September 9, 2014. My friend Mandy Slater and I take our seats inside the Eventim Apollo theatre in London at 7:20 p.m. The show is supposed to begin at 7:45. This will not be a typical rock concert, so I expect it to begin on time.
The next twenty-five minutes are going to be excruciating.
Because it’s not just that I have flown halfway around the world and racked up credit card bills I’ll be paying off for the next year to be here tonight. It is, rather, about imagining what this might be like for over thirty years.
It goes back to 1982, when I was barely out of my teens and living alone (for the first time) in Westwood, where UCLA is located. At that time, Westwood was a hive of amazing bookstores and record shops. One record store in particular (and sadly the name escapes me now) always had a great selection of imports, and I shopped there frequently, buying mostly obscure soundtracks.
One day I entered the store and was stopped dead in my tracks by a newly-mounted poster. It showed a sepia-toned photo of a beautiful woman embracing a man with slicked-back hair and chains around his shoulders. The woman’s mouth is open, there’s a small gold key on her tongue, and she’s looking furtively to the side.
I’d never heard of the performer – Kate Bush? – but there was something familiar about that image…and after a few minutes, my memories of studying the history of magic when I’d been a semi-professional teenaged magician flooded back. I knew the man was Houdini, and the woman was his wife, Bess, passing the key to him so he could perform one of his “miraculous” escapes.
I bought the album, took it home…and it wasn’t love at first listen. I’d never heard anything like it (in case you’re not familiar with The Dreaming, it’s Kate Bush’s most experimental album). I didn’t quite know what to make of it. But after listening to it endlessly for several months, I decided it was quite brilliant. I returned to the store and bought The Kick Inside, her first album.
These were the pre-Internet days, and so I knew virtually nothing about her. It wasn’t until a few years later – about the time she released The Hounds of Love/The Ninth Wave – that a friend of mine married a British chap who filled me in on her history.
From that point on I was obsessed. I loved the storytelling in her lyrics, her unique arrangements and the obvious perfectionism on display (something I’ve been accused of having myself). I loved the visuals on her album covers and videos. I admired the way she’d charted her own course and never caved to trend or public expectation. And of course, there was the astonishing four-octave voice and the rich, emotive piano.
The obsession never faded, even when she seemed to vanish for the twelve years between The Red Shoes (1993) and Aerial (2005). I had missed her one and only tour in 1979. She rarely appeared in public anymore. There was no doubt in my mind that she’d never tour again.
You can understand, then, when I tell you that, upon receiving an e-mail from her website in April of this year informing me that she would be presenting live concerts beginning in August, my first thought was, This hoax is really well done.
Now, here I was five months later, sitting in the stalls at the same theatre in Hammersmith where she’d presented her 1979 tour, waiting with 3,000 others for the show to start. I’d already read the reviews, but they were so extraordinary that I thought they couldn’t be true.
To pass those agonizing twenty-five minutes, I chatted with Mandy and observed the crowd. In the lobby, we’d queued with everyone else to buy programs and t-shirts. In line, we’d met a charming young man who’d flown all the way from Australia; he was impressed when we told him I’d come from Los Angeles, because he said lots of Aussies were there (she’s well loved DownUnder), but few Americans, where she remains maddeningly obscure. When the young Australian man got to the merchandise counter, he simply asked for one of everything. There was a lot of stuff – many t-shirt designs, key chains, pins, even a “Rescue Kit” for 45 pounds. He staggered away with a three-foot-tall stack in his arms and we wished each other well.
Our seats were perfection – about sixty feet from the stage, dead center. The stage was set with the musicians’ instruments, lit in a blue so deep it was almost ultraviolet. At about 7:25, a handsome young gay couple sat on my right and jabbered excitedly in German. At 7:30, a middle-aged pair and two twentysomethings took the seats immediately in front of us. The adorable blonde girl started taking photos of the couple, and at one point she bumped Mandy slightly. “Sorry,” she said, “but it’s their anniversary.” The older couple seemed somewhat stunned to be there.
At 7:40 the theatre was nearly full. At 7:44, an announcer’s voice came over the speakers: “Good evening. Kate would like to ask her friends to please turn off cell phones and refrain from taking photos of tonight’s performance. Thank you, and enjoy the show.”
At exactly 7:45, the lights went down.
The crowd went utterly and ecstatically apeshit. So apeshit that it was a few seconds before we realized the opening spoken-word invocation from “Lily” was playing. The band took their places. The lovely invocation ended. Lights and sound exploded.
And Kate walked on, leading her five backup singers.
6,000 feet slapped the Apollo’s floor as emptied seats flipped up. The audience absolutely shrieked. Then silence fell as Kate picked up a mike.
What would she sound like? It’d been 21 years since she’d first recorded this song, 3 years since she’d re-sung it on the Director’s Cut album. Could she still hit those notes? Would she be nervous without the safety net of her studio behind her?
It took all of about three notes to wash away those concerns. Impossibly, at 56 she sounds better than she ever has before. She belted out the songs with such power that it felt like a challenge – “c’mon, you youngsters, see if you can keep up with the old broad.” She swayed gracefully to the music, lifting her left hand as she clutched the mike with her right. If she didn’t dance much, it had more to do with focusing on the singing.
