Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  As the BBC’s Bernard Clark noted, hanging around the Empire foyer like an extravagantly moustachioed portent of doom, awaiting either a hoedown or a wake, “even parts of the audience were nervous.”9 EMI’s Brian Southall was there to “fly the flag” for the company on opening night and “buy dinner, nut rissoles or whatever.” He recalls that Bush “was incredibly nervous. Terribly, terribly nervous, I remember that, but the show was just extraordinary. We didn’t quite know what we were letting ourselves in for, this extraordinary presentation of her music.”

  To the amplified keening of whale song the band began playing ‘Moving’. The gauze curtain hanging in front of the stage was swept away, revealing a henna-haired Bush in a sea-green leotard, swishing dreamily as though beneath the waves, lost in an underwater waltz. The beauty and power of her voice was instantly apparent, as was her magnetism: it was immediately clear she was blessed with the performer’s ultimate gift, that of innate watchability. “I’d never felt anything like it,” Del Palmer recalled of the atmosphere. “It was electric. It almost made me stop dead, it was over-whelming.”10 Next came ‘The Saxophone Song’, with Bush on piano and Kevin McAlea playing the eponymous horn, after which a thudding amplified heartbeat announced ‘Room For The Life’, for which Bush emerged from the huge egg which had rolled on to the stage.

  The first major production number of the show was ‘Them Heavy People’, for which Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst joined Bush. It was Guys And Dolls as directed by Bob Fosse: trenchcoats, trilbies, shoulder-shaking cartoon menace. There was more than a little Humphrey Bogart in there, too. “We both loved the lighting in Casablanca, we talked about that a lot,” says Jackson. “She tended to think cinematically, rather than theatrically.”

  The routine was great fun, a tremendous rendition of one of her most ebullient songs, but the choice of costumes and choreography neatly encapsulated the wider difficulty of representing the depth of meaning of many of Bush’s songs in a visually comprehensible, empathetic way. Onstage, the routine for ‘Them Heavy People’ pivoted upon the conceit of interpreting the word ‘heavy’ to mean noir-style ‘hoods’ rather than – as the song intended –serious, weighty teachers. Somewhere down the line the purity of the song’s message was in danger of being scrambled.

  “I can remember trying to figure out what the [hell] she was talking about,” says Jackson. “At the start she wanted ‘egg’ images, and babies, the big red satin lined egg we built was supposed to be the womb and she was supposed to arrive on stage inside of it, but then choreography and costume had to translate the line ‘them heavy people’ and wound up with MI5, or the Mafia. The point – her point, I think – is that we’re born and sometime later somebody, some inspired guru –Gurdjieff in her case, at the time –rolls us the ball of knowledge and we either catch it or unknowingly pat it back. Did it have to do with childbirth or enlightenment, or both? Nobody knew. And how the [hell] are you supposed to present a concept like that live on stage? Did anybody in the audience have the slightest idea what that song was about? I doubt it. One in one hundred. But it didn’t matter cause it was Kate!”

  The mixed messages mattered not a jot in terms of the audience’s enjoyment, nor did they in any way detract from the richness of the spectacle, but for someone as keen on preserving emotional resonance as Bush, the yawning gap between the song’s initial intent and its visual expression must have been apparent, and may have later led her to the conclusion that it was easier to be true to her overall artistic vision via the more malleable medium of film and video than onstage.

  There followed a tender ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, just voice and piano, and then a new composition, ‘Egypt’, which Bush – dressed in a glittering, flowing Arabian skirt –sung from beneath a simple golden crown. It was a terrific version of the song, markedly different and unquestionably superior to the one that later appeared on Never For Ever. Driven by Preston Heyman’s taut bongos, this ‘Egypt’ was snappy and lean, fast and fiery, like some distant cousin of Nina Simone’s ‘Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter’.

  Simon Drake appeared plucking a series of metal balls from thin air on ‘L’Amour Looks Something Like You’, and then made an unforgettable appearance as a fiddling dervish on ‘Violin’, another unrecorded song that ended Act One. This abandoned declaration of musical freedom demanded a suitably untethered performance and Bush delivered, leaping around the stage as though tip-toeing over electrified stepping stones; it’s not a great song but it’s notable, containing the first hints of the deeper, darker, more visceral vocal style she would develop on parts of Never For Ever and particularly on The Dreaming. While she was singing, Paddy and a stage hand donned huge, floppy violin costumes and flanked Bush onstage in a final, full scale fruition of the ‘duelling basses’ idea that first saw the light of day at his show at his Whitechapel Gallery back in 1976. As their long bows tipped back and forth, they looked both comic and eerie, resembling something from The Day Of The Triffids, another of Bush’s favourite novels.

  Act Two began with Jay fiercely declaiming his poetry, entering into a dramatic call and response with his sister on the line “two in one coffin”. Vegas this was not. She then sang ‘The Kick Inside’ and ‘In The Warm Room’ at the piano, a neat erotic one-two, both dripping with heightened sensuality, before launching into ‘Full House’. For ‘Strange Phenomena’ the sloping ramp at the centre of the stage reared up, its underbelly sending a barrage of pink fluorescent lights out towards the audience while Bush donned a top hat and tails against an astral backdrop, like a feline magician-cum-ringmaster intent on realigning the planets as Avon Arnold and Hurst floated around her looking like extras from Blake’s 7.

