Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  The audiences tended to agree, acclaiming most of the shows with lengthy ovations. The critics were generally persuaded as well. Many of the reviews were euphoric, uniting the tabloids, the broadsheets and the music inkies in gushing praise. “Full of poise and in complete control of her vocal dexterity … it was the ultimate rock’n’roll extravaganza,” ran Record Mirror’s review of the opening night in Liverpool.

  Sounds caught the show in Birmingham the next night and concluded, “It’s so finely realised that it’s beyond rational criticism because she’s created her very own universe on a stage … Rock turkeys the world over have forever played around with stage concepts, but apart from a smoke machine here and a thunderflash there it’s all come to naught. Kate Bush, however, has put her dreams into actual flesh.” Melody Maker reviewed the same show and simply deemed it “The most magnificent spectacle I’ve ever encountered in the world of rock.”

  There were many more eulogies along similar lines in the local press as the tour wound through the north of England and Scotland. When it landed in London for five straight nights at the Palladium, the superlatives went into overdrive. “A dazzling testimony to a remarkable talent,” said the Daily Telegraph. “Bush lines up all the old stereotypes, mows them down and hammers them into their coffins with a show that is –quite literally –stunning,” raved the Daily Mail. “What an ambitious adventure it is for a singer on her first concert tour –and how mediocre does she make most of her pop contemporaries seem.”

  “Her performance was risky, teetering often on the brink of the perilously overblown, but a nerveless triumph of energy, imagination, music and theatre … I was bushwhacked,” said Melody Maker, back for another taste. Only the NME were unmoved, dismissing Bush as “condescending” but –with the kind of proud and rather wonderful perversity that defines the rock press – praising the magician.

  Unsurprisingly, it was not a tour characterised by off-stage hi-jinks. Indeed, it began with a truly tragic epilogue during the preview show at Poole Arts Centre. After the concert, while scouring the venue to make sure nothing had been left behind, lighting engineer Bill Duffield was killed in a freak accident.

  “Evidently Bill had taken it on himself to go back into the already darkened building to perform this completely redundant ritual we used to call ‘idiot check’,” remembers David Jackson. “You run around the theatre one last time to make sure nothing got left behind. The brand spanking new Poole Arts Centre had spiffy seating that could be retracted to the walls to change the shape and use of the space but before it would retract the staircase landings had to be taken out, basically creating a 6ft × 4ft cavity over a [huge] drop –in the dark. Bill ran up the stairs and landed on a landing that wasn’t there. Probably didn’t even touch the sides. There should have been flashing lights, there should have been guard rails, there should have been beeping warning things, there should have been all sorts of safety stuff. But there wasn’t.”

  Duffield fell 17 feet onto hard concrete. He survived for a week on a life support machine, but there was little hope. He had only been involved in the tour for a matter of days, drafted in during final rehearsals to assist the over-extended Jackson on lighting duties, but such was the nature of the ‘Tour Of Life’ party that he was already one of the gang. He was just 21. The band were already back at the hotel when they got the news, and Bush was absolutely shattered. “It was terrible for her,” says Brian Bath. “Something had happened to her little baby. Kate knew everyone by name, right down to the cleaner, she was so like that, she’d speak to everyone. I suppose it’s something you wouldn’t forget, but we just carried through it. We got into the mood of the show and the [tour] just kept rolling.”

  The option of cancelling the entire tour was discussed but the decision was made to carry on –at such short notice, what else could they do? – and organise a suitable tribute to Duffield. His death cast a heavy pall over the proceedings for several days, although it also strengthened the existing familial bond, the feeling of everyone pulling together for one another. The mood lifted as the shows gathered momentum and reactions continued to be ecstatic. Birthdays were celebrated with gifts; elaborate in-jokes and old war stories were shared. “It’s one of those things you don’t appreciate until you look back in hindsight,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “‘Well, that was amazing, new, exciting!’ We earned good money, always stayed in five-star hotels. At the time you take it for granted.”

  Bush was an amiable, if often distant presence. It was an energy-sapping tour for everyone, but especially for her, and she was not often seen in the hotel bar after the show. “We were all exhausted, so tired,” says Brian Bath. “There might be a party in the TBA room, the spare room, and we might pile in there for a noisy get-together. Kate might make an appearance, [usually] it was just the band with the roadies.”

