Tour of Life (second draft) (Patreon)

Still not finished - I started over. Still needs an outro, some more historical context, and some comments on critical conception. Thought I'd let everyone see the writing process.

Tour of Life Hammersmith Odeon Manchester Apollo Let It Be I Don’t Remember Nationwide documentary

The touring career of Kate Bush consists of 29 shows across 6 countries in roughly 6 weeks, with performances of 2 existing albums and a burgeoning third. The singularity of Bush’s tour is as much a staple of Bush as an artist as “Wuthering Heights,” Hounds of Love, and her 12-year moratorium on new albums between The Red Shoes and Aerial. The difference between that music, that gap, and the tour, however, is accessibility. You can listen to Bush’s music pretty much whenever provided you have the physical media of it, downloads, or a steady Internet connection, and many people lived through the longest gap between Kate Bush albums ever. The Tour of Life is Bush’s only tour — if you wanted to see her do a full concert outside of the UK, you could only have done so through April and May of 1979. Locked into a short period of time, Kate Bush on Tour was a phenomenon that drastically moved her forward both as an artist and in the public eye, and one she never repeated.

Every date of the tour began with “Moving.” Whale sounds were played for several seconds, as they were on The Kick Inside, while a transparent blue curtain cordoned off those onstage from the audience, with only a bright light in the center of the stage and the silhouette of Bush completely visible through it. Then came the vocal and the piano: “moving stranger, does it really matter/as long as you’re not afraid to feel?” called Bush to her audience as the curtain was pulled back. Her dance, made up of open arms and gestures aimed at the outline of her body, was an invitation to the audience to collaborate and be part of her music. It was the right move: when the first number ended, the audience made their enthusiasm known. Perhaps this would be alright, Bush likely thought.

The Tour of Life (as it’s called now but wasn’t then) was in the works shortly after Lionheart wrapped. Serious planning began in January of 1979, continued through months of furious rehearsal and promotion, and then resulted in the 29-date tour, a number of concerts that, while minimal compared to the number of shows Pink Floyd or Genesis were doing in the same period, was still a big step up from Bush’s previous commitments to live performance. As intimidating as the number of shows was the scale of her concerts — this wasn’t just going to be Miss Kate Bush and Her Band showing up, playing their back catalogue for a second, and leaving without an intermission. Bush was producing a stage show, a colorful stage show with extensive costuming, mime routines, dancers, act breaks, poetry, and elaborate set design. “I think the most important thing about choosing the songs is that the whole show will be sustained,” said Bush later. “…the songs must adapt well visually: a show is visual as well as audial, so there must hopefully be a good blend of the two.” Doing the songs as an album is one thing; making a stage show out of them is both a musical and theatrical process. As per usual, Bush’s way of proving herself was unorthodox. Rather than a series of gigs, she was going to do the most elaborate stage show in British pop. 

Hype around the tour was extensive: reviews, Callaghan, free club. Fan writing

Plans for Bush’s tour had begun properly at the end of December 1978, when Bush had a brainstorming session with set designer David Jackson at EMI’s headquarters. Further preliminary meetings were held at East Wickham Farm in January, and shortly afterwards Bush was meeting wardrobe consultant Lisa Hayes. Rehearsals then began in earnest: Bush spent mornings at The Place performance center in Euston preparing the tour’s dance routines with choreographer Anthony Van Laast (now of Mamma Mia! and Harry Potter fame) and dancers Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst. These sessions were as collaborative as they were instructive: Bush had worked with Van Laast before, as he’d appeared in the “Hammer Horror” music video as her masked dancing partner. They spent the mornings designing routines for the show, informed by Van Laast’s seasoned dancing skill and Bush’s mime training. It was a positive union: the resulting concerts have notable dancing which is inseparable from the songs it’s set to. As Bush had to both sing and dance onstage, she and Van Laast worked out choreography that would both work as dance and allow her to sing without losing her breath. The minimalism of “Moving” and Bush’s all-limb gesturing during it is one such careful work of planning, as is her most frenetic gun-happiness during the extended bridge of “James and the Cold Gun,” where she doesn’t sing. 

Rehearsals for the tour’s music were staged initially at Wood Wharf Studios in Greenwich, before moving to Surrey’s eminent Shepperton Studios in March. The idea was to retain the heart of The Kick Inside and Lionheart but to also progress them to the next level. Lionheart is at its core a work of musical theater, and its stage incarnation helps it to be the best version of itself. As Bush had done the album once before, she knew its strengths and weaknesses, and had more time to perfect its material. She also had a different lineup of musicians than was available to her on her two albums so far: she’d begun sneaking the KT Bush Band into the studio by including them on “Wow” and “Kashka from Baghdad,” but a proper reunion of the old touring group was mostly in swing onstage. It wasn’t the exact same band (drummers Charlie Morgan and Vic King declined to return), but the quartet of Bush, bassist (and her partner) Del Palmer, guitarist and bandleader Brian Bath, and stalwart polymath Paddy Bush were playing music again together. Preston Heyman, Bush’s best drummer to date, joined the group and brought a percussive explosiveness to the concerts that the albums lacked (“when he hit the cymbal Kate used to blink,” said Brian Bath). Keyboardist Ben Barson, saxophonist and pianist Kevin McAlea, and guitarist Alan Murphy were the other new additions to the group, assuring that the shows would sound as full as Bush’s albums. 

