“She entered the room with a coterie of management types, smart, successful, and I thought: ‘heavy hitters’,” says Jackson. “Because Kate is so petite I had the impression of a precocious child surrounded by heavily protective parents. We shook hands, we made eye contact, and there was a bit of light chit-chat. I don’t think we even looked at the fat portfolio of stuff I brought to show her. She was totally friendly, like we’d known each other for years, and just buzzing with enthusiasm. I had a huge scratch pad and some pencils with me, the pad was too big for any of the desks in the room so we sat on the floor and scribbled and talked and scribbled. When I looked around the management types had all wandered off, so there we were like two kids on the floor with our crayons. At some point one of my scribbles reminded her of an ankh*: ‘Looks like an ankh!’ ‘It does doesn’t it? That’s what it is then!’ The design for the physical stage set was pretty much done right there, and I fell in love with her right there. She was gorgeous, personable and very smart. After that it was, ‘Anything I can do to make you happy, Ma’am!’”
In the coming days, between January 2 and 4, she and Jackson met again at Wickham Farm to pin down the general look and feel of the set and the lighting. Like most aspects of the tour, it was a fully collaborative process, albeit one conducted within her strict guidelines. Bush would explain – not always clearly; she tended towards opaque, abstract inspiration –what she wanted and then allow her colleagues a degree of autonomy in executing her vision. She was not dictatorial, but given full artistic control for the first time her imagination tended to run riot. “Kate would just go off and I would jump in now and then and say, ‘Yes, OK, I think that one is just within the range of possibility,’” says Jackson. “It was out of control from the moment it began. Not literally, [but] the stuff we scribbled on the carpet was out of control.”
This was not atypical. For someone whose productivity is hardly the stuff of legend, the sheer pace at which Bush comes up with ideas in all aspects of her work, and the constant supply of new and occasionally outlandish concepts, has struck many of her collaborators. “She was a great person to work with, incredibly energetic and frenetic,” says Gered Mankowitz. “I used to feel absolutely exhausted after every session, because she has this effect of jumping from one idea to another. You have to continually pull her back and say, ‘No, this is going to be great.’ If it doesn’t seem right straight away she’d want to jump to another idea, and that was exhausting, trying to keep her on the rails. But the next day you’d see the film and there would just be shot after shot after shot, just wonderful.”
She spent further time in January with wardrobe assistant Lisa Hayes working on ideas for costumes and visual themes. Meanwhile, she had to orchestrate both the song and dance elements of the show. After the disappointment of being sent down from the mountain, Brian Bath, Del and Paddy had been drafted back in to form the nucleus of the touring group. Vic King was now firmly off-radar, and Charlie Morgan had amicably left the band of his own accord, somewhat weary of the piecemeal nature of the work. They needed a new drummer and, to recreate accurately the sound on the records, they also brought in a piano player, a keyboard player and another guitarist.
Ben Barson, the brother of Madness’s Mike Barson, joined on synthesiser. London-born session musician Alan Murphy came in on lead guitar on the recommendation of drummer Preston Heyman, who had played on Bryan Ferry’s 1978 album The Bride Stripped Bare and knew Murphy from gigs and studio sessions around London. Northern Irishman Kevin ‘Eggs’ McAlea, a pub rock veteran and a seasoned session player, played piano and saxophone.*
“We needed extra musicians, so the group just got bigger,” says Brian Bath, who was de facto bandleader. “Preston showed up and he was great, a really loud drummer: when he hit the cymbal Kate used to blink, she couldn’t help it! I remember Dave Gilmour’s younger brother coming along, but then Alan Murphy turned up and I thought, ‘My God, this guy’s good, and so positive,’ so we started working on guitar parts. Kevin came along, got on the piano and said, ‘Can you play that bit again, Kate?’, and he copied straight away what she played, note for note. He was so brilliant, never made a mistake.” Bush revealed that a major part of the attraction with McAlea was the fact that she had “never met anyone else who plays the piano –or can play it if he wants to –so like me. [He] was an incredible find.”2
The idea was to play all 23 songs from the first two albums –in the end only ‘Oh, To Be In Love’ wasn’t performed –along with new material. There would be no idiosyncratic renditions of ‘Honky Tonk Women’ or ‘Nutbush City Limits’. Accustomed to getting her music played exactly as she wanted it, Bush drilled the band over and over again until there was no margin for error. She had not long returned from her appearance on Saturday Night Live in New York, where she had briskly informed house drummer Billy Cobham, a jazz-fusion legend who had recently worked with Miles Davis, that his playing on ‘Them Heavy People’ was all wrong: “No, no, no, no, no,” she chided, “You don’t do it like that….’