Each song sounded greater than the last. The band was superb, adding a definite rock powerhouse flavor to the songs. I didn’t understand why the press had been somewhat dismissive of the visuals for this opening “mini-set” – the obviously custom-designed lighting grid at the rear of the stage was spectacular, mimicking the look of everything from flames to city lights to a snowy, cold mountaintop. Between songs, Kate lavished praise on her team. Her son, Bertie, stood with the backup singers, tall and elegant in simple button-down shirt and slacks.
She finished “King of the Mountain” – her exploration of the meaning of celebrity via the life and death of Elvis – and really punched the last few notes. The audience was on their feet again. The song ended.
Lights went down. The long-haired percussionist stepped to the front of the stage and whirled a bullroarer overhead. The sound rumbled through the theatre.
And then cannons went off. Yes, cannons, firing bits of paper into the audience. The little parchment-colored slips had four handwritten lines from Tennyson’s “The Coming of Arthur”:
The much-hyped presentation of The Ninth Wave had begun.
I soon thought the newspaper raves hadn’t been big enough.
The Ninth Wave wasn’t just a concert, or an opera, or multimedia performance art, or musical theatre, but all of those. It was an entirely new form of art; there’s nothing else to compare it to. It begins with a funny and finally dread-inducing filmed bit, as an astronomer tries to report an emergency call he’s accidentally received from a sinking boat to a bureaucrat at the Coast Guard. When his bit ends, a new film appears behind it: Kate, playing a floating survivor of the shipwreck, singing the opening song “And Dream of Sheep”. The vocals were so clear I assumed she must have been offstage providing a live accompaniment; the program book, however, makes it clear that she really sang the damned thing while floating in icy water as they recorded it.
The Ninth Wave became more awe-inspiring and frightful and mesmerizing as it proceeded. Random images from it are still stuck in my head a week later: Kate kneeling before a black-robed inquisitor, cringing as he judges her; a team of rescuers taking a chainsaw to the stage and pulling Kate up from beneath “ice”, only to lose her and watch her sink back down; Kate climbing onto a buoy to join the rescuers, then falling back into a waiting school of skeletal “fish people” who carry her from the stage and through the audience; a helicopter swooping down through the theatre, its intense searchlight swinging back and forth; and my favorite bit, Kate playing a ghost in the performance of “Watching You Without Me” and trying desperately to cling to her (real-life) son. The Ninth Wave ends with the upbeat and triumphant “The Morning Fog”, during which the entire band joined Kate at the edge of the stage, joyfully performing on acoustic instruments.
The Ninth Wave ended, and we were told there would be a twenty-minute intermission. A curtain dropped down over the stage; the curtain was painted with a feather framed in a glowing red sun, an image that perfectly captures A Sky of Honey, the conceptual side of Aerial. A Sky of Honey is my favorite Kate recording, but I had to wonder…how could she equal what we’d just seen with The Ninth Wave?
Intermission passed. Lights went down. The curtain rose to reveal the band now at stage left, with Kate seated behind a grand piano. An immense pair of wooden doors occupied the other side of the stage. Kate began to sing the “Prelude” from A Sky of Honey. The doors opened to reveal snowfall framing a boy-sized wooden artist’s puppet, attached to a young man who deftly controlled him. The puppet wandered through the doors, curious. They slammed shut. He panicked, but soon fell into the wonder of the sunny scene and the music. The drummer waved to him; he waved back. He joined Kate at the piano.
It was lovely and oddly poignant. In the next song, “Prologue”, Kate left the piano and strolled across the stage, at one point embracing the puppet. Was he a stand-in for Bertie, who would have been about his size when she recorded Aerial (Bertie, by the way, is featured throughout the CD of Aerial)?
A Sky of Honey is every bit as visually astounding as The Ninth Wave – drenched in color, achingly beautiful, playful (Bertie, playing a landscape painter, told the puppet to “Piss off!”). Somehow it never occurred to me before that A Sky of Honey is about more than just the passage of day into night and the power of nature – it’s also about transformation. A wooden puppet becomes a boy; the glowing red sun becomes a giant spinning moon; and Kate becomes a bird. Yes, really. After performing the famed duet with bird song (“Aerial Tal”), a black wing was strapped to her right arm. The band donned bird masks. The music became more frenetic. The wooden puppet abruptly broke free. And at the grand crescendo, Kate stepped through those wooden doors, spread two great black wings, and soared upward as the lights slammed to black.
The audience lost its collective mind. We were all on our feet, shouting.
Kate graced us with two final songs: The soft, deceptively simple “Among Angels” from her last album, 50 Words for Snow; and the anthemic “Cloudbusting” from Hounds of Love. That last song became a communion, as the entire audience sang along. At one point Kate lowered the mike and stood, listening, a broad smile across her face. She seemed genuinely thrilled to hear 3,000 voices chanting her song’s chorus.
The evening spanned three hours. It was magical. While I would love to have heard “The Sensual World” (my favorite song) or “Misty” or “The Big Sky”, I didn’t really miss them at all. And if a twentysomething version of me would’ve killed to hear “Houdini” live, that same earlier incarnation would have been thrilled to know that, thirty years later, I’d be sitting in a London theatre with 3,000 friends hearing the woman with the key on her tongue.