that between 2014 and 2016, Bush was so immersed in mixing and producing this album. One might assume she’d go to the soundboard and download/upload a set and mix it. Instead, there are performances from different dates. It was a tireless task getting it to come together and sound perfect. I can listen to the album and I do get a sense of what people felt in 2014. When I bought the vinyl edition of Before the Dawn, I had an empty house – my parents were out for the evening -,. and I put it on, lay on the carpet with my eyes closed, and I transported myself to the Eventim Apollo. Even if some reviews of the residency say there was the odd miss or imperfect moment – a couple of the between-song set-pieces, and the fact that there were some loose seams or slightly underwhelming bits here and there -, it was a seismic moment (this review of the live album is pretty insightful). This was the first major live undertaking for Kate Bush since 1979’s The Tour of Life. Following her 2011 album, 50 Words for Snow, fans would have wished for something live. Though this album is perhaps not one that instantly lends itself to the stage. Or a bigger production. I do feel, mind, when there is another album, Bush could fuse songs from that, 50 Words for Snow, and a few other albums and come up with something brilliant.
One of the questions people ask me when they discover I am a Kate Bush fan is whether I was at Before the Dawn. Almost like a fishing hook being removed from my testicles, there is this psychic pain that definitely stings! I think it hurts particularly because memories of that gig could sustain me today. Things were bad in 2014, though it was a time relatively calm compared to today. David Bowie was still alive. And Prince. Only three years after her most recent studio album, fans got to witness this incredible live experience! I have argued before the Dawn has influenced some of the biggest-budget and acclaimed tours of the modern day. In terms of mixing various forms of media and the scale of it. One of the main reasons for doing the residency – aside from her son Bertie giving his encouragement and push – was joining her two suites. The Ninth Wave from Hounds of Love (1985), together with A Sky of Honey from 2005’s Aerial. The former about Bush/a woman who is out of sea after falling from a boat. It is about her experiences staying afloat and alive. Different visions and themes explored in the songs. She is eventually rescued, though those who were at Before the Dawn felt that the events playing out suggested Bush drowned and she not saved. Her original vision was that the woman made it to land and was saved, though people attest that the 2014 version has an unhappier outcome. A Sky of Honey is the course of a summer day. From the struggle and scares of the sea to the purity, scale and wonder of the sky, it is the underneath to the depths of the ocean, joining with the scope and wonder of what lies above us. In my head, I feel the woman who survived The Ninth Wave is the same who gets to witness and voyage through the summer’s day! In 2026, perhaps we have reached peak despair. This is how Caitlin Moran has categorised the here and now. Her new book, How to Be Hopeful, is extraordinary. I have heard her talk about it and say that we have probably reached the peak of how bad things will be.
I listen back to Before the Dawn because it offers this escape. Even though it was twelve years ago, it does seem like a different time. Twelve year ago today (24th September, 2014), Bush was readying herself for one of the last dates on the residency. She would perform four more dates after that, enduing on 1st October. I listen back to that Matt Everitt interview and get some insight from Bush about how she felt. Nervous every night, the best moments for her when things were over! Perhaps too distracted and anxious until then, you cannot feel any nerves listening to the performances. The live album is so astonishing because of that voice. Arguably at its peak, there is this rawness and power that sends shivers down the spine. For me, not only is Before the Dawn a chance to briefly block out the savagery of the current times. In personal terms, it is a particularly dark time. I am severely unhappy in my job and I have high anxiety, insomnia and depression. It is a very challenging time where I am struggling to find light. Not that Kate Bush alone can overturn that – my family are the ones who can do that -, but immersing myself in Before the Dawn and imagining I am in the audience provides some respite. Though that pain of not actually being there will stay with me forever. I am hopeful Bush will do something live again. A while ago, when David Gilmour was being interviewed, he was asked if he thought Bush would perform lived again. He said (rightly) how Kate Bush is the only one who can answer that. Emma Barnett interviewed Bush and repeated this answer, asking Bush when she would perform live again. Bush said, with a slight laugh, how she was not there yet. Not a refusal or closing the door. It makes me think that, after another album comes out, she will do something. Even if it is a single gig or something smaller-scale than Before the Dawn. Given the way her legacy has expanded and deepened since 2014, there are so many people who did not see he live back then who would die to do so. A reason why you cannot rule out Bush taking to the stage again.
One of the biggest losses is how the filmed gigs never made it to the public. The idea was that there would be a D.V.D.; though I feel Bush was unhappy. Maybe with her physical appearance, she may have felt too self-conscious and shelved the plan. Bush told Matt Everitt how she wanted people to listen to the album and that a filmed thing would be a distraction. I feel this is not the real reason why a D.V.D. will never be released. I saw the Oasis film, Don’t Look Back in Anger, yesterday. I instantly thought of Before the Dawn. The Oasis film/documentary takes us back to their reunion dates last year. We see the rehearsals and then go into the arena gigs. The sheer scale, size and noise of it all! Thousands of fans brought to tears and jubilant seeing the band back on the stage. Following a bust-up in 2009, the band split and there was a period of fifteen years when Liam and Noel Gallagher did not speak, few would imagine they’d reconcile. What we get from the film is that all that hostility is gone. They were so affectionate about one another. Silently forgiving one another, they are no longer competing! It is all about the music and not the drama. Living a more disciplined and cleaner life, that focus and passion shows in the performances. They are touring again next year and will be back at Knebworth. They played historic gigs there in 1996. The documentary/film is amazing. You get a real sense of why their reunion and return was such an important moment in music history. Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn is as epic and important in a different way. If the Oasis gigs was about people belting out to these 1990s bangers, that is not to say Before the Dawn is any less spectacular, iconic and important. Fans in floods of tears in 2014. I would love to have seen some rehearsal or interview with her band and crew. Build-up and shots of the audience outside the Eventim Apollo. Getting to see some of those gigs filmed and experience the wonder of it all. People reflecting on what it was like being there. In the same way I escaped into my memories of Oasis in the 1990s watching Don’t Look Back in Anger, I find a similar escape listening to Before the Dawn.
Hard to believe that the live album turns ten on 25th November. Kate Bush’s most recent album, 50 Words for Snow, turns fifteen on 21st November. I need that sort of escape right now. I am not sure when and if things will get better from me. It seems hopeless at the moment. Yet I can find some comfort and soothe listening to Before the Dawn. I do want to end with segments of Pete Paphides’s glowing review of witnessing Before the Dawn. The headline quote is a big reason why Before the Dawn will resonate and affect people years to come: “She may have propelled us to the essence of our connection with her music: the miraculous, ungraspable nature of human consciousness”. It is wonderful to read, though it also adds an extra layer of pain that I was not there:
“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.
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.
I will explore the live album again closer to its tenth anniversary. This is a bit of an interesting year for Kate Bush. There has been no big album anniversary or new audio interviews. She has posted updates to her website, yet it has been a little quieter compared to the last three or four years. I do feel next year will be a big one. Perhaps an album nanoelement. The Dreaming turns forty-five. 2028 even bigger when it comes to anniversaries, as both her debut single (Wuthering Heights) and album (The Kick Inside) are fifty. Though she will be tight-lipped around further live performances, you can never say never. Few felt Before the Dawn would ever happen, so there’s nothing to say that was the end of her live chapter. I hope she does perform live again. Not just so I can right a wrong and finally get to see her perform! It is a time when there are so many new fans. So many artists citing her as an idol. You can feel and hear Kate Bush’s D.N.A. through modern music. Following the triumphant and acclaimed Before the Dawn, there is that tantalising prospect of the Queen of Music coming to the stage…
ONE more time.