The band rehearsed for a full three months, much of that period spent simply trying to come to terms with the structures of the songs, negotiating and logging their many unexpected twists and turns. “It took us so long to learn them because they were so complicated, I just worked at it day and night,” says Bath.
It’s safe to say that Bush was working even harder. Throughout most of January and February she spent her mornings at contemporary dance centre The Place in Euston, central London, putting together routines and rehearsing for the show. Anthony Van Laast had been hired by director Keith MacMillan for the ‘Hammer Horror’ video, and she subsequently invited him to help her choreograph the entire tour. Van Laast went on to work on a number of high profile productions, including Chess, My Fair Lady and Abba’s Mamma Mia! movie, and is now a knight of the realm. At the time, rather more humbly, he was a member of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, and when not touring he would often teach evening classes at the school attached to the company. It was from these classes that he recruited Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst, two young, black dancers who would become Bush’s principal partners on stage, in videos and in studios over the next decade and more. There was perhaps a degree of gentle provocation in her decision to choose –at a time when racial divisions in the UK were still pronounced –to dance with two black men. “She does think about cultures a lot –black culture, Irish culture, Aboriginal culture,” says Avon Arnold. “She’s very aware of colour and creed.”
Whereas Bush was now confident enough in her musical vision to call all the shots, when it came to her dancing she still felt more like a student and was therefore willing to take direction from Van Laast, despite the fact that it was his first major job. “It was six-to-eight weeks of five days-a-week work and rehearsal,” says Avon Arnold. “Kate was telling Anthony what she wanted, but sometimes we’d all work together on a movement, and Anthony would basically stage it and direct it, because she was in it. Other times he’d completely put the steps together himself. It would vary from song to song. He might say to her, ‘Look, on this song it’s better that you don’t get up from the piano’, or whatever. She was still very young then, and she hadn’t had a lot of experience in stagecraft, so it needed Anthony.”
“I can’t emphasise the word ‘collaboration’ enough,” Van Laast later said. “The choreographer is usually very much the master, but part of Kate’s fascination is her idiosyncratic way of moving, and you can’t take that away.”3 A daily routine emerged. Gruelling mornings at The Place and cold, misty afternoons spent with the band at Wood Wharf studios down by the waterfront in Greenwich, on the other side of the city though handily located for Welling and her flat in Wickham Road, where she would return late in the afternoon and continue working on her dancing –often with her partners in tow –until the early hours. It was a punishing schedule. To make matters worse a BBC film crew, headed by the laconic reporter Bernard Clark, dropped in periodically to record th
e historic proceedings for a Nationwide special. Del Palmer recalled, “She was getting up in the morning, going dancing, coming back, rehearsing with the band, going home, in a meeting ’til three in the morning, then getting up, going dancing …”4
While the artists were all knuckling under, the nuts and bolts of the set were put together in a hair-raising six weeks under the supervision of tour manager Richard Ames. It was high concept but low tech. There were no hydraulics –the ramp, which rose up vertically on ‘Strange Phenomena’, was made out of aluminium and hand-operated –and nothing was computerised. The rear projections were executed manually in real-time each night. It was built like an old fashioned theatre set, which is precisely what it was. Looking at the stage from the auditorium Bush’s fans would see a large circular screen, intended to represent an egg, at the back of the stage, onto which slides and film images –clouds, a desertscape, waves –could be projected, and into which a circular flap was cut at the bottom through which Bush could enter and exit. From this concealed doorway the central ramp sloped down to the front of the stage, with the band tucked away on either side. It did indeed give the structure a vaguely ankh-like shape, though it was hardly obvious. A huge three-dimensional egg, upholstered in red satin like an Easter chocolate box, made sporadic appearances onstage: one of its primary purposes was to allow Bush to conduct her many costume changes out of sight inside it, without constantly running back and forth from the stage.