  “If we had a day off we slept,” recalls David Jackson. “There might be some get-togethers in hotel bars, but there were no big party scenes or anything like that. There was one night I remember in Edinburgh when we thought, ‘What do rock’n’roll bands do when they’re on tour? They wreck hotel rooms!’ The party was in some room and I went up and as I walked towards the door the carpet beneath my feet squelched, the whole thing was wet. I knocked on the door and stepped out of the way and this bucket of water came flying out, and then Kate came out soaking wet, covered in little white feathers from a burst pillow. She had these little feathers on her eyelashes and she looked at me and went, ‘Wow! Amazing!’, and trotted off down the corridor. I never did go in the room.”

  This was the notorious water-bottle-and-pillow-fight fracas at the five-star Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh, following the April 13 show at the Usher Hall, later reported in Sounds as ‘Kate Bush (Not) In Wild Orgy Of Hotel Destruction Shock’. EMI footed the bill for damage, estimated at around £1,000, but that was about as rock’n’roll as it got. An after-show party on April 20 at the Dial 9 Club in Chelsea to mark the end of the initial run of UK dates was notable for its lack of excess: no “pie fights, drink fights, fist fights” grumbled Record Mirror, reporting that the entire Bush clan huddled together in the gloom.

  Extra UK dates were added a fortnight into the tour, with three additional London concerts arranged at the Hammersmith Odeon to finish, one of which was advertised as a benefit for Bill Duffield’s family. It was held on May 12, after Bush returned from 10 shows in western Europe, and featured Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley, for whom Duffield had also worked. They joined in on ‘Them Heavy People’ and sang ‘The Woman With The Child In Her Eyes’ [sic], while Bush and Gabriel duetted on Gabriel’s ‘I Don’t Remember’ and added backing vocals when Harley sang his own big hit, ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)’. The pair joined Bush on a closing –spirited, if rather ramshackle – rendition of The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’, where she broke the no-speaking spell by announcing, ‘This song is for Bill. I want you all to give a big cheer for him, OK?’ The crowd duly obliged. All the money raised was donated to a fund for Duffield’s family.

  The following night, the second of the three Odeon shows was professionally filmed for later release. It was a case of second time lucky. The Manchester Apollo show on April 10 had been recorded by Granada for their On The Road programme, but the results were never broadcast. The lighting used in the ‘Tour Of Life’ was deliberately subtle, mostly using deep, saturated colours, a theatrical ethos at odds with the flashy pyrotechnics of the standard rock’n’roll stage show but appropriate to the nuances of Bush’s music. It was designed with the naked eye of the live audience in mind, but such muted hues made it devilishly hard to capture the show on film without adding vast amounts of extra, ultra-intense lighting, which would have made the stage look like an over-bright television studio.

  At Manchester, the Granada film unit turned up without any prior consultation with the stage crew, and the results were awful. “Their cameras were so insensitive and the stage lighting was so dark and blue, you couldn’t see anything,�
�� says John Henshall, who worked with director Keith MacMillan’s production company KeefCo and was director of photography on many of Bush’s early videos. According to Henshall, Bush’s ‘people’ threatened Granada with an injunction in order to prevent them transmitting the results. “Keith sent me a pneumatic tape of the Manchester recording and it was useless,” he says. “I told Keith, ‘It’s fucking dire!’, and Keith said, ‘Yeah, they’ve stopped them using it, they want us to reshoot it at Hammersmith Odeon.’”

  MacMillan, Henshall and the KeefCo team scoped out the show twice before the Odeon taping, but the lighting problems were never quite overcome. What worked on stage never really translated to screen and the film footage is a little murky, lacking punch and dynamics. Some ground was recaptured in post-production through double imaging and posterisation and reinserting most of the rear projections which had been washed out on the night by the added film lights, but the video, released in 1981 as Live At Hammersmith Odeon and featuring 12 songs from the show, was never felt to be a truly satisfactory souvenir of an extraordinary step forward in the evolution of the way in which popular music could be represented on stage. There was also a little local difficulty and residual resentment over the credits for the film, which read: ‘Conceived, written, produced and choreographed by Kate Bush, with the assistance of …’

