FEATURE: On the Road: Kate Bush and The Tour of Life

FEATURE:

 

 

On the Road

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush photographed performing at Carre, Amsterdam on 29th April, 1979 for The Tour of Life PHOTO CREDIT: Rob Verhorst/Redferns

 

Kate Bush and The Tour of Life

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I wanted to write this feature…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during The Tour of Life in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Max Browne

so that I can briefly return to The Tour of Life from 1979 and also a particular reason. I wanted to talk a bit about the wireless stage microphone that was developed for the tour. I am not sure whether anything was fashioned beforehand that was used in theatre however, when it came to Pop concerts and live music for artists, Kate Bush was responsible for popularising them. Something often credited with Madonna, Kate Bush’s wireless microphone was used in 1979. So that she could dance and perform her high-energy set without being lumbered with holding a microphone. I shall come to that soon. Prior to that, it is worth speaking about The Tour of Life. I will dive deeper into The Tour of Life closer to its anniversary. The warm-up date was on 2nd April, 1979 in Poole. Whilst it was called The Kate Bush Tour, it was later renamed The Tour of Life. I will keep that name for this feature. Prior to taking a glimpse into the tour and life on the road, here is some background information that gives us some context:

Consisting of 24 performances from Bush’s first two studio albums The Kick Inside and Lionheart, it was acclaimed for its incorporation of mime, magic, and readings during costume changes. The simple staging also involved rear-screen projection and the accompaniment of two male dancers. The tour was a critical and commercial success, with most dates selling out and additional shows being added due to high demand. Members of the Kate Bush Club were provided with a guaranteed ticket.

Rehearsals

The tour was to become not only a concert, but also incorporating dance, poetry, mime, burlesque, magic and theatre. The dance element was co-ordinated by Bush in conjunction with Anthony Van Laast – who later choreographed the Mamma Mia! movie and several West End smashes – and two young dancers, Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst. They held morning rehearsals for the tour at The Place in Euston, after which Bush spent afternoons in Greenwich drilling her band. Off stage, she was calling the shots on everything from the set design to the programme art.

Band

The band playing with Kate Bush on stage consisted of Preston Heyman (drums), Paddy Bush (mandolin. various strange instruments and vocal harmonies), Del Palmer (bass), Brian Bath (electric guitar, acoustic mandolin and vocal harmonies), Kevin McAlea (piano, keyboards, saxophone, 12 string guitar), Ben Barson (synthesizer and acoustic guitar), Al Murphy (electric guitar and whistles) and backing vocalists Liz Pearson and Glenys Groves”.

As we are in a new year, I wanted to spend some time with one of my favourite parts of Kate Bush’s career. Her one and only tour. I am going to move on to the wireless microphone that helped to revolutionise live music. If you were in the crowd for one of the dates, you were in for a treat. A large gauze curtain cast a large shadow of Kate Bush as she entered the stage via a ramp. The whale song of Moving was played as Bush entered the stage as waves were played on the screens. Thanks to Rob Jovanovic and his book, Kate Bush: The Biography. There is a terrific section on The Tour of Life. It was understandable that Bush would open her set with a run of songs from The Kick Inside. Her debut album, its opening track, Moving, opened things. Played fairly straight by Bush, I often wonder how hard it was to compile the setlist. If Act I was mainly all about The Kick Inside and Act II more about Lionheart, the first act featured two new songs. Ones that would appear on 1980’s Never for Ever. Violin and Egypt were introduced to excited crowds in 1979. The third act saw an equal balance of The Kick Inside/Lionheart (three songs each) whilst the encore took one from each album: Oh England My Lionheart (Lionheart) and Wuthering Heights (The Kick Inside). It is also amazing how the costume changes flowed and each song had its own life. A different aesthetic. Like when Room for the Life, when Simon Drake was on stage with a Carmen Miranda outfit with fruity headgear. Some of the highlights from Act I included L'Amour Looks Something Like You where Bush danced in front of a mirror. Simon Drake once more appeared. Violin found two dancers in human-sized violin costumes stood either aside of Kate Bush. Simon Drake played the part of a frenzied fiddler who played faster and faster until his instrument produced smoke. It was a blend of the magical, unusual and theatrical. Bush, dashing off stage between some numbers to change, had mounted an impressive first act with a combination of familiar songs and two new cuts. The lyrics for Violin not quite settled on until it appeared on Never for Ever.

