FEATURE:
The Excitement and Speculation on That First Night…
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/REX
Kate Bush stepped back on the stage in Hammersmith for the first night of her Before the Dawn residency. This was something fairly new for an artist. There are residencies in Las Vegas but, as hard as I try to think, not too many artists have been able to book a venue for so might consecutive nights for a residency. In Kate Bush’s case, there was always going to be massive demand. Bush performed twenty-two nights in total. The final was on 1st October. At Hammersmith’s Eventim Apollo, there was this feverish and excited chatter before her first performance. I must put a caveat on this: I was not at any of the twenty-two nights. In my eternal naivety, I assumed I would get a ticket for one of the nights if I left it a few days after the announcement that she was coming back to the stage! It is one of the great regrets that I will not get to see Bush perform live. In any case, thousands did go and see her on one of the twenty-two nights in London. She had performed live between 1979 and 2014, though Before the Dawn was her first extensive live experience since 1979’s The Tour of Life. Before coming to the sense of anticipation and the reaction to that first night, I have to return to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia. They provide details about the announcement, band, and which celebrities were spotted in attendance:
“Announced on 21 March 2014, Before The Dawn was the first set of live dates by Kate Bush since the Tour Of Life in 1979. Originally, 15 live dates were announced. A pre-sale ticket allocation took place on 26 March for fans who had signed up to her website in previous months (and years). After this pre-sale, a further seven dates were added due to the high demand. Tickets went on sale to the general public on 28 March and most of them were sold out within 15 minutes. All dates took place at the Eventim Apollo in London (UK). The tour was a critical and commercial success, with all shows sold out.
Before The Dawn was a multi-media performance involving standard rock music performance, dancers, puppets, shadows, maskwork, conceptual staging, 3D animation and an illusionist. Bush spent three days in a flotation tank for filmed scenes that were played during the performance and featured dialogue written by novelist David Mitchell. Also involved with the production were Adrian Noble, former artistic director and chief executive of the Royal Shakespeare Company, lighting designer Mark Henderson and Italian Shadows Theatre company Controluce Teatro d'Ombre. The illusionist was Paul Kieve, the puppeteer Basil Twist, the movement director Sian Williams and the designer Dick Bird. The video and projection design was by Jon Driscoll.
Band
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”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Annie Lennox
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.
Recordings
While Kate requested there was to be no photographing or filming during the evenings, many members of the audience have recorded the sound of the concert instead. Sound recordings from the audience exist from 10 of the 22 dates. On September 16 and 17, some seats were moved in order "to film the show for a DVD release", according to an e-mail to some fans who had bought tickets for these two shows. In 2016, the album Before The Dawn was released, with live recordings from the shows”.
On Tuesday, 26th August, 2014, there was so much electricity and chatter surrounding the Eventim Appollo! I can only imagine how busy the Tube was and the sort of crowds that were packing in! Whether wearing a Kate Bush T-shirt or not, fans from around the world descended on this iconic venue – the one where Kate Bush ended The Tour of Life back in 1979 – to see something they thought would never happen. I don’t think any fan expected Kate Bush to do more live shows, not least a residency! It was a pleasant shock that then turned into reality. Of course, as she is an icon, there was a lot of interest around that first night. The Guardian live-blogged the first night with all the observations and news from the venue. From rumours and celebrities piling in, to the general feeling among the crowd, it was a monumental opening night. I can only imagine how nervous Kate Bush was feeling backstage waiting to go on. A massive sense of expectation coupled with the fact she had not done anything like this in over three decades must have been very daunting. Even if she was nervous during the first song, Lily, by the time Hounds of Love followed it, she was more in her step – having absorbed the love and positive vibes from the thousands packed in there! I want to bring in a few observations from The Guardian on that opening night. I will start with the initial build-up and that pre-show reporting:
“Yes, you read the headline correctly: This here is the Guardian music Kate Bush Before The Dawn live blog. Tonight is the artist’s first show in 35 years. Her last tour took place back in 1979 and featured 17 costume changes, 6 dancers dressed as violins, 1 large egg, loads of fake blood and 24 songs packed with pure, celestial majesty. Hopefully her opening night at London’s Eventim Apollo will follow an even more elaborate set up, but unfortunately I won’t be there to witness it. Instead, will be sat in the Guardian building trying to piece together as much information as possible in order to bring this very special show straight to you at home.
Aside from my observations, we have other means of collecting information from the show:
· Tim Jonze is at the gig and if he happens to visit the toilet at any point there is a slight possibility that he may well feed us back some information
· Hannah Ellis-Petersen is outside the venue speaking to some of the fans and generally soaking up some of Hammersmith’s giddy atmosphere
· Alexis Petridis will also be telling us his thoughts at the end of the night.
