So, Tuesday 30th September arrived, the day I would finally manage something I had wanted to do since 1985 - to see Kate Bush in concert. As a spotty teenager I had become enraptured with Kate, listening to her albums over and over on my Walkman, covering my wall in her posters and scouring the media for the smallest mention of her in a way which would put a modern-day teenage Directioner to shame. My love had perhaps lapsed a little in the last 20 years and I had not given the later albums the attention they deserved, and so I had tried to rectify this in the weeks leading up to the concert.
We had been lucky enough to get much-sought-after tickets by going for the penultimate show in the run, which I thought would be a less popular night than the opening few. I was terrified in the few days running up to the event that one of my usual minor ailments (broken tooth, blocked ears) was going to prevent me from getting there - and
would have prevented my friend and fellow Kate fan Steve from going in too, as I had our tickets! But
all was well in the end.
It was really one of the most extraordinary things I have seen on a
stage. Anyone expecting a valedictory 'greatest hits' performance would have been disappointed - she
didn't even do three of her half-dozen Top 10 songs. (Well, she didn't do 'Don't Give Up', either, but I wasn't expecting that.) But it wasn't about that, and so there was no disappointment in the Hammersmith Apollo - just a lot of love, awe and admiration. The focus of the evening was to be a dramatic, musical presentation of the two Kate albums which could be said to be almost narrative poems, two pieces of work twenty years apart:
The Ninth Wave from the flipside of 1985's
Hounds of Love, and
A Sky of Honey, the second CD of 2005's double album
Aerial. The first is an intense 7-song cycle depicting the hallucinatory experiences of a woman almost drowning in icy water after a shipwreck, while the second is a modern-day symphony expressing the changing moods of a single day in the countryside from dawn through to night-time and the next morning, and a reflection on the challenge of capturing this in any form of art.
The concert was divided
into four distinct parts, opening with Kate coming on stage with band and singers for what looked like a conventional rock gig, drenched in blue light and with the guitars turned up, if not quite to 11, then certainly to a rockier level than one might have expected. Crowd-pleasing moments
included a storming 'Hounds of Love' and 'Running Up That Hill', at which point a young man six rows in front of us leapt up and danced as if at a rave. We didn't begrudge him his fun, really, although he was almost exactly in front of us and we had to crane to either side to see Kate! (At various points throughout the night, the audience got to its feet and gave spontaneous ovations, but then respectfully sat down again and listened to - and, just as importantly bearing in mind what was to come, watched - what was going on. This was rather as I imagined it might be.)
'King of
The Mountain' finished this opening section - a song which always rather underwhelmed on the radio, but which sounded awesome live - and then three-quarters of the way
through, it just exploded. The band vanished from the stage, a mime
artist came on twirling some odd device, and confetti (adorned with the
Tennyson quote from
The Ninth Wave) was blasted into the audience.
With a combination of sound and lighting, the effects guys managed to create
the impression of a storm in the theatre, and at that point a screen
came down and we had an amusing filmed insert (scripted by Kate and the novelist David Mitchell) with an astronomer calling the
coastguard. From there it was full-on theatre - with scenery, lighting
effects, back-projection, dramatised inserts, etc.
The Ninth Wave was
brought to life with visual imagery which I will always associate with
it from now on when listening to it - including the one part which leaked
out before the performance, the 'flotation tank' sequence where she
performs in the water in a life-jacket! (The accompanying concert programme goes into the problems they had recording with live microphones in water, complete with some fruity language from an increasingly-frustrated Kate.) There was also a brilliant
evocation of a helicopter sequence, achieved only with a
massive lighting-rig swooping over the audience and stabbing out a stark, white spotlight. Also memorable was a dramatic interlude as a lead in to the spooky 'Watching You Without Me', where some clever direction managed to sneak Kate on stage behind a door without anyone noticing. An upbeat, light-drenched rendition of 'The Morning Fog' finished this section, with the musicians coming to the front of the stage and giving a beautifully joyous, loose-feeling, folky rendition of this piece, in which - spoilers! - the drowning woman is rescued and returns to her family.
The third part was mainly based on the second disc of
Aerial, which I
have always found difficult - but I appreciate it a lot more now! Digital images (birds, sunsets etc.) combined with
conventional stage scenery, puppetry and moody lighting to create the feel of passing time, recreating and re-interpreting the album's 24-hour timescale. The climax of the 'Aerial' song
itself, where she sings about going up on the roof and, um, turns into a
rather scary blackbird (or was it a crow?) was very powerful and
unsettling and weird! Then she finished with an encore, which involved her sitting
down at the piano and performing not an obvious song but the lesser-known 'Among Angels' from the
50 Words For Snow album, and ending with a
crowd-pleasing 'Cloudbusting' with the full band.
So, well worth it and very memorable - more like theatre than a traditional music
concert. I loved it, and if I had any mild disappointments at all it would be the
self-indulgence of the
Aerial section in places (but if you go and see
Kate Bush and don't allow her to be self indulgent, you're in the wrong
place!). One might question the wisdom of giving her son Bertie, lovely
chap that he appears to be, a full 4-minute solo, but there you are... nobody seemed to mind that much. Altogether it was well worth it, with a very contented audience vanishing into the night, and I hope the rumours of more Kate concerts in the future turn out to be true. The word 'genius' is over-used in the rock world, having been applied to everyone from McCartney to Eminem, but surely in Kate's case it is not hyperbole. There can rarely have been a live concert which was such a complete expression of an artist's creative concept, combining music, theatre, lighting, sound, staging, choreography and set design in perfect holistic vision.
Although, next time, 'The Man With The Child In His Eyes' would be lovely, please, Kate...
Footnote - I also managed while in London to go and take a peek at the new Foyles - a thing of glass and light and beauty with books arranged very
creatively. I hope it starts a high street bookselling renaissance. (I
had to navigate my way through the mess that Tottenham Court Road/Oxford
St/Soho has become, though - when will that vast redevelopment ever be
finished?)
