Last night Kate Bush made a triumphant return to the concert stage - for the first time in 35 years! The 3 hour long show was met with great reviews from both critics and fans.
Kate Bush: Before the Dawn review – a lithe
grace and note-perfect vocals
Hammersmith Apollo, London
(from The Guardian)
For someone who's spent the vast majority
of her career shunning the stage, she's a hugely engaging live performer
5 out of 5
Over the course of nearly three hours, Kate
Bush's first gig for 35 years variously features dancers in lifejackets
attacking the stage with axes and chainsaws; a giant machine that hovers above
the auditorium, belching out dry ice and shining spotlights on the audience;
giant paper aeroplanes; a surprisingly lengthy rumination on sausages, vast
billowing sheets manipulated to represent waves, Bush's 16-year-old son Bertie
- clad as a 19th-century artist – telling a wooden mannequin to "piss off"
and the singer herself being borne through the audience by dancers clad in
costumes based on fish skeletons.
The concert-goer who desires a stripped
down rock and roll experience, devoid of theatrical folderol, is thus advised
that Before the Dawn is probably not the show for them, but it is perhaps worth
noting that even before Bush takes the stage with her dancers and props, a
curious sense of unreality hangs over the crowd. It's an atmosphere noticeably
different than at any other concert, but then again, this is a gig unlike any
other, and not merely because the very idea of Bush returning to live
performance was pretty unimaginable 12 months ago.
There have been a lot of improbable returns
to the stage by mythic artists over the last few years, from Led Zeppelin to
Leonard Cohen, but at least the crowd who bought tickets to see them knew
roughly what songs to expect. Tonight, almost uniquely in rock history, the
vast majority of the audience has virtually no idea what's going to happen
before it does.
The solitary information that has leaked
out from rehearsals is that Bush will perform The Ninth Wave, her 1985 song
cycle about a woman drowning at sea – which indeed she does, replete with
staging of a complexity that hasn't been seen during a rock gig since Pink
Floyd's heyday – and that she isn't terribly keen on people filming the show on
their phones.
The rest is pure speculation, of varying
degrees of madness. A rumour suggests that puppets will be involved, hence the
aforementioned mannequin, manipulated by a man in black and regularly hugged by
Bush during her performance of another song cycle, A Sky of Honey, from 2005's
Aerial.
The satirical website the Daily Mash
claimed that, at the gig's conclusion, Bush would "lead the audience out
of the venue, along the fairy-tale Hammersmith Flyover and finally to a
mountain where they would be sealed inside, listening to Hounds of Love for all
eternity".
In fairness, this was no more demented than
the thoughts of the august broadsheet rock hack, apparently filing his report
direct from the 1870s, who predicted that Bush would not take part in any
choreographed routines because dancing in public is "unbecoming for a
woman of a certain age".
As it turns out, the august broadsheet rock
hack could not have been more wrong: for huge sections of the performance,
Bush's movements look heavily choreographed: she moves with a lithe grace,
clearly still drawing on the mime training she underwent as a teenager forty
years on. Her voice too is in remarkable condition: she's note-perfect
throughout.
Backed by a band of musicians capable of
navigating the endless twists and turns of her songwriting – from funk to folk
to pastoral prog rock - the performances of Running Up That Hill and King of
the Mountain sound almost identical to their recorded versions - but letting
rip during a version of Top of the City, she sounds flatly incredible.
You suspect that even if she hadn't, the
audience would have lapped it up. Audibly delighted to be in the same room as
her, they spend the first part of the show clapping everything she does: no
gesture is too insignificant to warrant a round of applause. It would be
cloying, but for the fact that Bush genuinely gives them something to cheer
about.
For someone who's spent the vast majority
of her career shunning the stage, she's a hugely engaging live performer,
confident enough to shun the hits that made her famous in the first place: she
plays nothing from her first four albums.
The staging might look excessive on paper,
but onstage it works to astonishing effect, bolstering rather than overwhelming
the emotional impact of the songs. The Ninth Wave is disturbing, funny and so
immersive that the crowd temporarily forget to applaud everything Bush does. As
each scene bleeds into another, they seem genuinely rapt: at the show's
interval, people look a little stunned. A Sky of Honey is less obviously
dramatic – nothing much happens over the course of its nine tracks – but the
live performance underlines how beautiful the actual music is.
Already widely acclaimed as the most
influential and respected British female artist of the past 40 years, shrouded
in the kind of endlessly intriguing mystique that is almost impossible to
conjure in an internet age, Bush theoretically had a lot to lose by returning
to the stage. Clearly, given how tightly she has controlled her own career
since the early 80s, she would only have bothered because she felt she had
something spectacular to offer. She was right: Before The Dawn is another
remarkable achievement.
I really hope we will see a DVD/Blu-Ray recording of this! In the meantime, enjoy this new BBC documentary on Miss Bush.
