FEATURE:
The KT Fellowship Presents…
Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn Live Album at Eight
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FOR most Kate Bush fans…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during the shooting of the video for And Dream of Sheep, a song that is part of her suite, The Ninth Wave/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
listening to the Before the Dawn album was the closest we got to that 2014 residency. It is interesting listening to an interview Kate Bush did with Matt Everitt in 2016 where she discussed the shows in Hammersmith. She also said that, as of then, there were no plans to record any new music. Of course, eight years later, and she has invited that possibility. I mark this anniversary because it is important. The second live album from Kate Bush, it would have been a different creative process and working routine bringing it together and getting it mixed. In terms of what she experienced. For a studio album, there is this complete take and something that is deemed to be worthy of inclusion on an album. You may notice the odd blemish here and there, though the job of producing a studio album is different to that of producing a live album. On 25th November, 2016, we got the release of Before the Dawn. I remember when it came out. Disappointed not to have been able to go to one of the concerts two years previous – due to the fact I was very slow off the mark thinking about getting tickets -, it was a treat having the live album. Though one can never truly get a sense of what it was like being at the Eventim Apollo in 2014 during that twenty-two-date run of shows, you get a feel of the atmosphere and electricity that was in the air. From the stirring and epic opener of Lily, through to the encore that included Among Angels (from 2011’s 50 Words for Snow), it is a dazzling and extraordinary experience! There are questions and possibilities that come to mind. I will end with them.
Things were different producing Before the Dawn. Bush’s first live album was in 1994. That was when it was released. It was a release of an abridged video recording of the 1979 The Tour of Life. That was first introduced on home video in 1981, together with a C.D. version of the video soundtrack. The video and C.D. comprise twelve songs recorded live at the Hammersmith Odeon on 13th May, 1979. It was a different process approaching the 2014 recording. Somehow more epic in scale. With twenty-nine songs spanning three acts, it was a lot of work ensuring that the sound and quality was almost as good as seeing the show. I will end with a couple of reviews for Before the Dawn. Apologies if there is any repetition from previous features about it. The collaborations on the album are great. In terms of the writing. Astronomer's Call, Waking the Witch, and Watching Them Without Her Bush co-wrote with author David Mitchell. Jig of Life was written with Bill Whelan and John Carder Bush (her brother). The main thread of Before the Dawn was tying together the suites from 1985’s Hounds of Love and 2005’s Aerial. The magnificent The Ninth Wave and A Sky of Honey were brought to life for the first time. Almost like two short films working together. From albums separated by two decades, there is this sense of unity and cohesiveness. Even if the drama and struggle of The Ninth Wave is different from the calm and scope of A Sky of Honey, I guess there is a nice contrast that meant the audiences got to engage with different emotions. The reactions both must have received. Alongside these suites were other tracks from Hounds of Love. Lily, Top of the City and Never Be Mine (the latter of which was not recorded in front of an audience) were in the first act. Some cuts from The Red Shoes and The Sensual World performed live. I do like how there were songs from The Red Shoes. An album that was perhaps not a favourite of Kate Bush. She did re-record Top of the City and Never Be Mine for 2011’s Director’s Cut – Lily too for that matter.
In a way, Act 1 was setting the scene and providing a mix of songs. Hounds of Love and Aerial getting some recognition in that act. Act II was The Ninth Wave and Act III was A Sky of Honey. After the atmospheric and moving realisation of The Ninth Wave, there was this sense of light and new dawn for A Sky of Honey. I always wonder if Before the Dawn was a reference to the space between The Ninth Wave and A Sky of Honey. With an encore featuring the only outing from 50 Words for Snow and another Hounds of Love classic, Cloudbusting, ending things, it is a set that highlights two masterpieces. Her most popular album, Hounds of Love, and Bush’s favourite and perhaps most personal, Aerial. I could talk about all the personnel. How Bush’s brothers (Paddy and John) both feature. An incredible band with her, the album was actually credited to The KT Fellowship. Maybe nodding back to her band, the KT Bush Band, from 1977, I love how this was seen as a collaborative live album. To be part of a fellowship like that must have been an honour for the musicians. You can hear the connection. The hard work that goes into every song. I do think that Before the Dawn should be available on Spotify. The vinyl can be expensive and it is not as easy to buy around the world as her studio albums. When I wrote anniversary features for the 2014 residency to mark a decade, I did discuss all the celebrities that were there. The leadup to the show and the reaction from critics. It was this almost spiritual event. Something that many consider to be the best moment of their life. The live album does a great job of giving a glimpse into that magic concert. Being among the thousands who travelled from all around to witness Kate Bush and her Fellowship on stage. Returning to a venue where she ended The Tour of Life in 1979. Reaching number four in the U.K.,
“It was an extraordinary experience putting the show together. It was a huge amount of work, a lot of fun and an enormous privilege to work with such an incredibly talented team. This is the audio document. I hope that this can stand alone as a piece of music in its own right and that it can be enjoyed by people who knew nothing about the shows as well as those who were there.