“As a tribute to our friend Darren from LA (still no guesses as to which band he’s in guys. No guesses, no eggs!) here’s a lovely piece from the New York Times about American fans travelling to London to watch their idol play. There are some great stories in An Encore 35 Years in the Making.
Mr. Twomey will attend the opening-night concert. “I’m quite prepared to take a ferry or swim over if I need to,” he said. He has been obsessed with Ms. Bush since he was a teenager, bewitched by her idiosyncratic vision, literary references and vocal ability.
“When she sings the song ‘Pi,’ ” whose chorus is a recitation of the mathematical digits, “she really brings the emotion to it,” he said. “She’s able to deliver things that on the surface seem odd.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/REX
As the show begins, here’s Hannah Ellis-Petersen’s report from the venue so far:
They lined up quietly and obediently in the rain, a mood of hushed anticipation hanging in the air. No-one jostled, no-one pushed in, no-one even really spoke. After all, for the hundreds of Kate Bush fans gathered outside Hammersmith Apollo for her opening show, this was simply the final moments of what has been a 35-year wait.
Returning to the same venue where she played her first and last shows in 1979, aged just 20, Bush, now 56, will perform 22 dates over the next month. Yet what the thousands of fans, many of whom have travelled from as far as the USA and Australia, can expect from the enigmatic performer remained a mystery, even as the ticket-holders began filing into the venue.
For Chad Siwek, 30, who flew over from Los Angeles, California, for the concerts and has ticket for all three of Bush’s opening nights, described standing at the venue on Tuesday night as “like a dream.”
“Kate Bush just means everything to me, she cares more about her work and pleasing her fans than the commercial value or just making money off it” he says, stopping as his voice breaks with emotion. “I’m sorry, i’m getting choked up but it’s just my whole life I’ve been a huge Kate Bush fan. I’ll cry when she comes out and I think i’ll just be in awe that it’s really her as I’ve never seen her in person. It’s going to be really special and to be here means more than any other moment of my life.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Noble & Bright/REX
Siwek was not the only member of the patiently-waiting crowd who had flown from Los Angeles, with Daren Taylor, drummer for band The Airborne Toxic Event, among those right at the front of the queue.
He said: “I’ve flown in from Los Angeles, California today just to see Kate Bush. It’s not easy to express what Kate Bush means to me. Her music touches me, and I’m sure everybody here, in very unique ways. I don’t think any two people will tell you the same thing that her music means to them.”
The setlist for the show has been kept completely under wraps, though the performance itself is expected by many to include similar theatrics to her 1979 show, which included 17 costume changes as well as combination of mime, flamboyant dancing and poetry. For this series of shows, the influential singer is reported to have spent three days in a flotation tank at Pinewood Studios to create the special effects.
While some many fans have speculated the show will include include The Ninth Wave, a seven-track concept piece from her bestselling 1985 album Hounds of Love about a woman drifting alone in the sea, others said they would be content even with something low key.
“It’s not going to be a straight up gig is it?” said Susie Martin, 28, a teacher from Barnsley and lifelong Bush fan who said she had cried when she heard that the singer was ending her 35-year moratorium on touring. “But equally I’d like to just see her up on stage, one piano, one spotlight, Moments of Please and Under the Ivy, This Woman’s work. Because I think she’s at her absolute best, she’s peerless, when it’s just her and a piano and that voice. Today is quite overwhelming.”
Asked what Bush meant to her, Martin added: “Her music is so original, so stunning, so beautiful but it’s not just the music it’s the visual aspect of it, it’s the lyrics, she puts everything into it and never compromises. Every emotion in your life, whatever you are feeling there’s a Kate Bush song for it to help you get through things or dance wildly round your bedroom.”
IN THIS PHOTO: Journalist, writer, broadcaster, and The Guardian's resident beauty columnist, Sali Hughes, was in attendance to see Kate Bush on 26th August, 2014/PHOTO CREDIT: Alex Lake for The Guardian
There was an enormous amount of excitement from The Guardian. Almost like a historic event, there were eyes everywhere. Which famous people were there, what Bush was performing, what the general vibe was like, whether there were any rumours or unexpected surprises. It was one of the most exhilarating and unifying nights in music in decades:
This Madonna fansite is claiming that the singer and W.E. director is currently at the Kate Bush show. Other people attending include Lauren Laverne, Darren Taylor, Caitlin Moran, Darcey Bussell*, Sali Hughes and Sophie Heawood. Some of which arrived at the Eventim Apollo together
* Darcy’s not there. Does anyone know where she is?
