After the Dawn

Diotima a écrit:C'est juste merveilleux, une performance, comme sortie d'un rêve et comme seule Kate aurait pu le faire !

Emma a écrit:Après ce spectacle de près de 3heures, on se sent un peu sur un autre monde.
Dans la mesure où je me rends à deux dates, je me réserve qq jours avant de faire un compte rendu complet.
Beaucoup d'ovations tout au long du spectacle .... Et dès l'arrivée en scène.
On peut se questionner sur le choix des titres de la première partie...mais The Ninth Wave et Aerial (Sky of  honey) sont magnifiques.
Pour ma part, pas encore redescendue de mon nuage...

There is a song on "Aerial", Kate Bush's eighth and possibly best album, called "Bertie". "Here comes the sunshine," it begins, "Here comes that son of mine/Here comes the everything/Here's a song and a song for him." Nine years later, here, perhaps is a show for him: an unexpected comeback; a ravishing absurdity; a launchpad for his theatrical aspirations. Our pleasure may, to some degree, be collateral.

Why has Kate Bush come back now? The best response to such a question might well be, Why not? The cod-psychoanalytic one, unsteadily based on an interpretation of the second half of her career being dominated by the demands of parenthood over art, is that Bush's return to the stage after 35 years is one more immensely generous act of maternal love. Bertie McIntosh, now 16, is the Creative Advisor of Before The Dawn, and its male lead. He has the largest speaking part in Bush's first gilded song cycle, "The Ninth Wave", and the starring role in her second, "A Sky Of Honey". He even has a new song to sing by himself, "Tawny Moon".

"Without my son, Bertie, this would never have happened," Bush writes in her meticulous programme notes ("I love detail," she notes, unnecessarily). "He is a very talented actor and beautiful singer, as you will be witness to, and he brings something very special to the show through his presence."

Bush credits her son for, among other things, helping her conquer the stagefright that has reputedly kept her offstage since 1979. As the second night of Before The Dawn begins, though, either those nerves have been resoundingly conquered, or her acting abilities are more subtly effective than the broader strokes might sometimes suggest. The first song is "Lily", from 1993, carrying Bush back into the spotlight with an elegant groove, where she can proceed with an air of glowing inclusivity, arms outstretched in beatific welcome.

Gabriel is before her, Raphael behind her, Michael to her right and Uriel to her left, and the seraphic horde hover over the whole performance: "Put me up on the angel's shoulders," she sings early on in an exceptional "Top Of The City". Much, much later she will don wings and ascend into the darkness at the climax of "A Sky Of Honey", then reappear at the piano to sing "Among Angels".

After that song, and before a final rousing "Cloudbusting", Bush steps out of character to make a short but heartfelt speech. In it, she thanks the audience for not capturing the vivid, sometimes daft, frequently transcendental three hours that preceded it on their phones. It is, she tells us, about people, not technology. It is also, sceptics might add, about preserving the magic for an eventual DVD release.

But still, for all the discipline of the audience, it would have taken some effort to have avoided the ecstatic blitz of reportage that greeted the first night of Before The Dawn. At a time when surprise album releases and liveblogs create Twitterstorms that can blow out in the space of a single playback or performance, what happens on the second night, when the element of surprise has been removed? When you briefly consider advising a frustrated paparazzo, sated by Lily Allen at the premiere, that Jeanette Winterson has just joined the queue to get into Hammersmith Apollo?

What happens, perhaps, is that you can concentrate a little more on the rapturous music, and circumnavigate the dazzling light design, the West End manners, the wooden puppet that wanders rather forlornly through the seven-piece band for much of "A Sky Of Honey". Bush's strategy is as cunning and artful as might be expected: a warm-up session of half-a dozen songs; a full dramatization of the "Ninth Wave" suite from "Hounds Of Love". Then, after the interval, the second disc of "Aerial" (the "Sky Of Honey" sequence) and a couple of symmetrically resonant songs for an encore.

Some of the "Sky Of Honey" songs have a vintage Balearic swish to them, so that an outstanding "Sunset", in particular, feels like the work of some classy musicians of a certain age enjoying a "Café Del Mar" compilation after dinner in the countryside. Mostly, though, Bush's aesthetic has remained miraculously unchanged since 1985, and "Hounds Of Love" (she plays all but two songs of that album in Before The Dawn, and nothing predating it). One of her keyboardists, Kevin McAlea, actually figured on 1979's Tour Of Life, while other bandmembers include David Rhodes, John Giblin, Jon Carin and Omar Hakim, auspicious session vets who have long moved in a world populated by Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, Simple Minds, Dire Straits and Barclay James Harvest.