Like 2014’s Before the Dawn where the acts had a different feel and mood, that was the case back in 1979. Half of Lionheart (fives songs) was played in Act II. The first act had a combination of tones and moods. It was more eclectic. Act II focused more on love and sex. Tracks like In the Warm Room being a standout from that act. The tour started with Bush playing at the piano solo but, as the dates wracked up, she had Kevin McAlea play piano so she could move around the stage and give the performance more physicality. One of the most impressive aspects of Kate Bush’s live performances are her vocals. So controlled and strong through each date, even when she came down with a cold whilst performing in Europe, she was still very strong and professional. If Before the Dawn brought the band closer to the front of the stage, they were very much in the background for The Tour of Life. Tightly focused and very well-rehearsed, there was very little improvisation or flexibility in that sense. The songs had been worked by Bush in rehearsals. They held morning rehearsals for the tour at The Place in Euston, after which Kate Bush spent afternoons in Greenwich drilling her band. Before moving through the setlist, MOJO spoke with Simon Drake earlier this year about his involvement in The Tour of Life. It caught my eye:

REHEARSING KATE BUSH’S Tour Of Life was nearly the end of then budding illusionist Simon Drake. He was emerging from under a walkway at the back of the stage, when a section of plywood slid loose and cracked him on the head.  “I was knocked right out,” he recalls today. “And I came to with Kate sort of holding me in her lap. I was sick for a couple of days.”

Drake was lucky. If one of the section’s metal braces had hit him. he might not have lived to tell the tale. It was, sadly, one of several instances where the ambition of Bush’s staging for her single tour as a star outstripped the experience of the team lashing it together, a situation that ended in tragedy after the warm-up show at Poole Arts Centre, with the fatal fall of young lighting engineer Bill Duffield.

It was an outcome unthinkable in the innocent pre-dawn of Drake’s involvement with the tour, which had begun the moment he first heard Wuthering Heights on the radio in January ’78. Bowled over, Drake – a former plugger at Decca and EMI – sent a note to Bush through Capital Radio producer Eddie Puma.

“I knew Eddie was seeing her that night. I just wrote that the record was amazing and if she ever toured, I wanted to be a part of it.”

Later, Drake invited Bush to a magic show he was performing at J Arthur’s, a club at the “wrong end” of the King’s Road, Chelsea, a party for Roxy Music. “I was on a little half-circle stage. And I distinctly remember her sitting there watching me, sat on her own.”

Subsequently, Drake was invited to tea-fuelled meetings at Bush’s flat in Lewisham. He watched the singer scribbling designs for the ankh-shaped set that later clobbered him (“she’s very aware of esoteric matters”) as the pair swapped ideas for bringing Bush’s already theatrical songs to the stage.

“She was a pioneer,” says Drake. “There wasn’t anyone doing anything quite that ambitious then. Maybe Peter Gabriel with Genesis. Certainly not with that amount of dance. Now it’s normal.”

Drake’s key scenes with Bush included two ‘dancing cane’ demonstrations on L’Amour Looks Something Like You and Strange Phenomena, and a spidery turn as a crazed fiddler during Violin.

“The violin was Kate’s own from when she was a kid. I cut out a bit of the back and put homemade pyro in it. The idea being I’d play the violin so fast, it would start smoking.” For the paranoid murder fantasies of Coffee Homeground, Drake had two liquids – one pink, another yellow – that turned black when mixed: “You know, like a poison. Then I’d come up behind her and try to strangle her. They were all these rather ‘panto’ attempts at assassination.”

Drake and Bush dubbed the assassin ‘Hugo’. The vibe was Berlin ’30s cabaret, Paris Moulin Rouge. “He’s partly based on ‘Valentin The Boneless One’ who you see in a couple of paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec with this very big, pointy chin, pointy nose and cheekbones.”

The tour itself – 24 shows between April 2 and May 14, 1979 – was a roller coaster: traumatic for Bush on account of Duffield’s death and the exposure to her own mounting fame. “I mean, fans would almost throw themselves in front of the coach,” says Drake. “It was scary.”

Factor in the demands of the show – its athletic challenges, the costume changes – and it’s miraculous that only one health scare (Bush lost her voice temporarily in Sweden) threatened to end the tour prematurely. “She was amazing every night for two and a half hours,” says Drake. “I mean, extraordinary. She created this whole massive world”.