Most of the set, including the large back projection screen –which in reality more closely resembled a ribbed kite than an egg –shared key characteristics with The Kick Inside sleeve concept and the themes of many of those songs. The egg motif symbolised the womb, the beginning of life, but ultimately Bush had more ideas than could easily be accommodated within the available space, time and budget, and the result was a set design sufficiently fluid to act as backdrop to a series of short musical skits but lacking a clear visual identity. In the end, much of the show’s momentum and sense of drama was generated by the costume changes, the innovative lighting from both the back and the front, and above all the dramatic energy which Bush and her dancers invested in the songs.
In early March the production moved to The Who’s sound stage at Shepperton Film Studios, where huge mirrors were installed at the back of the room so everyone on stage could see what was going on and how they were projecting themselves. This was the scene of the coming together of two very different cultures: dance, still a marginal, rather esoteric pursuit, and popular music. “It was the first time, I think, that the musicians saw the dance, and vice versa,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “There was one point where Del was like, ‘What are they doing? Where have they got their hands?’ He didn’t realise it was ‘art’! Kate wasn’t doing anything that was new in terms of pure dance, but in terms of applying it to rock it was very new.” Palmer remembered that he spent most of the time at Shepperton “with my back to those mirrors because it was too freaky…. I remember looking over at Brian and going, ‘What the hell is going on?’”5
It was a febrile atmosphere. This large group of young, highly creative but relatively inexperienced people worked very hard to make Bush’s vision come alive, and their efforts resulted in equal measures of innovation and frustration. At all times, Bush was forced to negotiate the conflicts between creative control and financial and practical realities. Often, many of her more outrageous ideas were by necessity compromised. Having dreamed up dozens of concepts for the content of the rear projections, the crew shot thousands of feet of film footage of pool balls and wave machines and rotating six-shooters, nine-tenths of which were never used. “In fact, we totally ran out of time,” says Jackson. “When we got to first rehearsal we were using footage she’d never seen, the film was still wet from the lab. What you’re looking at [onstage] often is not the idea but the solution to the idea. If we’d had the Rolling Stones’ budget at that point we could have got really silly. We thought we were being quite restrained!”
At other times, necessity proved the mother of invention. Towering sound engineer Gordon ‘Gunji’ Patterson devised the head microphone as a solution to the question of how Bush could sing and dance at the same time. The tiny microphone was attached to a wire headset which left both her hands free for dancing and expressive movement (although she didn’t use it all the time; often she sang into a hefty canary-yellow hand-held mike). It was a genuinely pioneering innovation but fraught with problems, most of which involved getting it to sit correctly in front of her mouth so it picked up her voice clearly.
It was all terribly exciting, conducted in a warm, familial environment. Given the stakes and the scale of the production it was an amazingly organic, home-grown enterprise from top to bottom. Jay and his wife Judy were cooking the food, unwrapping little parcels of vegetarian fare as though servicing some over-subscribed family picnic. Bush’s mother and father often popped in, and of course Paddy was playing a central role as musician and occasional dramatic foil. And, loyal to a fault, she had delivered on her implied promise to the KT Bush Band after the disappointment of Lionheart. Del and Brian were present and correct, at the heart of the music.
The ‘Tour Of Life’ was sold out by mid-March, assisted by the progress of ‘Wow’, which was climbing the charts to an eventual high of number 14. Between March 18 and March 29 the cast and crew moved to the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, north London, for full technical, musical and, finally, dress rehearsals. Right until the last minute at the Rainbow final additions were being made, suggestions tried and discarded. The content of the show was shrouded in secrecy, with all memos marked as highly confidential. The BBC film crew was usually left filming closed doors; behind them, strange things were occurring, some in the realm of Spinal Tap. The wagon-on-wheels which allowed Bush to be spun around by the dancers while still playing piano arrived back-to-front: with the glue still sticky, the decking was prised off the frame and stuck back on the opposite side, the wheels turned over, and the whole thing repainted. Afterwards, one of the running tour jokes became, pace Bush’s much-loved Fawlty Towers, ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention the piano wagon!’