With that aforementioned attention to detail, Bush, the seven-piece band and five backing singers (including Bertie McIntosh), set about recreating the sound of the original records with phenomenal accuracy. The opening six songs move with a steady relentlessness, a mellow funk, a precise digital rendering of those glassy Fairlight epiphanies, and provide Bush with a calm base to display the still-astounding potency of her voice. The rearing climaxes of "Top Of The City" are delivered with grace and soul as well as power, while juxtaposing "Running Up That Hill" with "King Of The Mountain" proves that, in another time, the latter could well have been as significant a hit as the former.

Throughout, too, there's ample evidence of how Kate Bush and her music sometimes bewilderingly transcend context and prejudice. For as those musicians' CVs prove, here is someone immersed in a shiny world where the virtuosity of prog-rock met the perfectionism of a then-new studio culture, where the '70s met the '80s; not a world which, traditionally, has received unwavering critical love.

Bush, of course, is too much of an idiosyncratic talent for these immaculate textures to be rendered sterile. The range and vigour of "The Ninth Wave", in particular, highlights how she inhabits - defines, even - that most rarefied of genres, feminised prog. Even without the spectacle which accompanies it, the radically expanded "Ninth Wave" is a masterclass in extended musical writing, in threading flights of fantasy into a more or less coherent narrative, and in finding an emotional valency - one which, more than ever, focuses on a love of family (the benedictions of "The Morning Fog" are particularly moving) - in something which initially appears outlandish.

The staging of "The Ninth Wave", Bush's tale of a shipwrecked woman's fight for life in the sea, involves filmed segments, a helicopter hovering over the audience, dancers adorned with fish skeletons drawing the victim to her doom, stern recitations from the singer's brother, John Carder Bush, tragi-comic dramatic interludes, and some remarkable visual tableaux. The sight, during "Hello Earth", of Bush clambering onto a buoy undulating amidst fabric waves, lit by red flares, is one of many enduring images in Before The Dawn.

Those of us averse to the stagecraft of West End musicals may, however, find other sections a little tougher to deal with. The mime involving a stereotypically fiery preacher during "Waking The Witch", for instance, or the long, stilted dialogue between McIntosh (as the drowning woman's son) and backing singer Bob Harms (as her husband) written by the novelist David Mitchell. As an illustration of how banal domesticity can be fractured by disaster, it makes sense. As a vignette that depends on lines like "HP and mayo, it's the badger's nadgers" for laughs, it leaves something to be desired.

Pretty much from the beginning of her career, Kate Bush has presented herself with uncommon success as the full artistic package: a multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary conceptual artist whose genius cannot be reduced, as many recent thinkpieces have recently tried, to a detail about how many costume changes she went through on the Tour Of Life. The heretical thought does occur during Before The Dawn, though, that her desire to visualise and dramatise most every aspect of her music can sometimes detract from its inherent quality.

There's a good argument to be made, for instance, that "A Sky Of Honey" is one of Bush's very best pieces of work: its inclusion in Before The Dawn implies that she would agree, and the way she performs these delicate and sophisticated songs with her band only emphasise the point. In the programme notes, though, she admits "I really struggled with the staging for this for a while… What was the action on stage to be?"

It's an anxiety of creative vision that seems out of character, but one which is reflected in the performance, with Bertie McIntosh taking Rolf Harris' old role as the painter, moving uncertainly around the stage while his fellow vocalists strut awkwardly in bird masks and that odd wooden puppet, a manifestation of the artist's model ("Piss off!" orders McIntosh), is left to mooch aimlessly in search of the occasional hug from Bush. The gorgeous Turner-style sunsets and slow-motion bird films would, perhaps, have sufficed.

The music, though, remains magnificent, at once meditative and pulsating, working its way from quasi-ambient piano studies, through birdsong and the wonderful choreographed informality of "Sunset", to the pumping abandon of "Nocturn" and "Aerial" itself, and the salient cry of "We become panoramic!"

After all that, a solo piano interlude of "Among Angels" provides a tantalising glimpse of an alternative way that Kate Bush could have made her comeback: one more musically pure, perhaps, but also one which would have only represented, for better or worse, one strand of her essence. Before The Dawn is a celebration of the sublime and the preposterous, of a talent returned to the stage after a confoundingly epic length of time, and also, critically, of the consolations and inspirations of family. Love, it transpires, can make you do the strangest things - for 22 nights. Come on Joe, you've got 20 more shows to go…

John Mulvey

HOW WAS KATE BUSH’s second show in 35 years? Well let’s say that the Superlative Aficionados meeting won’t be adjourning just yet. The first night reports don’t lie: she flies, she almost dies, a silver birch tree crashes through a piano and, oh, everything.

