Kate Bush always believed Tina Turner had “the greatest stage entrance”
Kate Bush always seemed to have a complicated relationship with live performances.
The best songs of all time deserve to be played on the biggest stages possible, but outside of a handful of shows, Bush seemed to feel the most comfortable putting together the kind of musical masterpieces that don’t necessarily have to leave the studio. But when you see the true legends putting every other performer to shame, it’s much easier to admit defeat and let them grandstand.
That’s not to say that Bush was a terrible performer by any means. Sure, her inaugural tour in the 1980s was littered with mishaps and left one person dead on the crew, but even when she came out of the woodwork for a one-off show, she had the same power that she had on her records, even managing to build on her classic tracks when she played The Ninth Wave all the way through.
But talking about Kate Bush as a performer is a lot different from any other pop artist. Madonna might be looking to create a spectacle onstage, and you can see the hard work that went into any production by Dua Lipa these days, but what Bush was doing didn’t need to have millions of dancers or anything. She could make her point with music, but sometimes it’s better to have that spectacle behind you.
And it’s not like Bush didn’t know what that spectacle looked like. David Gilmour of Pink Floyd had already signed her, and their massive productions of albums like The Wall are still the most awe-inspiring stage designs in rock history. If you take away all of the bombast, though, artists like Tina Turner were about to get the same kind of reaction from their audience by simply giving their all to every single track.
While Turner didn’t have the same show-stopping voice that comes out of every talent competition these days, no one could deny that she meant every single word she sang. Even when she was singing ballads like ‘Better Be Good To Me’ or ‘Private Dancer’, Turner was going to make sure whatever song of heartbreak she had up her sleeve was going to be something people would feel in their gut whenever she took to the stage.
And in terms of stage presence, Bush knew that Turner was miles above anyone else from the second she walked onstage, saying, “I think probably the best stage entrance I ever saw was Tina Turner. I saw her a long time ago at some open-air gig that she was doing. She was just fantastic, the way she burst on stage. She appeared at the top of a flight of stairs, shimmied the whole way down these steps, came straight to the front of the stage, and went straight into the song. It was so exciting.”
Bush was never going to have that kind of stage entrance, but she didn’t really need to, either. All of her music feels like it’s being beamed down from the heavens most of the time, so it’s only natural for her to release her songs into the wild without having to worry about attacking the stage by any means.
She was no doubt leaving a lot of great shows on the table by refusing to tour, but Turner was practically making up for every artist of Bush’s calibre. She may have only been one rock icon, but Turner had the kind of energy in her prime that most four-piece rock acts wish they had combined.
