‘Before The Dawn’: The bold live comeback of Kate Bush
Most of the time, looking back at the work of an artist as influential and beloved as Kate Bush leaves one cold. Or at the very least, it leaves one having to remind themselves how impactful and strange it was at the time. The Ramones sound like a pleasant enough pop-punk band now, but were genuinely radical upon release, while Marlon Brando’s acting comes across as pretty quaint today. Not so with our Kate.
There is still something thrillingly, captivatingly strange about those early Kate Bush music videos. That elastic, skyscraping voice, those incredible eyes, and, most of all, the sheer expressiveness of her dancing. This was no accident. A part of the large advance she received for signing to EMI was spent on interpretive dance lessons from Lindsay Kemp, who boasted David Bowie as one of his former pupils.
From the outset, this was someone who took not just the act of making music seriously but also being a performer. There’s a theatrical streak running through the heart of all her best work, from the character-based drama of her songwriting to the intricate choreography and almost cinematic flourish of her music videos.
With that in mind, it’s quite strange that a performer of her calibre never really performed live all that much. Surely an artist whose level of musical ability was matched only by her visual flair would have been right at home on the concert stage, right? Well, that’s just it. Bush did want to perform live. It’s just that her ambitions were so huge that they could never be satisfied by putting a band together and setting off down the M1 in a Ford Transit van.
What were Kate Bush’s live shows like?
Her first proper concert tour came in 1979 with The Tour of Life. This was a staggering visual spectacular incorporating song, dance, mime, magic, projections and, fun fact, the invention of the wireless headset microphone. In true Kate Bush fashion, she was so desperate to dance while she sang that they worked out a solution that would change the face of pop concerts forever.
All of this came from the mind of a woman who was, and I can’t stress this enough, 20 at the time of the tour’s debut. The tour was not without its hardships, where a tragic accident after a warm-up show took the life of Bush’s lighting designer, Bill Duffield. It has since been theorised that Duffield’s loss, combined with a chronic fear of flying and the sheer physical, psychological and emotional burnout that her first tour left her with, put her off following it up.
It seemed like Bush had made her mark as a live performer and wanted to leave it there. She spent the next 35 years as a studio-bound artist and, considering that time was spent making records like The Dreaming, Hounds of Love and 50 Words for Snow, it would be difficult to argue that wasn’t time well spent. She’d make the occasional live appearance on TV, or one-off appearances at benefit shows like, The Secret Policeman’s Ball and that, seemingly, was it.
Then, on March 21st, 2014, the strangest thing happened. After three and a half decades, Kate Bush returned to the stage, in a run of 15 shows at London’s Hammersmith Apollo called Before The Dawn. There’s an argument to be made that this was the single biggest music news story of that year. The fact that a further seven shows were added due to demand, yet the entire 22-night run would still sell out in 15 minutes, only proves it.
The famously private Bush discussed this new live show in an interview with Matt Everitt for BBC 6 Music. When asked what changed her mind about performing, she said, “I’d done two albums in really quite quick succession, and I felt like doing something different. I really wanted to do something that wasn’t going to mean sitting in the studio for a couple of years, just putting an album together. So it just felt like the right time.”
Like the Tour of Life, Before The Dawn would be another multimedia extravaganza. One that combined a pop concert with theatre, animation, puppetry, dance and film. Bush herself would spend three days filming in a flotation tank for scenes shown during the concert, as if how committed she was to seeing her vision come to life needed proving. The show also saw Bush collaborating with everyone from the novelist David Mitchell to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s chief executive, Adrian Noble.
The setlist seemed to consciously draw from both her past and the present. The first half of the show consisted of The Ninth Wave suite from 1985’s Hounds of Love, before the second saw Bush performing the A Sky of Honey suite from 2005’s Aerial. These two suites were bookended by hits from Hounds of Love, 50 Words for Snow and The Red Shoes. While Bush said in the BBC 6 interview that she was “terrified” to go through with the shows, there was barely any need to be.
The shows were rapturously received as the best concerts of the year and arguably among the best of the decade. John Aizlewood of the Evening Standard summed up the basic sentiment of everyone lucky enough to snag a ticket to Before The Dawn, saying that Kate Bush was “so obviously, so unambiguously brilliant” that “this extraordinary mix of magical ideas, stunning visuals, attention to detail and remarkable music left this crowd well-pleased”.
Thankfully, Bush felt the same. She said in the same interview that the experience was “an extraordinary thing to be involved in, especially to have got the response that we did. It was really magical”. It almost certainly won’t happen again, and while there’ll be legions of fans disappointed with that, especially due to her Netflix-assisted commercial resurgence, that’s just part of the joy of Kate Bush.
In a world of instant gratification, there’s something elusive and magical about her work. No matter how many artists are influenced by her, it’ll be a long, long time before her work is diluted enough to lose that beguiling, queer beauty.