Simon Drake was a relatively late arrival. A former record plugger at Decca, back when he was plain Simon Alexander, and an old friend of Bush’s ex-boyfriend Steve Blacknell, Drake came on board to provide mime, illusion and magic, adding an impish, more theatrical flavour to the proceedings. In common with almost every other element of the show, however, there was insufficient time to incorporate all his ideas. “There was a lot that Simon wanted to do that never got done,” says Jackson. “He arrived too late to integrate. It was great to have him involved, if he’d have turned up a month earlier it would have been terrific.”
By nature a perfectionist, Bush kept a watchful eye on the integrity of each element of the show. Right down to the last detail, every aspect of the production had her direct creative input and required her approval. The artist Nick Price, a friend of Jay’s, was commissioned to design the tour programme, a beautifully realised full colour booklet with postcards, writing paper and an application to join the fan club. The cover image was a stylised painting of Bush’s face, full frontal, with the hair as multicoloured clouds; when you looked through her eyes you could see night skies, studded with twinkling stars. “She was very particular about what she wanted,” says Price. “But she didn’t nit-pick after I’d done it, which was very nice.” Inside, heightening the aroma of greasepaint, the musicians, artists and dancers were showcased simply as The Cast.
The total cost was reputedly between £200,000 and £250,000. To the best of Bob Mercer’s recollection, EMI was not involved in any aspect of the financing. “Normally, I would have been asked for a tour subsidy, and in her instance I would have given it,” he says. “It may have been that there was nobody in her camp that thought to come to me and say, ‘Look, this is going to cost £10,000 a night, can you help us?’ In which case I would have done, but as the head of EMI I wasn’t really in the habit o
f going around to my acts and saying, ‘Are you making money on your tour? Do you need any help?’ I was a pretty generous MD, but I wasn’t that generous!”
Jay, who was handling many of the financial aspects of the tour, such as paying wages and dealing with insurance, recalled that EMI eventually stumped up some “token support funds”.6 However, in the days before Live Nation, tour sponsorship from commercial brands and ‘360 Degree’ deals with record companies that encompass all areas of an artist’s earning potential, Bush was effectively financing the concerts direct from her own pocket. Hard and risky enough if you’re simply transporting a four-piece band around the country for a month, but a different proposition when there’s an entire set to build, months of rehearsal time in a number of vast studio spaces to pay for, and a 13-piece ‘cast’ and an overall crew of 40 to employ and take on the road throughout Europe. It was a show with arena-production values deliberately booked into more intimate theatres, which meant it would always be a struggle to make the sums add up. The price of creative autonomy was that the buck stopped with her. “The battles were endless,” says Jackson. “I tried and tried to get a bigger budget and a bigger lighting system, which would have meant more trucks, more people, more time and lots more money. It became clear to me at the Rainbow that my intense efforts to get a bigger budget were starting to upset Kate, potentially putting her off her stroke, so I shut up.”
Cast and crew were exhausted before they even started, but charged with excitement. As they were picked up outside Hammersmith Odeon by the tour bus on April 2 everyone felt like they were embarking on the mother of all school trips. Following a low-key run-through that night at Poole Arts Centre in Dorset, the tour officially opened in Liverpool on April 3, 1979. The first live performance from the biggest – not to mention the oddest, the most divisive –pop star of the past 12 months brought an enormous amount of media and audience interest. It was a true event in the British pop world, an occasion to be observed microscopically. With every date sold out and more being added as the tour rolled on, opening night came with layers of conflicting emotions: excitement, nerves, anticipation, dread and expectation from all sides. Hilary Walker admitted tersely beforehand that it “means a lot”.7 Bush was not afraid of her audience, nor was she performing for the approval of the media. Instead, the pressure she felt was the need to meet her own almost impossibly exacting demands. As much as her fans and the press needed to see her sing, dance and play piano with their own eyes before they would truly believe in her gifts, she too seemed to need to convince herself that she really was capable of being the kind of artist she wanted to be. This was her chance to illustrate exactly what she could do, that she was not a record company puppet, that she was not contrived. “It has simply taken all this time to stage things the way I want to,” she said in the run up to the tour. “And to match up to the standards I have set myself. It’s a culmination of two years planning and six months solid rehearsal.”8
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