Well, almost. Was she note-perfect? Pretty much, yes. Was the whole show faultless? No, of course not. She’s only human after all, and that fact, conversely, is also her great strength. Who else so successfully alloys songwriting brilliance with individual idiosyncrasy, turning every corner of her imagination from the prosaic to the fantastical into gratifying pop themes, be it a washing machine, her mother’s milk jug or the feelings of an unborn child facing assured nuclear destruction? She can make the listener feel self-conscious, stray perilously close to self-parody at times but always pull it off because we believe her, completely. With Kate Bush, all is fanciful but nothing is ever fake. Before The Dawn has given us a new window onto her creative process, and it’s quite a view.

The lavish £15 programme on-sale last night reveals that Kate and author David Mitchell – who wrote the dialogue for the Ninth Wave segment – initially struggled with the concept of translating side-two of Hounds Of Love into a narrative piece, and you do glimpse that. A domestic vignette in which Kate’s son Bertie and his stage dad sit at home waiting for his mother to return is a little awkward, certainly. (No really, why is she at sea? Does she commute on a fishing trawler? We don’t know.) But the strength of emotion running through the scene – indeed the whole night – overcomes any obstacles of plot. The fact that her actual son is playing the boy who could be left motherless is almost too much to bear. “I only cried twice,” declared MOJO’s reviewer Jim Irvin (whose full review you can read in next month’s issue) as the curtain went up for the interval. I’d gone by the second chorus of Hounds Of Love – just watching mop-haired, 16-year-old Bertie sing his part in the background hunting call so beautifully, while failing to stay in step with the professional backing singers’ two-step shuffle did for me.

The adrenalin shock of The Ninth Wave, crashing into the comparatively straight performance of the opening songs and effectively washing them away inevitably gave the third act, A Sky Of Honey, a high bar to clear. But Aerial’s atmosphere of drowsy afternoon bliss prevailed, its slower pace (in the case of the actors quite literally – and brilliantly – moving in slow motion across the stage) providing a chance to really take in the stage set – this time an amazing changing sky, while in the foreground a giant picture frame fills the proscenium arch where Bertie, as the painter Ivan Aivazovsky, paints the scene. It’s young Albert McIntosh’s big scene and he does a convincing turn. And if it’s indulgent of his mother to add in a song (Tawny Moon) just for him, who could argue with her prerogative to do so?

And if starry skies and medieval bird masks sound like so much prog rock fantasy, that’s probably true too. But this was prog as done by the RSC, Kate’s co-director Adrian Noble getting personal thanks from Kate at the start of the evening, his last night working with her.

Kate’s notes in the programme are revealing. She tells of how wary she was working with Noble, a renowned figure in the theatre, of how she feared he would take over. No doubt a career spent battling the will of male record execs and the dubious fantasies of TV light entertainment directors will do that to you. But she needn’t have worried, Before The Dawn feels unequivocally a Kate Bush production: surprising, moving, endlessly fascinating. Bring on the DVD.

Kate Bush hails return to stage 'a great adventure' as ultra-theatrical show launches in London

Show saw 'Hounds Of Love' suite 'The Ninth Wave' and 'Aerial' movement 'A Sky Of Honey' brought to life in full


Kate Bush tonight (August 26) made her return to the stage after a 35-year absence in a show that began as a typical concert but evolved into a theatrical spectacular.

The three-hour show saw Bush recreate the second side of her classic 1985 album 'Hounds Of Love' as a fully realised stage production, with theatrical sets, costumes, effects and lighting. The same treatment was then given to the second side of her 2005 album, 'Aerial'.

The performance took place at London's Hammersmith Apollo, where the capacity crowd brushed with a raft of TV crews and reporters on the way in, such was the circus around Bush’s long overdue return to live performance.

In attendance were singers Lily Allen, Rufus Wainwright, Holly Johnson and Anna Calvi, actress Gemma Arterton, comedian Frank Skinner and Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour, who discovered Bush in the late '70s. The band Warpaint were also in attendance, having flown to London especially for the show. "We bought tickets and a plane ticket to get here and go back to where we are – Croatia – on tour," guitarist Theresa Wayman told NME. “We've come over for this on a much-needed day off. Some of us [in the band] are fans – and some of us are about to be.”