For all the strengths of The Kick Inside and Lionheart, the live versions of many of their songs are superior: the revamped band bring the songs a power the original recordings sometimes lacked. “Coffee Homeground” sounds better realized, and even the unimpeachable “Wuthering Heights” improves slightly when Alan Murphy improvises bits of the track’s guitar solo. There are plenty of odd musical choices throughout the shows: there’s an electronica-inflected rendition of Satie’s Gymnopedies leading into “Feel It,” and “James and the Cold Gun” becomes the 10-minute prog jam its album counterpart was itching to be. There’s no sense Bush has been constrained by the studio — in fact, it’s likely she works better outside of the traditional rock band format. But in many ways she’s liberated by her chance to do musical theater, showing off what her songs look like and pushing some aspects of their sound a bit further. 

In practice Bush was doing the Lionheart Tour, as it was her most recent album. Yet the show as it was set up was equally the Kick Inside Tour. All songs from both albums were performed barring “Oh To Be In Love” (perhaps justifiably — it’s the Bush album track which most feels like a holdover from the Phoenix years), plus a couple new songs called “Violin” and “Egypt,” the latter of which we’ll return to next week. It’s a solid pairing of albums, as Kick and Lionheart are both preoccupied with adolescent world-storming. Bush seems conscious of this, as at one point she planned to tour after doing Never for Ever and The Dreaming. Two albums a tour is the kind of ambitious planning Bush would have done in the early days. There’s a precision of artistic placement here Bush is arranging her albums to mirror each other, allowing all of them to have common links (although it’s difficult to know whether or not to pair up Hounds of Love and The Sensual World or The Sensual World and The Red Shoes). Bush’s concert setlists show off this interplay of albums well: Act One is constructed around the lighter songs of The Kick Inside (“Heavy People,” “L’Amour”) and “Violin” with “Egypt,” while Act Two centers the anxiety-ridden bulk of Lionheart plus “Strange Phenomena, and Act Three provides the show with a theatrical climax of “Coffee Homeground” and “Kite” before the encore of “Oh England My Lionheart,” and finally “Wuthering Heights.” Setlists can be unruly things: while touring for albums, you’ll want to intersperse the newer material with the hits. Bush keeps this in mind while also remembering she’s doing a stage show with act breaks and thematic resonances. It’s a strong act, one that’s bolstered by its setlist.

The artistic precision of the concert belies what occurred behind the scenes. Bush was exhausted by the shows and the preparation for them, with her essentially all-day rehearsal schedule giving her little-to-no time off. The scale of the shows and the extensive travel involved (Bush is famously afraid of traveling by plane) are likely a contributing factor to Bush’s decision to never tour again. A likely further cause is the tragic first night of the tour. During a warm-up concert at Poole, lighting director Bill Duffield fell through an open panel around the stage and landed on a concrete floor 17 feet below. After a week on life support, Duffield died. It was a traumatic moment for everyone involved in the tour, and gave the group pause about whether to continue. When they inevitably did, it was as much as because of the effort put into the shows as it was for Bill himself.

Bush didn’t forget Duffield, keeping tabs as she did on everyone she worked with. The first date of the final London stretch of the tour was a benefit concert for Duffield’s family. There was no attempt to exploit Duffield’s memory and profit on him: the Duffields received all revenue from the show. The night saw a drastic departure from Bush’s other concerts in many respects: the setlist was significantly different, as Bush wasn’t the only singer performing that night. Two other artists who’d worked with Duffield were present: Steve Harley and Peter Gabriel. Bush had worked with collaborators of famous artists before (e.g. Geoff Emerick), but appearing onstage with established British rock stars was a step forward for her. Harley had scored a #1 single with his glam band Cockney Rebel in 1975 when they released “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me),” and didn’t fall out of the albums charts for the next few years. While in 1979 he was hardly the big name he had previously been, with his attempt to go solo beginning with a critically savaged and commercially disappointing album, he had hardly been forgotten by listeners of British pop. Peter Gabriel, however, was at the top of his game. Unlike Harley, Gabriel was confidently traversing through the early years of his post-Genesis career, with the first two of a quartet of self-titled albums under his belt, both of which had made the top 10. The classic “Solsbury Hill” had climbed to #13, and Gabriel was good to go. At the Duffield concert he performed the effervescent “I Don’t Remember,” a wild ballad of the kind of formalist mountain-climbing and despair Gabriel had made his bread and butter while in Genesis. A wailing Kate Bush joins him on backing vocals, who sounds like her larynx is about to combust under the weight of the song’s Frippertonics. Much easier on Bush is a traditional cover of “Let It Be,” an unchallenging song for her to sing and thus one she hadn’t made her way into yet (this would change — wait until this blog hits the late Eighties). Conversely, Gabriel seems to struggle with the song, as Paul McCartney’s gentler songwriting chafed with the new modes of songwriting he’d been exploring on his new albums and tour. A duo was established, however: Bush and Gabriel would sing together again.

[Going to extensively retool this, cut down on the history and do more analysis, pen some sort of outro]