By the start of 1978, punk's vanguard of The Damned, the Sex Pistols and Television had already collapsed, leaving The Clash to keep that particular revolution going, sort of. Out of it emerged the New Wave and the punkish, somewhat less threatening likes of The Jam, The Police, XTC, Siouxie & The Banshees, Nick Lowe, Ian Dury and even Dire Straits and their bluesy pub rock. Elsewhere, rock's establishment was consolidating its lot: Bowie spent much of '78 on an epic world tour, the Low and Heroes albums behind him, while the Rolling Stones delivered the patchy Some Girls ahead of Keith running into drug trouble in Toronto. The Who released Who Are You? (yes kids, long before CSI...) and then Keith Moon shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 32 from a prescription drug overdose.
Three years previously, a member of one of the other behemoths of the age had set in train the career of a British national treasure. While mixing Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here album, guitarist David Gilmour was handed a demo tape by a schoolgirl from south-east London: Kate Bush. "I was intrigued by this strange voice," Gilmour recently told the BBC. "So I went to her house, met her parents down in Kent, and she played me - gosh - it must have been 40 or 50 songs. And I thought, I should try and do something." Gilmour arranged for the prodigy to have a more professional tape made before arranging executives from EMI Records to come down to Abbey Road studios to hear it. On the back of what they heard, EMI signed the-then 16-year-old, who had already amassed a catalogue of 200 songs in various forms.
Who was this 19-year-old, with an audacious song that might be prog rock, might be a MoR ballad, or might be simply avante garde? Whatever it was it went to Number One and stayed there for a month, the first time a female singer-songwriter had got to the top with a self-written song. Four months later Bush released the spine-tinglingly beautiful The Man With The Child In His Eyes, which went to No.6 in the charts. It had been one of the songs that had clinched her signing to EMI, when Gilmour had arranged for executives to hear Bush's demos at Abbey Road Studios. "I said to them, 'Do you want to hear something I’ve got?'," Gilmour recalled to the BBC. "They said sure, so I played them The Man With A Child In His Eyes and they said, 'Yep, thank you — we’ll have it.' It’s absolutely beautiful, isn’t it? That’s her singing at the age of 16, and having written those extraordinary lyrics."
By the end of 1978 Bush was already releasing her second album, Lionheart, capitalising on the success of her debut, though the somewhat uninspiring nature of the record - the idiosyncratic hit single Wow not withstanding - suggested a rush job. Regardless, 1978 was still the year that founded one of the most remarkable, if idiosyncratic, music careers, one that has never, ever wielded to convention or commercial expectations. Much like her occasional collaborator Peter Gabriel and the Bowie and Roxy Music she idolised as a teenager, Bush has successfully - and resolutely - bucked convention. It's hard to think of any other artist - with perhaps the exception of Björk who would release an album called 50 Words for Snow which included a song that indeed contained 50 words for snow, and it not coming across as profoundly pretentious.
That album, though, was only her 10th, and it came more than three decades after her first. Bush has always steadfastly dictated the pace of her career, sometimes haphazardly, it would appear. Her 22-night, 2014 residency at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith were her first gigs for 35 years. She had toured only once, in 1979, and while the death of her lighting engineer, Bill Duffield, is reported to have induced a long-standing aversion to live performance, she suggested to BBC 6 Music's Matt Everitt last Sunday that her absence from the stage was perhaps down to other forces. "After 1979 the intention had always been to do another set of shows after the first two albums," she explained. "There was never any intention to go such a long time without shows - things just went in a different direction."
Whatever that direction was, the surprise decision to appear in a live setting once more was no less artistically bold and imaginative as any of Bush's songwriting. The 22 Before The Dawn shows - captured in a triple live album released today - brought together Bush's longstanding love of theatricality (Lindsay Kemp - who'd worked closely, in more ways than one, with Bowie had been another early influence and mentor). Part rock concert, part performance art theatre, the shows were split into three acts - the first featuring hits like Hounds of Love and Running Up That Hill, with the second and third based on the two long songsuites from the Hounds Of Love and Aerial albums, The Ninth Wave and A Sky Of Honey.
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| Photo: Ken McKay |
"I was really nervous every night," Bush told Everitt, explaining how she worried she would lose her place in the middle of her often complex compositions. "I naturally tend to race ahead in my mind, I'm always thinking about situations and running them through. Maybe it's that kind of primeval thing where you're trying to think, 'Can I get to that tree before the tiger gets me?' So my head is always moving ahead, just trying to get to the conclusion of whatever this journey is. And once we started running the show I had to be absolutely in that moment. "But I was so terrified that if my mind wandered off that when I came back I wouldn't remember where I was."
Although such apprehension has been a hallmark of much of Bush's career, she relished the challenge of creating the Before The Dawn concept. "The idea of putting the show together was something that I found really interesting and really exciting. But to actually step into it was something that I had to really work hard on because I was terrified of doing live work as a performer again," she said in the BBC interview, which portrayed Bush not as a reclusive, publicity-shy British eccentric, but as the mum and occasional pop star she has studiously worked at being seen to be.
The comfort and appeal of family life in rural Devon has certainly played a part in restricting musical output. The clear message from her encounter with Everitt is that we shouldn't expect any new material from Bush anytime soon. "The thing about [the Before The Dawn show] is that most of the material was already written. And to start something like that from scratch is another whole world of work, isn't it? It was an extraordinary thing to be involved in, especially to have got the response that we did. It was really magical. But I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do next."
Bush explained that production of the Before The Dawn album (there are no plans at all for an accompanying video release) has taken up a lot of time, an attention to detail as fastidious as her production of new material to begin with. "I'm desperate to do something new," she told Everitt, "I've been working on this project for a really long time now. I haven't written a song for ages." And asked if this new release represented a "full stop" to her career, Bush simply replied warmly but vaguely: "Oh no, I don't think so. I think it's just a rather big comma."
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