“Losing confidence”: The live shows that made Kate Bush never tour again
As part of a documentary with the BBC in 1979, Kate Bush showcased the six months of planning that went into her first and only tour, The Lionheart Tour, also known as the Tour of Life, a celebration of music, poetry, dance, magic and mime.
The documentary was an eye into the soul of one of her crew, the morning dance class, which saw her improving at such a rate that it became a focus for her dance instructor to fit the singing in; later, the band practice showed Bush rehearsing her songs until everything was perfect. Bush was visibly exhausted, going from one rehearsal to the next; these were 14-hour days, but she was meticulous, and so were her crew.
Half a dozen costumes were created for the tour, and Bush would be instrumental in making every decision, down to the fine details of what food the crew would eat. Her brother John Carder Bush’s wife provided vegetarian meals for the crew, Bush being a vegetarian herself.
The tour would last for over six weeks and see Bush performing for two hours at a time, singing and dancing the entire time. A wireless headset was created to allow Bush to perform freely without constraint. The headset prototype was made from a wire coat hanger. The device was the first of its kind to be used in such a context.
“I did enjoy it,” Bush said of her time touring in 1979, “But I was really physically exhausted. Eventually, I got nervous about performing live again, because I hadn’t done it for so long, and I think I actually started losing a lot of confidence as a performer. I felt that I’d become a writer in a very isolated situation, just working with a small group of people.” Both of Bush’s brothers were involved in the tour; Paddy played mandolin and harmonica in the band, and John read poetry between songs.
Following the Tour of Life, Bush wouldn’t perform live until 2014; her Before the Dawn residencies at London’s Eventim Apollo marked the first full live shows Bush had performed in 35 years. The venue was the same building she’d used for the final Tour of Life shows back in May 1979.
Even before the tour, Bush expressed a need for solitude, confessing how hard it was for her to ask people to leave in a 1978 interview. She missed being alone. “The more I got into presenting things to the world, the further it was taking me away from what I was,” Bush said to Rolling Stone back in 1994, “which was someone who just used to sit quietly at a piano and sing and play. It became very important to me not to lose sight of that. I didn’t want my feet to come off the ground.”
As well as being gruelling both physically and mentally, the tour was also overshadowed by the death of Bush’s 21-year-old lighting director, Bill Duffield. Duffield died from an accident which occurred at a warm-up show at the Poole Arts Centre after he fell 20 feet through an open trapdoor on stage. Duffield died a week later from serious injuries; by that time, the tour had already started. A memorial concert would be held to honour Duffield, and the song ‘Blow Away (The Bill)’ would be penned for Bush’s 1980 album Never For Ever.
