Do you know what? Some thoughts after seeing Kate Bush

If I could identify one moment in the whole evening of the Before the Dawn show that made most impact on me, it was a moment during the performance of the final song in the Ninth Wave song-cycle, The Morning Fog, when Kate sang the line ‘Do you know what, I love you better now’, and the audience erupted into applause. I joined in, perhaps ecstatically.

There was no effect, no theatrical moment, nothing other than the lyric. It was a unique moment in the history of my experience of performance; a moment in which some profound human understanding was collectively grasped, appreciated, and spontaneously and joyously celebrated, almost interrupting the song that stimulated and contained it. It was the relief of the expression of love, of the redemption of love, which quickly is contextualised in the song within family, and the return to family from death or near-death that the song cycle explores. Expanding upon the original lyrics, Kate sang, gesturing toward members of her musical family on stage, and her actual son: ‘I’ll tell my mother, I’ll tell my sisters, I’ll tell my son, I’ll tell my brothers, how much I love them’.

This was not some semi-abstract Lennonesque appeal to universal love, but to the affection, need, bond of family (Lennon, of course, moved in that direction later). And in the wake of that glorious shared applause, I had an epiphany that this was central to what Kate communicates in her art. Home.

After a traditional set of six songs (Lily / Hounds of Love / Joanni / Top of the City / Running up that Hill / King of the Mountain), The Ninth Wave was introduced by a video contextualisation of a distress call to a lifeguard concerning a ship going down into icy sea, but the segue from a straightforward set of songs to ‘performance’ was first announced by one of the band’s percusionists entering the stage space downstage from his kit, as the final bars of King of the Mountain were given, and swinging a rain maker above his head. From then on, the musicians were more or less obscured behind elements of shifting set, screens and groups of actors presenting the narrative of the song cycle. Weather and sea, underwater and under ice, dream, nightmare, delirium were all captured scenically, and a short piece of dialogue between son and father pulled the story of the songs together as theatre, its visual and gestural languages filling the space as the music played behind it all. Only with those first plucked acoustic guitar notes of The Morning Fog did the musicians re-emerge onto the stage, swaying forward, dancing, strumming guitars and tapping their hollow wooden frames. In this way, the stage was reclaimed by them, by the life-affirming music, the harrowing narrative resolving in a return to health, to life, to togetherness. The presence of the musicans in the scenography in this way (and perhaps first in that rain-maker moment) is seemingly deliberate: their presence, their instruments, their expressive bodily synergies with those instruments (man-and-guitar, not just man with guitar), signified life. I suspect that intuiting that as an audience, we were ripe for that out-of-place applause.

Part of the intense value of the whole evening was the sheer joy at not only having an opportunity to finally see a treasured artist performing live when there had to date been no expectation of that, but of having one’s expectations surpassed, and surpassed again as the evening progressed. And that passion for the music in the first place prepares for the pleasure in the live moment. And Kate Bush’s natural humility and charm melted any possibility of the contruction of celebrity infecting the experience. When she first walked on stage with a kind of augmented walk, stepping forward with a spring in each pace, bouncing on bare foot to the beat, the simplicity and unpresuming embrace of singing and performing belied the level of creative burst that was to follow. This is just what she does, and you can’t help but admire that humble lack of show, of self-projection, that then permits us to appreciate the sophistication of the creative imagination to follow not as indulgence, but as play. We might have expected this. I recognise that her work has participated in my understanding of my relationships over the years with women; I don’t believe she has ever self-declared as a feminist, but her inclination to continue doing what she wants to do regardless of how others have tried to steer or define her is perhaps in itself a significant feminist achievement, because it is an achievement beyond gender. Even making this statement perhaps misses its own point. Kate Bush has steered her own course, and all that talk of her as a ‘hermit’ is just a preposterous foregrounding of the rules of engagement for artists in the music industry, rather than a foregrounding of an artist as a person with a life and family who expresses to her own timetable, not that of a market, culture or demand.

Added to the pleasure of finally seeing her perform is the manner in which that music, of course, is woven into our individual histories. Most potently for my wife and me is the bank of memories that connect the Aerial album with our daughter. She came home with us three months after her birth in 2009, having spent the interim in hospital, including extended periods in intensive care. I recall the evenings that my wife would spend bathing her and preparing her for bed, her blood oxygen and heart rate monitor and oxygen pump all part of the night-time routine, cleaning around her gastrostomy, relaxng her with massage on a bath towel on the bed, condensation on the window, Kate Bush’s Aerial pulsing amber into the room. Perhaps this explains my epiphany on family, on home, on the bliss of the domestic in Kate’s music. Perhaps a deeply personal response cannot be avoided. And when, through a story of trauma, death, separation, we reach the moment of realising ‘do you know what, I love you better now’, it all falls into place, the human journey experienced with family.

So when the show moved from that declaration of love, life, family, home at the end of The Ninth Wave to the expansive, mature palette of another song cycle, A Sky of Honey, we were prepared. We knew our memories contained a bank of tears that might flow at any moment when that music triggered it.

The theatrical arrangement, this time, was different. The musicians were not obscured and, instead of having to emerge from the set, the set would re-negotiate their presence, and transform them. The relationship between the imaginative stage space and the musicians was established charmingly first by the boyish wooden puppet figure who was beckoned by Kate at the piano ‘Over here, over here’ (deliberately or incidentally invoking The Ninth Wave?). He enters the space of the musicians, steps onto their rostra, touches the drum kit encouraged by its drummer, knocks a cymbal, caresses the side of the piano; the life-aspiring puppet in awe of the vitality of music. His negotiations for life through music, and his eventual transformation to independence from a puppet master was a neat parallel to the imagery of art and the artist in relation to the expanse of the natural world. The giant painter’s canvas and the even more giant backdrop to the whole stage that it mirrored, were the location for a series of visual statements about art’s relationship with the skies (life, nature, the organic) it aims to capture. The transformation of the musicians – seemingly through the compelling music – into bird-men suggested a surrender to nature, rather than there being any value in capturing it. The undeterrable stomp of two thick, tall tree trunks into the musicians’ stage space at the end set the seal. Music is nature as art, not nature in art. Finishing with that awe-inspiring leap into the air of a bird-mutated Kate, the collection of images and ideas complemented the music beautifully. If The Ninth Wave had been a constructed theatrical narrative that followed the story of that song-cycle, A Sky of Honey was more of an organic growth around the music, from it, responding to it, augmenting it.

The two encores were well placed to bring us down. The solo piano piece (Among Angels) gave us Kate alone to ourselves, and the final song Cloudbusting (introduced by a few bars of the military drum rattle) was a celebration in stomping, clapping ovation.

We didn’t have the words to explain how we felt in the wake of the show. This is just a first attempt at finding some.