The Tour of Life
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. Bush’s singular tour defines her career as much 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, or a steady Internet connection. 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 in April or May 1979. Sparseness is a key ingredient of Bush’s career, one that perhaps makes her especially suitable for a project like this blog. She builds her work piece by piece, letting it be an accumulation of important steps.
Planning for Bush’s tour (known then and during its existence just as the Kate Bush Tour) began at the end of December 1978 with a brainstorming session involving Bush and 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 shows were precisely outlined, retaining the ideas of The Kick Inside and Lionheart while developing them further onstage. Lionheart is at its core a work of musical theater, and its stage incarnation helped it to be the best version of itself. Out was the ill-paced sequencing of the album, supplanted with a solid theatrical structure. Bush also had a different lineup of musicians than 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.…