I never expected the overwhelming response of the audiences, every night filling the show with life and excitement. They are there in every beat of the recorded music. Even when you can’t hear them, you can feel them. Nothing at all has been re-recorded or overdubbed on this live album, just two or three sound FX added to help with the atmosphere.
On the first disc the track, Never Be Mine, is the only take that exists, and was recorded when the show was being filmed without an audience. It was cut because the show was too long but is now back in its original position. Everything else runs as was, with only a few edits to help the flow of the music.
On stage, the main feature of The Ninth Wave was a woman lost at sea, floating in the water, projected onto a large oval screen – the idea being that this pre-recorded film was reality. The lead vocals for these sequences were sung live at the time of filming in a deep water tank at Pinewood. A lot of research went into how to mic this vocal. As far as we know it had never been done before. I hoped that the vocals would sound more realistic and emotive by being sung in this difficult environment. (You can see the boom mic in the photo on the back of the booklet. This had to be painted out of every shot in post-production although very little of the boom mic recording was used. The main mic was on the life jacket disguised as an inflator tube!) The rest of the lead vocals on this disc were sung live on stage as part of the dream sequences. The only way to make this story work as an audio piece was to present it more like a radio play and subdue the applause until the last track when the story is over and we are all back in the theatre again with the audience response.
Unlike The Ninth Wave which was about the struggle to stay alive in a dark, terrifying ocean, A Sky Of Honey is about the passing of a summer’s day. The original idea behind this piece was to explore the connection between birdsong and light, and why the light triggers the birds to sing. It begins with a lovely afternoon in golden sunlight, surrounded by birdsong. As night falls, the music slowly builds until the break of dawn.
This show was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever been involved in. Thank you to everyone who made it happen and who embraced the process of allowing it to continually evolve.
Album Liner Notes”.
Before rounding up, I want to introduce two critical reviews for the live album. There were some interviews around the release of Before the Dawn. Although this FADER interview is not exclusively about the album, Bush was asked about it and the 2014 concerts. It was a nerve-wracking and exciting process dusting off some older songs and, in many cases, performing them live for the first time:
“You really dug into the archives for your 2014 live shows. How has your relationship with your older material evolved?
Well, part of the decision to do the live shows was because it was such an interesting challenge to work with the two narrative pieces [“The Ninth Wave” and “A Sky of Honey”], rather than just doing a bunch of single tracks.
It was within such a specific context, because [the setlist] was very much put together for a live event. Through that process, the songs naturally evolved because I was working with a band, a lot of whom I never worked with before. I just chose tracks that I wanted to do, that really worked with the band, and to keep it really focused in a rhythmic way.
Although the music was always kept as the lead, I didn't want the visuals to feel separate. What I had hoped was that what had been created was an integrated piece of theater that worked with the music — that it wasn't just music that had theatrics added to it — that there was a real sense of it being something that worked as a whole.
As a performer, do you you get lost in the moment or do you focus on the technical intricacies?
I had to stay really focused as a performer because I'm quite nervous, and I wanted to make sure I was really present when I was performing so that I could try and deliver the character of the song. And actually, the first set was the most difficult part to perform for me, because almost each song is from a completely different place.
Before the 2014 shows you hadn’t toured since 1979. When your return to the stage was so well-received, did you wish you’d done it sooner?