  The extended guitar solo at end of the song bridged the gap between yet another costume change, as Bush and Anthony Van Laast prepared to reprise their thrilling video routine for ‘Hammer Horror’. This was the only song in the set not played or sung live. Instead, Bush and Van Laast danced to a newly recorded version of the track (this was deemed necessary to circumnavigate Musicians’ Union regulations, and also to give the audience something with at least the whiff of live ambience) in order to allow her to perform a routine of which she was very proud; clad in black, the hooded Van Laast leapt out to shadow Bush on the choruses, a stark embodiment of both sexual need and a guilty conscience. Very physical, very powerful, very Flowers.

  This routine –along with Jay’s poetry –took the humble pop show into the realms of contemporary performance art, but most of the other dance elements in the ‘Tour Of Life’ were very cleverly and consciously choreographed to give the impression that more was happening than was actually the case. “The movements we were doing through Anthony were very simple,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “If you look at it as bare movement without the costume and the sets, it’s very simple –Step Ball Change, kick a leg, stand behind Kate –but at that time in the rock world very few of her audience had seen dance. She was very good. She had been trained, she had worked with Lindsay Kemp and done ballet and was doing classes before we met her, but it wasn’t until later on that Kate started really exploring movement: ‘Rubberband Girl’ is very different to what she was doing on, say, ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’.”

  Although Bush had by no means reached the standard of a professional dancer, this simplicity wasn’t primarily down to her lack of ability. “It’s incredible how far she’s got,” said Van Laast at the time. “I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.”11 Rather, it was a matter of practicality. It is impossible to dance full tilt and simultaneously sing live for even ten minutes, never mind for two hours, and early on she had organised her priorities. “It’s not a dance show,” she said. “It’s a music show that’s being illustrated with movement.”12 Yet it was another compromise, a further example of the limiting nature of live performance and another head on collision with the problem of how best to present her music to the public. Robin Kovac, her old dance teacher, was unconvinced that all
the routines –‘Wuthering Heights’, particularly –translated effectively from the screen to the stage.

  ‘Kashka From Baghdad’ began with the band chanting as though shuffling slowly on some Arabic chain gang, building up momentum like a steam train puffing down the track, a highly effective and atmospheric entrée to one of her most exotic, melodically satisfying songs. It was followed by a punchy ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’, which owed plenty to West Side Story and perhaps a little to Grease, Bush clad in black leather in a dusky city street, all flashlights and wire-mesh fences.

  She had fully embraced the idea, learned from Kovac, Adam Darius and perhaps most of all from Lindsay Kemp, of presenting herself fearlessly onstage with a rather brash assurance not at all evident in her character offstage. “When I’m onstage I’m performing, yes, and projecting, and to do those things well I have to be big and bold and full of confidence,” she said. “And I am, but it’s still little me inside. You can’t go onstage and simper, and be timid and shy. You’ve got to be big and strong, and give your audience everything you’ve got: reveal your emotions, be romantic, transport them into another world, so they’re in tune with you. That requires an awful lot of hard work, and an almost calculated force, I suppose.”13

  These controlled acts of letting go were a kind of possession, a high wire balancing act between losing one’s inhibitions yet remaining absolutely in command. “She was Kate the whole time, but Kate being whoever she was being,” says David Jackson. “You just suspended disbelief. They weren’t always personalities –on ‘Kite’ she is being a something.” It wasn’t as simple as someone playing a part. It was more mercurial than that, an almost inexplicable alchemy, a subtle blending of her core traits and her dramatic alter egos. Adopting a series of roles onstage wasn’t hiding; it simply allowed her to be bigger, brighter, deeper – more. Forgetting for a moment the physical effort involved, it was an intensely draining mental process to undergo each night.

  There was another break before Act Three, which began with a beautiful, understated performance of ‘Wow’, featuring Bush in the same elegant long dress she had worn in the video, flanked by the two male dancers, naked from the waist up, twirling gracefully in their flowing white skirts. Her voice was stunning throughout these shows, but something about this song allowed it to truly cut through: clear, forceful and hugely expressive. ‘Coffee Homeground’ was played as a dark pantomime, Simon Drake reappearing as Hugo the Mad Poisoner, with more than a touch of Sweeney Todd in the mix, trying to entice Bush into a barrel marked ‘Pork’.

  An appropriately gentle strain of Jay’s poetry –urging us “down the bluebell path” –ushered in ‘In Search Of Peter Pan’, with Drake as a Puckish Pan figure darting elfishly around the stage. ‘Symphony In Blue’ and ‘Feel It’ followed, the later performed solo at the piano in a teasing caricature of eroticism, all fluttering eyelashes, darting tongue and moistened lips. For all the flash and grab of the theatrical spectacle, in the end the show really was all about her extraordinary face. One minute she was Douglas Fairbanks, the next Lillian Gish, the next Lolita.

