FEATURE:
It All Led Up to This…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performs Wuthering Heights during The Tour of Life in 1979
Kate Bush’s The Tour of Life at Forty-Six
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BEFORE getting down to things…
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
people will call the tour different things. Originally called the Kate Bush Tour or Lionheart Tour, it was later renamed Tour of Life. I call it The Tour of Life, as I include the ‘The’. Everyone will have their own name or preference. In any case, there are some facts which are irrefutable. The Tour of Life had its warm-up gig on 2nd April, 1979 at Arts Centre, Poole and it ended on 14th May, 1979 in the Hammersmith Odeon. The set consisted of twenty-four songs. Tracks mostly taken from her first two albums, 1978’s The Kick Inside and Lionheart. A couple of new tracks, Egypt and Violin, would appear on Bush’s third studio album, Never for Ever. I am going to move on in a minute. First, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia provide some information when it comes to the rehearsals, the band and also an unexpected tragedy that occurred at the end of the warm-up gig in Poole:
“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.
Tragedy
The tour started on April 2 with a tragedy. The highly experienced lighting director Bill Duffield fell through an open panel high on the lighting gallery. He would die of his injuries a week later. Despite this, the tour still went on. A fundraising benefit concert was added to the schedule, taking place on 12 May 1979 to raise money for Bill’s family and featured Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley, for whom Duffield had also worked”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush pictured in Liverpool shortly before her The Tour of Life date at the city’s Empire Theatre on 3rd April, 1979
Even though 1979 was the year after Kate Bush released two studio albums, there seemed to be a longer history. Everything leading up to this. When Bush was playing in pubs and clubs in and around London in 1977 with the KT Bush Band. Even before then. Perhaps seeing David Bowie perform his final gig as Ziggy Stardust in 1973. There was something in Kate Bush from when she was a child and teenager. That desire to express her music in a huge and ambitious way. One of the reasons why I love The Tour of Life is that there was some unhappiness around her first two albums. At least a feeling that she was being guided rather than leading things herself. 1979 was mostly dedicated to this tour and her working on a third studio album. One she would co-produce. There are not that many features dedicated to The Tour of Life. It is good to get other people’s perspectives about this incredible event. Even though Bush put a lot of her own money into it and it actually lost money, the experience was a magical one. A chance for fans around the U.K. and Europe to see Bush on stage delivering this groundbreaking show. I have said before how the invention of the wireless head mic was a revelation. One that impacted live performance ever since. I am going to pop in some words from Dreams of Orgonon about The Tour of Life:
“Rather than feeding on nostalgia (a hard feat for a recent artist to pull off), Bush used her existing work as a diving board for her live shows. For all the strengths of The Kick Inside and Lionheart as albums, the live versions of a few of their songs are superior: the revamped band bring the songs a power the original recordings sometimes lacked. “Coffee Homeground” sounds tighter, and even the unimpeachable “Wuthering Heights” improves slightly when Alan Murphy improvises bits of the track’s guitar solo. There are plenty of odd musical choices throughout the shows: there’s an electronica-inflected rendition of Satie’s Gymnopedies leading into “Feel It,” and “James and the Cold Gun” becomes the 10-minute prog jam its album counterpart was itching to be. This doesn’t suggest that Bush has been constrained by the studio — in fact, it’s likely she works better outside of the traditional rock band format. But in many ways she’s liberated by her chance to do musical theater, showing off what her songs look like and pushing some aspects of their sound a bit further.
In theory Bush was doing the Lionheart Tour, as it was her most recent album. Yet in practice, it was equally the Kick Inside Tour. All the songs from both albums were performed barring “Oh To Be In Love” (perhaps justifiably — it’s the Bush album track which most feels like a holdover from the Phoenix years), plus a couple of new songs called “Violin” and “Egypt,” the latter of which we’ll return to next week. It’s a well-organized setlist, as Kick and Lionheart are both preoccupied with the sort of adolescent world-storming the tour is. Bush’s concert setlists show off this interplay of albums well: Act One is constructed around the lighter songs of The Kick Inside like “Them Heavy People” and “L’Amour Looks Something Like You” with the two new songs, while Act Two centers the anxiety-ridden bulk of Lionheart plus “Strange Phenomena,” and Act Three provides the show with a theatrical climax of “Coffee Homeground” and “Kite” before the encore of “Oh England My Lionheart,” and finally “Wuthering Heights.” Setlists can be unruly things: while touring for albums, you’ll want to intersperse the newer material with the hits. Bush keeps this in mind while also remembering she’s doing a stage show with act breaks and thematic resonances. It’s a strong act, one that’s bolstered by its setlist.
