Watch Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel in the bizarre Christmas special from 1979
Nothing gets you in the Christmas spirit quite like watching Kate Bush perform a holiday song as part of a 12-track setlist. Of course, the festive track is followed by a song that features two murders and suicide, which changes the sentiment slightly…Merry Christmas!
The slightly bizarre Christmas special, named simply ‘Kate on-screen’, aired on the BBC in 1979 whilst Bush was in the thick of recording Never For Ever and had just released Lionheart. She had recently wrapped up her massively successful concert tour, ‘Bush’s Tour of Life’, and the singer applied all the on-stage theatrics employed on tour to the 43-minute performance.
Bush was a student of Lindsay Kemp, the dancer and artist who also trained David Bowie. Discussing this education, she once said (via Rolling Stone): “There was no one quite like Lindsay. I was incredibly lucky to study with him, work with him and spend time with him”. Armed with her signature coloratura soprano warble, Bush always knew how to emote with her voice, but it was Kemp who taught her how to extend that expression in her dancing.
We see Kemp’s touch heavily in her performance throughout the footage below, but perhaps most strongly in the opening of ‘Violin’, where she enters hanging from a rope, clad in a bat-like black dress, waving her arms manically as two anthropomorphic violins dance alongside her. Peter Gabriel later joins her for two songs, ‘Another Day’ and ‘Here Comes The Flood’. Gabriel’s contributions are so sombre that the energetic shift we get from his tracks to the more upbeat likes of ‘Them Heavy People’ make the depressing nature of the songs almost comical.
But like we said, Bush does deign to include one Christmas song, the at-the-time unreleased ‘December Will Be Magic Again’. She sits at the piano for this one, mentioning traditional Christmas figures like Saint Nick and Bing Crosby, so the song had all the trappings of a pretty normal Christmas record (there are even jingle bells!). That’s until Bush starts telling the story of Santa as if he’s a benevolent parachuting man, dropping down onto “the white city” to “cover the lovers”.
But it’s not that Christmas song that defines the special. If anything, it’s Bush’s choice to follow it up with Never For Ever’s ‘The Wedding List’, which is less white Christmas and more so white wedding. Clips cut between pre-shoot footage of her husband getting shot on their wedding day to her clutching a gun and plotting an act of revenge. We finish with her husband waking from the dead for a brief moment to lift her as she dies in his arms.
You can watch the bizarre special below.
