63. Kate Bush
Hammersmith Apollo
24 September 2014
The “desert island album” question is one of those tedious, hypothetical parlour games that usually ends in someone choosing The White Album just to sound clever. But for me, there’s no hesitation, no agonising over the record crates. It’s Hounds of Love. It has been Hounds of Love for forty years. It will probably always be Hounds of Love. An album so eerily perfect, so finely crafted, it might as well have been delivered to Earth by celestial swans. It’s pop, but it’s also deeply weird, like a finely cut diamond that occasionally reflects something unsettling when the light catches it.
Side A is all glorious, high-concept pop bangers, covering casual little topics like body-swapping lovers, running from hellhounds that represent an existential fear of relationships, and Wilhelm Reich’s ill-fated experiments with a weather machine, because of course, that’s what you write about when you’re Kate Bush. Then there’s The Ninth Wave, a full-blown progressive pop opera about a woman lost at sea, clinging to life as the North Sea prepares to claim her. The title is a nod to the old maritime legend that, once you’ve gone overboard, your survival time is measured in waves.
As a side note, if I had to pick a runner-up, it would be Aerial, a bucolic joy of an album so soaked in the warmth of an endless English summer that I can practically feel my pasty skin turning red in the glow of just listening to it.
So, when she, the mythical, rarely glimpsed Kate Bush, announced a residency at the Hammersmith Apollo, her first live shows in thirty years, and that she was performing these two prog pop suites as performance pieces, I treated ticket-buying like a full-scale military operation and somehow, somehow, I emerged victorious with four tickets.
Two of them were for my neighbour and her plus-one, who, at the last minute, turned out to be a now reasonably famous Labour peer. At the time, she was peerless, a champagne activist, rather than a Labour peer and, if our evening was anything to go by, something of a nightmare to share a gig with. Rolling in late, already several drinks deep, radiating what Gen Z would now call main character energy but what I prefer to term belligerent and mildly unhinged, she wobbled her way through the interval, only to almost get into a full-blown fight with a posh bloke in a blazer. There’s an alternate reality where Kate Bush’s grand return was overshadowed by a punch-up with a future member of the House of Lords in the foyer bar.
Sideshows aside, this gig, this gig was, without question, the greatest I have ever attended, then or since. She opened with a smattering of pop brilliance: “Running Up That Hill”, “Hounds of Love”, “King of the Mountain”, before launching into the centrepiece of the night: “The Ninth Wave”. And this wasn’t just a performance; it was theatrical spectacle. Kate, floating in a tank of inky black water, searchlights slashing through the darkness, before she was dragged under by the eerie, writhing figures of the Fish People, summoning her to be judged by the ocean in the sinister, nightmarish “Waking the Witch”.
Then, as if we weren’t already emotionally spent, we got “A Sea of Honey”, the second suite from Aerial, drenched in golden light, birdsong, and the unmistakable warmth of an English summer’s day. Barefoot, radiant, utterly transcendent, she swept us into her world, where the afternoon hums with the sound of bees and the sunset stretches into forever.
To close, a hushed, heart-wrenching “Among Angels” from 50 Words for Snow, a moment so delicate, so raw, that I will fully admit to shedding a tear or two. Just when we thought it was over, just when we thought we had survived this otherworldly experience, the whole cast returned for a euphoric, full-cast rendition of “Cloudbusting”, Fish People and all. The entire room on their feet, clapping, singing, swept away in a moment of pure, undiluted joy.
And that was it. My number one. Forever.