Seems like a good time to mention that currently, eleven Kate Bush albums are in the top 100 albums chart, according to the Official Charts Company.
Breaking Bush update: One man claims that Kate stopped the set to eject someone using a camera. Grace Jones and Bjork are also apparently in attendance. There is a very strong rumour going around my desk mainly that Harriet Gibsone has cracked open her second can of sparkling apple and blueberry juice. She is feeling optimistic and nauseous.
After we last spoke to Tim Jonze, the show went from stripped back and simple to a full onslaught of theatrics. As previously speculated, Bush has performed The Ninth Wave, the conceptual suite from her 1985 classic album Hounds of Love. Here’s Tim’s account...
She created sea scenes through using bits of cloth, she was on video in a life jacket, there was one bit where a lounge was wheeled on stage, and you got to watch a conversation between her husband [Danny McIntosh] and son [Bertie] who are watching Liverpool v Chelsea on the TV. She disappears behind them as if she is haunting them. There’s a sea horse skeleton walking around the stage.
...And that’s it so far. It makes about as much sense as the half-awake ramblings of Noel Fielding.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/REX
Everyone’s favourite Before the Dawn roving reporter Hannah Ellis-Petersen been speaking to some fans during the interval:
Ben McMullen:
“It’s been fantastic. I was quite nervous. I’ve never come to a gig feeling nervous before but I was just thinking, ‘Oh no, this is going to be a letdown because the hype was so huge.’ But actually, it really was fabulous. What was really interesting I thought was the tribute she paid to her son. In the programme there’s a passage where she talks about how he’s really pushed her to do this and how without his support she couldn’t have done it. He’s been on stage with her the whole time as a backing singer and has been involved in some of the acting as well. There’s been a helicopter flying overhead and there’s been a huge sea-buoy on stage which she climbed onto to be rescued. They’ve not held back in terms of staging. But it’s completely worth it. You kind of think, ‘I should have booked a second night’”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/REX
I want to get to Alexis Petridis’s review for The Guardian. He was in that position of trying to enjoy the show as a fan, but also get down his impressions and paint a picture for the readers! An impossible balancing act, I hope he got to go for a second time and just enjoy it without having to constantly jot down notes:
“A pressing question looms over Kate Bush’s new live release, her first since Live at Hammersmith Odeon in 1994, an album drawn from her then most recent live shows, some 15 years before. That question being: what’s the point? Live albums can only ever hope to give the faintest flavour of the multi-sensory experience of attending a gig, and Bush’s 2014 shows at the Hammersmith Odeon were about as multi-sensory an experience as gigs get. The subsequent album isn’t credited to Bush but the K Fellowship, presumably in recognition of the vast ancillary cast of musicians, technicians and actors required to bring Before the Dawn to fruition – but it obviously doesn’t capture most of the results of their work. You get a vague sense of the crackling excitement in the audience, but despite the plentiful photos in the CD booklet (“Note the parked helicopter at the top,” reads one caption) it can’t give you any real sense of the overwhelming visual spectacle of the shows, which the DVD that was mooted to appear last year, but never did, might have done. There are moments on the album when the audience break into spontaneous applause during a song. If you were there, you find yourself scrolling through your memory to work out what provoked it – not an easy task, given that audiences frequently seemed to be so overwhelmed to be in Bush’s presence that they applauded pretty much everything she did. If you weren’t, it’s doubtless even more frustrating.
Meanwhile, it’s hard to work out whether the original show’s solitary misstep – the clunky, ostensibly comedic playlet by novelist David Mitchell inserted in the middle of The Ninth Wave – is amplified or minimised by appearing on an album. Divested of the accompanying action, its dialogue sounds even more laboured, even more like a particularly spirit-sapping scene from perennially unfunny BBC1 sitcom My Family. On the other, well, there’s always the fast-forward button, although long-term fans might suggest that it wouldn’t really be a Kate Bush project unless an array of dazzling brilliance and original thinking was offset by at least one moment where she felt impelled to follow her muse somewhere you rather wish she hadn’t. You can file the playlet alongside The Dreaming’s Australian accent, dressing up as a bat on the back cover of Never for Ever, and The Line, The Cross and the Curve, the short film that accompanied The Red Shoes, later appraised by its author as “a load of bollocks”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Hannah Ellis-Petersen
Clearly a degree of tinkering has gone on with the music. A beautiful take on Never Be Mine, from 1989’s The Sensual World, seems to have mysteriously appeared in the middle of the initial act, which never happened during the actual concerts, raising the tantalising prospect that far more material was prepared than made it to the final show. Perhaps they were off in a rehearsal studio somewhere, trying out versions of Suspended in Gaffa and Them Heavy People after all. But the really arresting thing about Before the Dawn – given that Bush is an artist whose perfectionism has led her to make a grand total of three albums in the last 22 years, one of them consisting of pernickety rerecordings of old songs – is how raw it sounds.