I don't know really. The original show was of the first two albums that I’d made, and I had hoped that to do another show after I had another of two albums’ worth of material. And as I started getting much more involved in the recording process, it took me off into a different path where it was all about trying to make a good album. It became very time-consuming, so I moved into being more of a recording artist. And every time you finish an album, there's the opportunity to make visuals to go with some of the tracks. So I became very involved in that, as well”.
I will end with a couple of reviews. Even though there were four and five-star reviews for the residency, that is not to say that would automatically be reflected with the release of the live album. If the mix was poor or it was seen as too bloated or flawed, then it could have got some worse reviews. In The Guardian’s review, Alexis Petridis noted how the live album was surprisingly raw. He commended Bush being on dazzling form:
“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”.
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”.
Prior to rounding things off, I want to source from Pitchfork’s review. To them, the setlist was obscure. As it features a mix of singles and deeper cuts, perhaps it was not as obvious and hits-filled as some would like. However, what was staged in 2014 was much deeper, more intriguing and interesting. Rather than repeat what went before, Bush was more interested in concept and story. Mounting what was almost like a play for an adoring audience. Perhaps a film with three distinct acts. To be there must have been awe-inspiring:
“Rather than deliver a copper-bottomed greatest hits set, Bush reckons with her legacy through what might initially seem like an obscure choice of material. Both Acts Two and Three take place in transcendent thresholds: “The Ninth Wave”’s drowning woman is beset by anxiety and untold pressures, with no idea of where to turn, mirroring the limbo that Bush experienced after 1982’s The Dreaming. That suite’s last song, the cheery “The Morning Fog,” transitions into Aerial’s “Prelude,” all beatific bird call and dawn-light piano. The euphoric, tender “A Sky of Honey” is meant to represent a perfect day from start to finish, filled with family and beautiful imperfections. “Somewhere in Between” finds them atop “the highest hill,” looking out onto a stilling view, and Bush’s eerie jazz ensemble anticipates the liminal peace of Bowie’s Blackstar. “Not one of us would dare to break the silence,” she sings. “Oh how we have longed for something that would make us feel so… somewhere in between.”
Purgatory has become heaven, and in the narrative Bush constructs through her setlist, “A Sky of Honey” represents the grown-up, domestic happiness that staves off the youthful fears explored on Hounds of Love. For her final song, she closes with a rendition of “Cloudbusting,” a song about living with the memory of a forbidden love, which is even more glorious for all the hope that it’s accumulated in the past 30-odd years. Bush’s recent life as a “reclusive” mother is often used to undermine her, to “prove” she was the kook that sexist critics had pegged her as all along. These performances and this record are a generous reveal of why she’s chosen to retreat, where Bush shows she won’t disturb her hard-won peace to sustain the myth of the troubled artistic genius. Between the dangerous waters of “The Ninth Wave” and the celestial heavens of “A Sky of Honey,” Before the Dawn demystifies what we’ve fetishized in her absence. Without draining her magic, it lets Bush exist back down on Earth”.
On 25th November, Kate Bush – or The KT Fellowship – released Before the Dawn. A stunning live album that Bush spent so much time and passion on. It makes me think about the future. Recently, David Gilmour was interviewed and asked if Kate Bush will ever return to the stage. He said the only person who could convince her to do that was herself. In the recent Today interview, Bush was asked about that response from David Gilmour. She said she was not quite there yet in terms of live plans! Now that Bush has suggested new music is on her radar, how about live work?! Maybe, at sixty-six, repeating what she did in 2014 might not be possible. The commitment and effort needing to do something like that again. Although it would be wonderful seeing her perform live, maybe it would be something more stripped-back or singular. I have suggested this before. Bush performing in a space like Abbey Road Studios or somewhere smaller. Tackling different songs. If a new album does arrive, Bush might want to take the songs to the stage. We are very fortunate that she came back to the stage in 2014. The reviews were ecstatic. In 2016, the live album was released. I wanted to mark the approaching eighth anniversary. It is a wonderful album. You can buy the C.D. version here. It is a wonderful audio experience that everyone needs to experience! Even if Kate Bush has said performing live again is not on her mind, it not completely…
OUT of the question.