The one singer David Gilmour said needs to perform again
David Gilmour wasn’t the kind of person that necessarily needed the massive light shows to enjoy himself onstage in Pink Floyd.
No matter how hard he tried to give the audience the best show that he could, it took a bit of convincing in their earliest days on Roger Waters’s part to get him to comply with a show that focused on the massive theatrics rather than the music. If all the band did was stand at the microphones and sing, it would have been pretty boring, but even Gilmour had a keen eye for what a true musical giant looked like whenever he started scouting for new talent.
Because even if the 1980s isn’t looked back on that fondly by most Floyd fans, Gilmour was still impressed by what he saw out of people like Michael Jackson every time he played. The MTV generation was much more interested in being larger than life, and while you can definitely hear Gilmour trying to get in on the action with A Momentary Lapse of Reason, there are more than a few moments on his first-led Floyd where he’s clearly finding his feet.
In fact, Kate Bush was starting to go far beyond anything that Floyd was doing well after Gilmour discovered her. She was still one of the finest songwriters of her generation even before making videos, but when she translated her songs to the small screen, ‘Running Up That Hill’ slowly became one of the finest pop songs of her generation. But throughout every one of her classics, it would be a long time before anyone convinced her to go back on the road to tour.
Bush’s greatest strength was in making the best music that she could, and that didn’t always involve risking her physical health to bring it to the people. She had already experienced a few tragedies when she went on her first official tour, and since she was adding new bells and whistles every time she went into the studio, there was no way of accurately recreating the same kind of feeling she got when she was making the entire flipside of Hounds of Love.
But in the modern age, people don’t need to worry about the integrity of the live sound. Everyone could make their music sound great, and considering what Gilmour saw, he thought it was a tragedy that Bush didn’t manage to get back out on the road, saying, “Kate Bush is the only person who can get Kate Bush back on stage. I think the shows she did in 2014 at the Hammersmith Apollo were some of the best I’ve ever seen. We went several nights. I’ve tried persuading her recently, actually. Gently.”
Then again, Bush’s music almost seems to exist outside of the traditional means of performing. A lot of her best songs are almost like sonic acting whenever she gets in front of a crowd, and even if she wasn’t going to have the same voice that she had when she first made The Dreaming, there are more than a few people who would love to hear what she’s capable of even years after her prime.
And now that The Duffer Brothers have given her an entirely new audience thanks to ‘Running Up That Hill’ being used in Stranger Things, it’s not like the audiences aren’t there. A whole new fanbase is growing up listening to her brand of baroque pop, and even if she hasn’t released a new album in years, there’s a good chance that she could give us a masterpiece as long as she thinks the time is right.
Given her track record, though, any new Kate Bush show or even album will only come out when Bush is up for it. After all, she has never made an overtly bad album in her lifetime, and since her last records were gorgeous in their own way, maybe all she needs is time to refine herself and give everyone the kind of vocal perfection that she has held herself up to all those years.