Of course, raw is an adjective one uses relatively, when considering an album that features a band of blue-chip sessioneers, celebrated jazz-fusion musicians and former Miles Davis sidemen: you’re not going to mistake the contents of Before the Dawn for those of, say, Conflict’s Live Woolwich Poly ’86. But, unlike most latterday live albums, it actually sounds like a band playing live. There’s a sibilance about the vocals, a sort of echoey, booming quality to the sound, the occasional hint of unevenness: it doesn’t feel like a recording that’s been overdubbed and Auto-Tuned into sterility. Given their pedigree, you’d expect the musicians involved to be incredibly nimble and adept, but more startling is how propulsive and exciting they sound, even when dealing with Bush’s more hazy and dreamlike material. It’s a state of affairs amplified by Bush’s voice, which is in fantastic shape. On King of the Mountain or Hounds of Love, she has a way of suddenly shifting into a primal, throaty roar – not the vocal style you’d most closely associate with Kate Bush – that sounds all the more effective for clearly being recorded live. Furthermore, there’s a vividness about the emotional twists and turns of A Sea of Honey, A Sky of Honey – from the beatific, sun-dappled contentment associated with Balearic music to brooding sadness and back again – that just isn’t there on the studio version, great though that is.
That answers the question about what the point of Before the Dawn is: like 2011’s Director’s Cut, it’s an album that shows Bush’s back catalogue off in a different light. And perhaps it’s better, or at least more fitting, that her 2014 shows are commemorated with an album rather than a film or a Blu-ray or whatever it is that you play inside those virtual reality headsets people are getting so excited about. They were a huge pop cultural event, as the first gigs in four decades by one of rock’s tiny handful of real elusive geniuses were always bound to be, but they were shrouded in a sense of enigma: almost uniquely, hardly anyone who attended the first night had any real idea what was going to happen. Even more unusually, that air of mystery clung to the shows after the 22-date run ended: virtually everyone present complied with Bush’s request not to film anything on their phones, and the handful that didn’t saw their footage quickly removed from YouTube. Before the Dawn provides a memento for those who were there and a vague indication of what went on for those who weren’t, without compromising the shows’ appealingly mysterious air: a quality you suspect the woman behind it realises is in very short supply in rock music these days”.
It seems like each night of the twenty-two was spectacular! Pete Paphides was there on the third night. It seems that he suitably enthralled and blown away by something we will never see again. Alongside her K Fellowship, Kate Bush proved that, then aged fifty-six, that she was still at her absolute peak. This was going to go down in music’s history books.
I guess the fact that she spent so much time ensuring that everything was perfect. From the concept and the band’s performances, right through to the costumes and the feel of the show, it was like being back in 1979 - where she was overseeing the coming together for The Tour of Life. I don’t think we will see another live show from Kate Bush, though I guess you can never rule out a one-off or something unexpected. I am gutted I wasn’t there! As Before the Dawn did start on 26th August, 2014, this Saturday will be the ninth anniversary. Since then, Bush has released two studio albums, a book of lyrics…and she has also gone to number one with Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). She has packed more into the past nine years than she did in the nine years prior to Before the Dawn – one double album and some bits here and there, I guess preparation for the residency took up quite a lot of her creative energy and focus. The live album for Before the Dawn came out in 2016. I will cover that in the second feature about the amazing 2014 residency. To have been there on that first night nine years ago (has it really been that long?!). I don’t think that Hammersmith had witnessed anything like that! Other legends have performed in that venue – including David Bowie who, sadly, died less than two years after the start of Before the Dawn -, though few with the sort of adoring fanbase as Kate Bush. She may have been nervous going on stage that first night – and, as she told Matt Everitt in a 2016 interview, that was the feeling every night; a sense of relief ending the show knowing she didn’t mess anything up -, but that soon turned to confidence as the audience got behind her and showed their love. By the time Cloudbusting ended the encore, twenty-five songs/pieces had been performed. When she took her bows and left the stage, everybody in attendance at the Eventim Apollo…
DIDN’T want her to leave!