FEATURE:
A Divine Light
PHOTO CREDIT; Trevor Leighton
Why a Tenth Anniversary Cinema or Streaming Release of Before the Dawn Would Be Embraced
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IT may seem obvious…
asking why fans around the world would embrace a screening of Before the Dawn. This time ten years ago, Bush had already released he return to the stage. She would embark on twenty-two nights at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith. It was a critically acclaimed and sell-out run. That is perhaps no surprise. Given the preparation and planning, Bush’s concepts and ideas were always going to captivate and stand out as original and unforgettable. Maybe her nerves and the sense that this was such a big deal could have jeopardised the quality. It would have been understandable. In May 2014, Bush was a matter of weeks away from getting back onto the stage. Her first large-scale performance since The Tour of Life ended in 1979. On 26th August, 2014, Before the Dawn opened. In the same venue that Bush ended The Tour of Life – on 14th May, 1979 -, it was an emotional and important space. I was not lucky enough to get a ticket. The dates sold out so quickly. Almost 80,000 people saw Kate Bush on the stage. After Bush announced Before the Dawn on 21st March, 2014, there was no real sense of what it would entail and how it would look. One of the most notable aspect is how she united Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave and Aerial’s A Sky of Honey. These are two different but powerful conceptual suites that were beautifully worked into the show. An unbelievable and hugely well-received residency, seats were cleared out of the venues to accommodate cameras. Recording took place over several nights. There was an initial idea to release the footage. It made it to Abbey Road and was being edited. That is as far as it got.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features
People have said how the footage was at Abbey Road and was being edited. Kate Bush released a live album for Before the Dawn through her Fish People label in 2016. She was interviewed by BBC Radio 6 Music’s Matt Everitt and said that there was a DVD of the show but it was not being released. The reason Bush said she wasn’t putting it out is because the experience wouldn’t be the same as being there. She discussed an Elton John live album, 17-11-70, and being moved by it. The fact that she heard the album and not the visuals. A more moving experience. The fact that she got so much from imagining what was happening. That vital listening experience. Bush also said how she hated it when DVDs were sold or available alongside a C.D. - and the C.D. would end up tossed away. She hated that. Someone who loved the album and wanted people to experience that. Those were her feelings in 2016. The footage is still available and, one presumes, could be upgraded to 4K or HD and streamed. It could be turned into a film. Given the fact there are no plans for her to release an album or any new music, fans are very keen for something new to come from her. I love the recent release of the documentary, The Beatles: Let It Be. It was originally released in 1970. Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, it now looks even better and sharper. Always considered to be a very dark and depressing documentary, after we have seen The Beatles: Get Back, new light and context has come in. We can now see the band and that time from a fresh perspective. The positivity and celebration that has greeted The Beatles: Let It Be has been amazing! It has been an event seeing this documentary.
The Tour of Life has not been released as a documentary or concert film. Bush’s 1993 short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, was released widely in 1994 but has not been re-screened or re-released widely since then. We have various documentaries made through the years. Nothing that has been brought to the big screen. Nothing like The Beatles’ documentaries. The tenth anniversary of Before the Dawn is a major thing! It allows fans to think back to that magical time. I do feel like a documentary could be released. Maybe an introduction with some news/archive feature or a face to face with some famous or well-known fans who were there. Perhaps locating Albert McIntosh – Kate Bush’s son, he performed on stage with his mother – and having words from him. I feel that there has always been this urge for that footage to be released. A tenth anniversary showing of footage collected would be amazing. So much time has passed since the dates. Since the live album came out. We have experienced one or the other. Taken all of that in. In no way would a documentary detract from this. It would provide fans who were not able to see Before the Dawn a chance to have that dream realised. I keep calling it a ‘documentary’. It would be a concert film. There could be breaks or asides between the various acts. Some visual or various effects between certain songs. The emotion that many have got from The Beatles’ Let It Be has got me thinking. The circumstances regarding The Beatles and Kate Bush are different, I know. What is similar is how this amazing footage would impact fans of all generations.
Maybe it is too late to put together something quickly enough so that it could be on a streaming site or small cinemas by late-August. My hope is that Kate Bush is thinking about something. She knows how significant Before the Dawn was! How significant it still is. I don’t know if there will be any anniversary magazine articles, books or podcasts/documentaries from others. Hopefully something can come. One can understand the reasons why Kate Bush did not want to release the filmed footage in 2014 or 2016. Maybe it was too soon. I don’t think her reticence has anything to do with the quality of the footage. I may have had doubts regarding the quality before. It can be improved and remastered. Perhaps the angles and restrictions of camera does not give one the same movement, immersive quality and sense of cinema, you would get from being at the gigs. Handheld and smaller camera too would have created extra movement and flow. Perhaps the cameras are too far away and you only get a far-off view of a show that is best viewed up-close. I don’t know. The fact that the footage supposedly made its way to edit and was considered for release is telling. It makes me think timing rather than quality was the reason for it being shelved. Bush has said why she was not keen to put it out. I never heard much determination and finality in her words. Always a sense that the decision is open to some negotiation. I can respect her prioritising the sound and live album over something filmed. She also wanted to honour the thousands who attended Before the Dawn and paid to be there. Releasing a film might have seemed like she was cheating them and giving free access to people.
On 26th August, it will be ten years since Bush stepped on stage in Hammersmith. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive! I am going to bring in a review from The Guardian. They gave Before the Dawn a five-star review. It is clear that everyone who was at one of the shows was left stunned and affected:
“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.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features
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 hope that we get to see Before the Dawn come to the screen. A cinematic limited run would be ideal, though something on Disney+ would also be awesome. Getting to see this iconic artist on stage. Something few thought would ever happen! Things have changed since 2016. Bush has revisited past material and been closely involved with Stranger Things and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) being used. Knowing legions of new and young fans are discovering her work. She realises people want something new. There seems few genuine or compelling reasons why the footage captured from Before the Dawn cannot be released to the public. On its tenth anniversary, it would be a rare thing from Kate Bush: a new release. Technically, it is not new to 80,000 people or so, though it is for the vast majority of her fans. Hearing news of the footage out in a concert film with some new and archived footage together. That would blow minds! One can never rule it out. Seeing this once-in-a-lifetime show come to the screen would be embraced for sure. What better time to make that happen. A decade after Kate Bush…
STEPPED onto the stage in Hammersmith.