  “Everything was done by Kate Bush,” laughs John Henshall. “Did you not notice? I know that a lot of people were pissed off with that. It was like, ‘Oh yeah, darling? You should bloody try it!’ I think a few people were annoyed by that and I’m not surprised. By that time she was definitely The Star.” Publicly acknowledging the roles of others in her endeavours was a courtesy Bush rarely overlooked. The ungenerous accreditation on the film was the result of an over-zealous assertion of her desire –as a young woman in a notoriously male-dominated industry, and following the compromises of The Kick Inside and Lionheart – to have, and to be seen to have, full creative autonomy for the first time. The credits ended with ‘Produced for the stage by Kate Bush Visuals’.

  “The whole thing is a little bit diminishing of other people’s contributions, when I don’t think Kate needed anyone to be diminished at all,” says Jackson. “Lisa Hayes wasn’t just the ‘costume design consultant’, she was running back and forth like a thing on a string, saying to Kate, ‘What about this, what about this?’ until Kate had what she wanted. Then she built them all, then she toured them all and maintained them and dressed Kate every night. And she gets ‘consultant’, on the same page as choreography ‘consultant’ Anthony Van Laast – a serious, respected choreographer. That insults him a little bit. Of course Kate’s name is the biggest, but come on! It just seemed a little ungrateful. I’m sure that wasn’t much to do with her at all, I’m sure it was management and marketing and all that.” She subsequently learned to assert her authority with a lighter touch.

  It should have been the beginning of something truly wonderful. Audiences had grown accustomed to the preposterous bombast of a typical rock or progressive rock concert –which was all about beating fans into submission through volume and the vastness of the spectacle rather than exploring the intricacies of an integrated performance –but no one had taken the humble pop show into quite such daring and epic theatrical territory. David Bowie could certainly lay claim to some key innovations in this field, particularly on his 1974 Diamond Dogs tour, which shared some key characteristics with the ‘Tour Of Life’ and set a precedent for theatrical presentation of rock. Restricted to North America and filmed only for a seldom-seen BBC documentary directed by Alan Yentob entitled Cracked Actor, Bush would not have seen the show with her own eyes – but had she done so she would have observed Bowie as the ‘character’ Halloween Jack, ‘acting’ out his songs on a stage that featured all manner of gantries and props, and never stopping to acknowledge the audience or his band of hired guns that was located well to the rear of the action. “I think Bowie will always be looked upon as a landmark in pop theatre, and I think Kate was the next mark after that,” said Anthony Van Laast. “It broke a lot of barriers.”15

  With the ‘Tour Of Life’, Bush rejected the orthodoxy of a rock’n’roll show while at the same time suggesting a template for its future: theatrical, dance-based, creating an aesthetic beyond the immediate context of the songs and the music. She even performed to playback, an entirely unheard of conceit at the time but nowadays almost the norm for a show with significant visual stimuli; the head-mike, too, is now virtually ubiquitous. It was groundbreaking on all levels. Within a few years Bowie’s ‘Serious Moonlight’ and ‘Glass Spider’ tours continued the thread, later joined by Prince’s ‘Lovesexy’ tour, Madonna’s ‘Blond Ambition’ tour, Roger Waters’ staging of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and U2’s ‘Zooropa’ extravaganza, each one a true event in which the theatrical spectacle (although none of these acts went as far as adopting an aloof onstage character to be maintained throughout) was arguably as important as the music.

  The ability of these acts to harness the enormous technological advances made in the Eighties and beyond eventually made the ‘Tour Of Life’ look rather quaint and old fashioned by comparison, particularly given its relatively small scale and the fact that it didn’t transfer onto the screen quite as well as it might have. But make no mistake: all the elements marking the tour out as a hugely significant step forward in the evolution of live performance were evident.

  “I do smile when I hear the current generation of show designers talk of ‘convergence’ – the supposed blending of projection and video and special effects and moving lights into one cohesive thing – as if they’d just thought of it,” says David Jackson. “We had moving lights, eight of them, they were called follow spots. We had scenic projection and multimedia and song and dance and all the bells and whistles in 1979. Convergence, phooey! These new guys have computers doing everything for them, we had to drive by the seat of our pants.”