Whilst most of the vocals were performed live, Hammer Horror was a different case. Performing a more complicated dance routine, a pre-recorded tracks was played. Bush was not even miming to the song. Instead, the focus was on her movement around the stage. Perhaps a chance for her to rest her vocal for a song. Kashka from Baghdad preceded Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake. Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst appeared on stage with electric torches. As Bush came to the stage with all three dressed in leather jackets, the set took a turn in terms of its aesthetics. Bush performing behind a wire-mesh fence. I shall come to the encore soon. The final act was that mix of songs from her first two albums. Wow stuck fairly close to the video in terms of its choreography. Bush was at the piano for the beautiful Feel It. Once more, there were costumer changes and sonic shifts. Kite was a highlight from the third act. An extended instrumental introduction allowed Bush time to come down the ramp onto the stage. Bush appearing with her dancers. James and the Cold Gun was a perfect finale. Bush wielding a gun and firing off imaginary bullets. With the lighting red and green, Bush looked authoritative and splendid in a black body suit and gold trimming. With gold collaring, the star sort of looked like a space cowgirl (as Rob Jovanovic writes) or this assassin. It was a perfect finale number that saw Bush mow down some dancers and then go to the top of the ramp. If today that sort of celebration of violence would be frowned upon and not encouraged in live music, things were different in 1979. However, this is also Kate Bush. She was not promoting gun violence. Instead, this was Bush putting together something theatrical and hugely exciting. Few Pop concerts before The Tour of Life spliced dance, mime, theatre and poetry. It was an extravaganza.

There were really only two songs that could feature in the encore. Even though there was no spontaneity to the encore, it was a perfect combination of Oh England My Lionheart and Wuthering Heights. The former found Bush in pilot’s gear remembering fallen heroes form the past. It was another costumer change that, at this stage of the set, must have been exhausting! Her best-known song to that date finished things. Many people came to see Kate Bush perform to see Wuthering Heights brought to life on the stage. Even if the performance was not one of the absolute highlights, it did not matter to fans. She was a triumph! As the tour moved up and down the country, crowds queued around the block to get in to venues. The crew were in a tour bus with a state-of-the-art video recorder and cassette deck. Kate Bush barely got chance to rest. Photographed between shows alongside Prime Minister James Callaghan, the first leg of the tour culminated in five nights at the London Palladium. From 16th-20th April, 1979 inclusive, the reviews for the shows were incredibly positive. After rapture from crowds and approval from critics, Bush should have victoriously stormed her first European show. However, a sore throat (that could have been because of strain or a cold) threatened the 24th April gig in Stockholm. Bush got the sore throat whilst flying out. With some vocal rest and some trimmed shows for the night few nights or so, Bush was back on top. Her parents flew out to catch her Paris show on 6th May, 1979. The Tour of Life ended on 14th May. Whilst there were some setlist changes for some of the dates, for the most part, the order was static. This, together with voiceovers and the blend of theatre, mime, poetry and music put some people off. Bush did not speak between songs but she explained it would have been out of place. She was trying to create a mood on stage.

Perhaps a lack of spontaneity means The Tour of Life is not something that some would herald as one of the best live shows ever. However, it was a spectacle that clearly wowed crowds and gathered a raft of awed critical reviews! I am one of those people that loves The Tour of Life and feels it is groundbreaking. Rather than it being a standard Pop show, what was mounted in 1979 was a show that was more of a performance. Cinematic; theatrical. So different to anything else. One of the most notable elements of the tour was how Bush was able to perform live and dance and move freely. The physicality she was able to express during songs made The Tour of Life one for the ages. Few people talk about the wireless head microphone that Bush adapted and adopted in 1979. One that changed live music forever. Gordon ‘Gungi’ Patterson was the sound engineer on The Tour of Life and fashioned a wireless mic out of a wire clothes hanger. You can read recollections and tour diaries from 1979’s The Tour of Life. There is very little audio where the headset is discussed. In 1979, it might have been like a solution to a bit of an irritating issue. However, in years since, it has transformed live music. Artists do not have to remain static or around a microphone stand. A wireless microphone means performers can incorporate dance and a lot more physical elements into their sets. Among all the highlights from The Tour of Life, I think the invention of the microphone used by Kate Bush was the one with the biggest legacy. Even if the wireless microphone pre-dates Gordon Patterson’s adaptation, Bush is regarded as the first artist to use it on stage. A breakthrough that meant Bush could realise her visions for a multi-discipline tour, influencing far behind The Tour of Life, the wireless head microphone….

CHANGED live music forever.