The artistic precision of the concert belies what occurred behind the scenes. Bush was exhausted by the shows and the preparation for them, with her essentially all-day rehearsal schedule giving her little-to-no time off. The scale of the shows and the extensive travel involved (Bush is famously afraid of traveling by plane) are likely a contributing factor to Bush’s decision to never tour again. A likely further cause is the tragic first night of the tour. During a warm-up concert at Poole, lighting director Bill Duffield fell through an open panel around the stage and landed on a concrete floor 17 feet below. After a week on life support, Duffield died. It was a traumatic moment for everyone involved in the tour, and gave the group pause about whether to continue. When they inevitably did, it was as much as because of the effort put into the shows as it was for Bill himself.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performing at the Falkoner Teateret in Copenhagen, Denmark during The Tour of Life in April 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Jorgen Angel
Bush didn’t forget Duffield, keeping tabs as she did on everyone she worked with. The first date of the final London stretch of the tour was a benefit concert for Duffield’s family. The night saw a drastic departure from Bush’s other concerts in many respects: the setlist was significantly different, as Bush wasn’t the only singer performing that night. Two other artists who’d worked with Duffield were present: Steve Harley and Peter Gabriel. Bush had previously worked with established names (e.g. Geoff Emerick), but appearing onstage with established British rock stars was a step forward for her. Harley had scored a #1 single with his glam band Cockney Rebel in 1975 when they released “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me),” and didn’t fall out of the albums charts for the next few years. While in 1979 he was hardly the big name he had previously been, with his attempt to go solo beginning with a critically savaged and commercially disappointing album, he had hardly been forgotten by listeners of British pop. Peter Gabriel, however, was at the top of his game. Unlike Harley, Gabriel was confidently traversing through the early years of his post-Genesis career, with the first two of a quartet of self-titled albums under his belt, both of which had made the top 10, and a major solo tour under his belt. The classic “Solsbury Hill” had climbed to #13, and Gabriel was good to go. At the Duffield concert he performed the effervescent “I Don’t Remember,” a wild ballad of the kind of formalist mountain-climbing and despair Gabriel had made his bread and butter while in Genesis. A wailing Kate Bush joins him on backing vocals, and sounds like her larynx is about to combust under the weight of the song’s Frippertonics. Much easier on Bush is a traditional cover of “Let It Be,” a song she’d sung before but still hadn’t made her way into (this would change — wait until this blog hits the late Eighties). Conversely, Gabriel seems to struggle with the song, as Paul McCartney’s gentler songwriting chafed with the new modes of composition he’d been exploring on his own albums and tour. A duo was established, however: Bush and Gabriel would sing together again.
It was a wild time for Bush. “It’s like I’m seeing God, man!” she said enthusiastically. When she’s onstage in a black-and-gold bodysuit and blasting her bandmates with a golden, it’s easy to believe she made that comment while looking in a mirror. It takes a shot of the divine (or perhaps a deal with it?) to stage a tour of this magnitude and success while dealing with such severe drama behind the scenes? It’s no wonder Bush stayed in the studio after this, recording closer to home all the time until she set up a studio in her backyard. Even when she finally returned to the stage thirty-five years later, she made sure her venue was in nearby London. 1979 was a different time. A Labour government was feasible, and Kate Bush was regularly on TV. She plays things close to the chest now, never retiring from music but often looking infuriatingly close to it. In a way, she retired in 1979. Kate Bush the media sensation was a spectacle of the Seventies. She cordoned herself off afterwards, becoming Kate Bush the Artist. Next week we’ll look at Never for Ever, the first post-tour Kate Bush album where she unleashes a flood of ideas into the world. What does one do after the Tour of Life? In Bush’s words: “everything”.
In 2020, Prog wrote about The Tour of Life. I have said how everything led up to The Tour of Life. It was a chance for Kate Bush to asset some independence and create a project very much in her own vision. It was a big undertaking. Throwing so much into it, Bush’s reputation was on the line:
“But in many other respects, the tour was utterly grounded in reality. The singer spent six months beforehand working herself to the bone as she attempted to forge a brand new model of what a live show could be, then another two months doing the same as she took it around Britain and Europe. And it was hit by tragedy when lighting engineer Bill Duffield was killed in an accident after a warm-up show, his death almost bringing the whole juggernaut to a halt before it had even started.
But all that was in the future when the idea for the tour was conceived. Ironically, Bush herself was the first to admit that there was no need for her to do it. “There’s no pressure,” she said in 1979. “But I do feel that I owe people a chance to see me in the flesh. It’s the only opportunity they have without media obstruction.”