  So, yes, it should have been the beginning of something wonderful. Instead, it was – to date – the last we saw of Bush in any meaningful sense as a live performer. There was talk after the final Hammersmith Odeon show of taking the tour to America, and much excited discussion among the cast and crew about all the things they could do ‘next time’ given a longer period of preparation and a bigger budget. Everyone involved felt they had prised open the door leading to a brave new world of possibilities for Bush and her music. Yet, 31 years later, ‘next time’ still hasn’t arrived. “I thought we were going to go around the world,” says Brian Bath. “[But] it just fizzled into doing bits and bobs for TV shows and then doing songs for a new album. It was such a shame, really. The Americans would have loved it, but it never materialised.” As Del Palmer drolly observed, “We went into the studio and never came out again.”16

  Countless times since in interviews Bush has spoken of her intention to tour again, and there is no reason to doubt that each time she was being at least partially sincere. She came closest to making it happen in the early Nineties, following the release of The Sensual World. She and Del had gone to see Prince on his ‘Nude Tour’, during his long residency at Wembley Arena, stretching between June and August 1990. She was there not just to see the show – though she was a fan and he was becoming a clear influence on her music – but also to case Wembley as a potential venue for her own concerts. The early versions of the songs for her next record, The Red Shoes, were travelling in a direction that seemed to suit a live band, and at the Kate Bush Fan Convention at Hammersmith Palais at the end of that year she went as far as to announce to the 1,000 people present that in 1991 she was going to play some shows. The room, predictably, erupted. But, perhaps inevitably, she got wrapped up in the recording process – and encountered some choppy water in her personal life – and the plans faded away, replaced by the idea of doing a film, The Line, The Cross And The Curve.

  Instead, an occasional series of brief, tantalising cameos have provided meagre sustenance. Later in 1979 she performed three songs,
one of which was ‘Blow Away (For Bill)’, a new composition dedicated to Bill Duffield, at the Royal Albert Hall on November 18 to celebrate 75 years of the London Symphony Orchestra. In July 1982 she stepped into David Bowie’s shoes at the last minute to perform ‘The Wedding List’ at a concert at the Dominion Theatre for the Prince’s Trust with a band that included Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Midge Ure. She wore big boots, a peach tutu and a flimsy satin halterneck, on which the strap snapped while she was singing. She finished the song grinning sheepishly, her left hand pinning her plummeting blouse to her breast. Ure later recalled it fondly as one of the highlights of his life; Townshend simply acknowledged the “power of prayer”.

  There was, relatively speaking, a rash of live activity following the release of Hounds Of Love. Between April 4 and April 6, 1986, she performed ‘Breathing’ live each night at the Shaftesbury Theatre for a Comic Relief fundraiser. Sung solo at the piano, it was a truly extraordinary and emotionally charged reimagining of one of her finest songs, proving beyond all doubt that there is scope within her music for great change, for various versions, different paths: listen to this marvellous song take on another life and you can’t help be filled with sadness that she hasn’t explored at least some of them; it’s a rather sobering reminder of the countless moments of potential brilliance we have never been permitted to witness.

  There were three further live appearances in 1987. Two consecutive nights in late March with David Gilmour and his band at the Amnesty International benefit The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball, where she performed ‘Let It Be’ and a thrillingly rough and ready version of ‘Running Up That Hill’. The scene on stage was the Eighties in micro: blue neon signs flashing ‘PIZZA’, huge overcoats, shoulder pads, rolled up suit jackets – and everybody was having a bad hair day, not least Bush, who looked distinctly puffy and uncomfortable. Gilmour proved a reassuring presence, flashing her several sweet smiles during the performance. Later the same year she made a last minute, unannounced appearance during Peter Gabriel’s June concert at Earls Court, descending from the top of a staircase to sing her part in ‘Don’t Give Up’, the only time she has ever done so live. The thunderous ovation prompted by her unexpected arrival onstage spoke more eloquently about the genuine love and warmth with which she is regarded than a thousand words ever could. It was also an acknowledgement that, eight years after the ‘Tour Of Life’, a sighting of Bush onstage, however fleeting, had already become an event to treasure.