  For ‘Kite’ she was transformed in blue, winged and ready to take flight. Wind effects whistled through the theatre as the dancers twirled umbrellas in a clear homage to Singin’ In The Rain. The song’s reggae inflections were adapted into a circus-like arrangement, with an extended outro that allowed Simon Drake to mime battling his way across the stage in the teeth of a gale.

  ‘James And The Cold Gun’ marked the climax to the main body of the show. Bush strutted around the stage in a black, figure-hugging spacecowboy suit as the rear projection screen filled with a classic death valley movie vistas, bathed in a glorious orange sunset. The Wild West theme was a hangover from her pub performances of the same song in 1977, where she had dressed up as a cowgirl. During the song’s long climax, where the meaty beat dropped to a sluggish, proggy half-pace, Bush picked up a rifle and, with some relish, gunned down the two dancers and finally Paddy as he swaggered menacingly down the ramp, scarlet ribbon shooting out of the muzzle. It was a wonderful set piece, and highly eroticised, a riveting dramatic enactment of female sexual power. Never mind the bodies piled up onstage – Bush killed everyone in the room.

  There had been some good-natured debate about how to stage the final shoot-out. “Kate and Paddy wanted to use liquid movie blood squirting everywhere, like Monty Python, when she shoots,” says Jackson. “But the set was painted white and that stuff stains. We even tested it at rehearsal, and the ramp had a pinkish hue for the rest of the tour. They compromised with red silk until the last night when of course we had to have ‘real’ blood.” On the final night of the tour, instead of Bush facing off against just Paddy and the dancers, the entire stage crew dressed up as cowboys and Indians and by the time the scene finished Bush was knee deep in ‘corpses’ and red liquid.

  For a first encore she performed a fragile rendition of ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’, the set inspired by old war films like A Matter Of Life And Death and Reach For The Sky. Dressed in an old, oversized flying jacket and air helmet, she sung her exquisite lament for the lost land of youth as her dying comrades lay around the stage. The coat belonged to David Jackson and, according to him, “she was naked underneath it. Somebody found that out and offered me £1,000 for [it] but I turned him down. He was so besotted that he wanted to buy the coat. I was so besotted myself that I wouldn’t sell it to him!” His mother eventually threw it out, much to his dismay.

  Afterwards, Bush left the stage and returned for the inevitable final encore of ‘Wuthering Heights’, played straight and true, the choreography following the template of the video, the stage swathed in mist and cloud. And then she departed for the final time, backing up the stage, waving as the cheers rang out and the curtain closed, underlining that this was pure theatre rather than a standard rock experience. Indeed, she had spoken not one word throughout, a fact picked up by many critics and fans as evidence of an aloof and impersonal onstage persona, and perhaps just a little pretentious. “I saw our show as not just people on stage playing music but as a complete experience,” she explained. “A lot of people would say, Poooah! but for me that’s what it was, like a play. That’s why I didn’t speak: ‘For our next song …’ and all that. You are a performer, you are projecting and exaggerating things and if you break the illusion you break the whole of the concept.”14

  Those who wanted to see her open up, to let her guard down and invite the audience to share her insecurities and uncertainties were inevitably disappointed. Bush never lost control onstage, nor did she veer off-message or allow the events happening in that room –right here, right now –to overtake her or divert her from the show’s preordained course. It was a rigidly planned and executed exercise, but there was plenty of emotion on display, built into the songs and the performances. Anyone who saw her backing up the ramp at the end of ‘Wuthering Heights’, at first waving rather formally as she collected the gifts thrown at her over the footlights from the audience, then becoming more animated, her smile widening, her gestures becoming less studied, and finally reaching the top of the ramp and leaping up and down like an over-excited child, bubbling with glee and gratitude, couldn’t fail to be convinced –and rather moved –that for Bush the ‘Tour Of Life’ was an intensely visceral experience. There was nothing cool or detached about it. It was emotional connection without speech, a la Lindsay Kemp, and all the more powerful for it. A few breathless hollers of ‘How ya doin’, Liverpool!’ would not have added to the experience.

  Backstage there was champagne, flowers and much laughter, a palpable sense of relief and excitement that they had pulled off a clear triumph on opening night. From Liverpool, the tour rolled out across the UK and mainland Europe throughout April and the first half of May. Because of its intricate nature, the details changed little from night to night and city to city. She might throw in the name of the place she was visiting –‘Oh Oxford, my Lionheart …’ – but that was about it. T
he set list was curtailed in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Amsterdam because she was suffering from ’flu. In Holland, for example, she dropped ‘Violin’, ‘In The Warm Room’, ‘Full House’, ‘Kite’, and ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’ from the concert, shaving about 25 minutes from its length, which may have actually been a blessing: playing virtually every song she had recorded to date made for a very long night. Parts of the German and Swedish performances were recorded for TV broadcast and reveal a little vocal grittiness, but hardly anything notable. “She was faultless,” says David Jackson. “I don’t remember her ever fluffing a line or hitting a bum note on the piano.”