“Kate was never at ease in the public eye,” says Brian Southall, who was Artist Development at Bush’s label, EMI, and had worked with the singer since she was signed. “Whether that was performing on Top Of The Pops or doing interviews. She was very reserved, very wary, I think by nature shy. So this spotlight on her was new.”
The singer was fully aware that anything she did would have to raise the bar on everything that came before. But even then, she was trying to manage expectations – not least her own. “If you look at it, it’s my reputation,” she said 1979. “And yes, I hope that it’ll be something special.”
EMI were unsure what the show would involve, so the costs were reportedly split between the label and Bush herself. In return, they got an artist who threw everything into her biggest endeavour so far.
“She was very determined about how her music was presented and performed – that was pretty obvious from her first album,” says Southall. “So no one saw any reason to step in and stop it. The rock’n’roll story was that you put singles out, you put albums out, you went on Top Of The Pops, you toured. But she wasn’t prepared to do the conventional thing.”
In fact no one realised just how unconventional it would be – with its choreography, dancers, props, multiple costume changes, poetry and in-house magician, there was no precedent with which it could be compared.
Rehearsals began in late 1978. Bush had already trained with experimental dancer/mime artist Lindsay Kemp, one-time mentor of David Bowie. But this tour would entail a new level of aptitude entirely, and the stamina to simultaneously dance and sing for more than two hours every night.
Dance teacher Anthony Van Laast was brought in from the London School Of Contemporary Dance to choreograph the shows and help hone Bush’s abilities. Van Laast brought with him two protégés, dancers Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst. Van Laast put the singer through the equivalent of boot camp at The Place studio in Euston, working with her for two hours each morning. Bush’s own input was crucial to the developing routines.
“Kate knew what she wanted, she had very specific ideas,” says Stewart Avon Arnold today. “What she wanted was in her head, and she wanted people around her who could help her put it into movement. She had so many hats on at that point – artistic, creative, musical.”
If the mornings were for the dance aspect of the slowly coalescing show, then the afternoons were for the music. As soon as she was done with Van Laast, Bush would make the eight mile journey to Wood Wharf Studio in Greenwich, south London, where she would meet up with a band that included Del Palmer, guitarists Brian Bath and Alan Murphy and her multi-instrumentalist brother, Paddy Bush. Also present was her other brother, John Carder Bush, who would perform poetry (and whose wife would provide vegetarian food for the tour). It was hard work for everyone involved and as the show neared, Bush would work 14 hours a day, six days a week”.
Rather than repeat what I wrote in previous anniversary features, the angle I want to bring in here is that balance between the risk and gamble Bush took and how necessary The Tour of Life was. As a popular artist, she was expected to tour. However, it was the sheer scale of the production that was unexpected. Not just an ordinary Pop tour. Despite some flawed moments and some mixed reviews, there was a lot of ecstasy and celebration for The Tour of Life. I think it gave Kate Bush the confidence to record a third studio album more ambitious than her first two. It also remains this oddity: Bush’s one and only tour.
PHOTO CREDIT: Rex
On 2nd April, it will be forty-six years since the first performance. In terms of the risks, there was a lot on the line. Kate Bush’s reputation. She said that and must have been terrified. The fatigue and hassle of travelling. Going in cars, buses and planes to various destinations. Not having much time to rehearse when she was in various towns and cities. There was also the sense of expectation. Bush’s expectation and that of critics. The need to blow everyone away and prove herself. Also, the financial burden. Bush and the label both putting money in. Expectations EMI had in terms of its profitability and success. There was also how Bush would follow it. Whether she would tour again. Fans hungry to see her play. The upsides outweighed the risks. The realisation of an ambition. The huge critical acclaim. The energy and skills Bush took from The Tour of Life to producing and writing her next album. The legacy The Tour of Life has. A female artist merging theatre, mine, poetry and music. That headless mic invention. Going beyond the boundaries of a traditional Pop concert. That has impacted artists today. I have also said how there needs to be a 4K/HD version of The Tour of Life. A special that has the 1979 Nationwide documentary and then a set from The Tour of Life afterwards. We are still talking about the tour all these years later. Whether they Lionheart Tour, Kate Bush Tour or The Tour of Life, it is a spectacle that fans of Kate Bush adore. I would have loved to have been at one of the shows!" Bush has spoken about it in years since and recalls how she really enjoyed the experience. I think it is a part of her career that deserves more attention. On 2nd April, when Kate Bush walked onto the stage at Arts Centre, Poole, that the first steps of this incredible tour would…
GO down in music history.