The performance began at 7.45pm, when Bush's arrival was heralded by a recording of the mantra known as The Gayatri: “O Thou Who givest sustenance to the universe/From Whom all things proceed/To Whom all things return/Unveil to us the face of the true Spiritual Sun/Hidden by a disc of golden Light/That we may know the Truth/And do our whole duty/As we journey to Thy sacred feet”.

As a barefoot Bush led a procession of her five backing singers onto the stage, the entire house rise to its feet in applause. Such was the warmth felt for the 56-year-old, her first three numbers all ended in varying degrees of standing ovation. “You’re lovely,” said Bush after the first. “It’s so lovely to see you all, thank you so much.”

At first, the stage set, lighting and performance were surprisingly traditional. Bush was backed by a seven-piece band, she wore an unassuming outfit comprising black trousers, black top and tassled black jacket, and she bobbed and swirled self-consciously through opening numbers ‘Lily’, 'Hounds Of Love' and ‘Joanni’, all the while delivering vocals that proved time had taken no toll on her abilities.

After a gospel-flavoured ‘Top Of The City’, Bush beamed at the effusive audience, and stopped to acknowledge her thanks for lighting director Mark Henderson, who she said had been "right here with me since we pushed the button 18 months ago". She also praised her son, Bertie, who appeared in her band: "Without him, there’s no way it would have happened," she said. “He gave me the courage to get it started. It’s been a great adventure so far, and it’s really just begun.”

A very well received ‘Running Up That Hill’ followed, then ‘King Of The Mountain’, during which Bush appeared to take a moment to survey the scale of the audience. As the song reached a climax of squealing guitars and thumping beats, Bush's long-haired male percussionist strode out to stage front, whirling a corded object around his head as the sound of thunder echoed around the hall. At the climax, pieces of paper the colour of autumn leaves blasted out into the audience. On them, the words: “Wave after wave, each mightier than the last. Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep. And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged Roaring, and all the world was in a flame.”

From this point, the performance of ‘Hounds Of Love’ song cycle 'The Ninth Wave' began, starting with a video of a man with a telescope reporting the sinking of a ship named Celtic Deep. “These people are depending on me,” he tells the operator.

The ensuing performance saw Bush become a player in an ensemble cast featuring seamen in life jackets and dancers dressed as skeletal fish, the singer herself sometimes appearing simultaneously onstage and on the big screen, floating in a life preserver in dark waters. Stage trickery and set design was employed to great effect - waves were created with rippling fabric, and the setting of a ship was created with rib-like struts of wood. During ‘Under Ice’, Bush disappeared from view, only to be pulled from the stage floor once she'd been cut free with a chainsaw. At one point, a helicopter searching for the shipwreck swooped above the audience, shining a powerful beam of light and blowing smoke overhead. At another, a crooked room appeared onstage, in which a boy and his father – the former played by Bertie Bush, the latter by Bush's husband Danny McIntosh – were having a banal conversation about what to have for dinner, before Bush appeared to sing ‘Watching You Without Me’. ‘The Morning Fog’ brought the performance to a close, and another standing ovation ensued.

After a 20-minute interval, a second narrative was played out on stage with a brand new set: a giant doorway with falling snow, a backdrop of blue sky and the band now arranged at stage left, having moved from the backline. Employing the ‘Sky Of Honey’ suite from the second half of ‘Aerial’, it was a piece that used imagery of birds, an artist and an artist’s mannequin – a four-foot puppet brought to life by a puppeteer. Bush underwent a transformation throughout the performance, sprouting blackbird-like wings as the setting changed from day to night and back, and effigies of gulls and owls flew around the stage and screens.

As the hour-long ‘Aerial’ performance concluded, Bush spent a rare moment onstage alone to perform ‘Among Angels’ on the piano, which she joked had “grown a tree” in reference to a prop remaining from the previous suite. “Thank you so much for the such a warm and positive response,” she said, after a performance in which the audience could have heard a pin drop. Welcoming the band back onstage, Bush ended with ‘Cloudbusting’, another track from ‘Hounds Of Love’, taking bows to rapturous applause that lasted long after the house lights were raised.

Review: Kate Bush's first gig in 35 years is the cultural event of the year
*****

The streets around Hammersmith Eventim where Kate Bush is to play her first live show in 35 years are crammed with film crews, and crowds, some of whom might have seen her in this same location in 1979.

Tens of thousands of tickets sold out within seconds, parties have been organised so the unlucky can commiserate together.

There are t-shirts proclaiming 'I got tickets', others bemoaning, 'I didn't get tickets'.The country has been swallowed up by Bushmania and no one has ever seen anything like it.

Just one question remains: can she pull it off?


Rock bible Melody Maker may have proclaimed the 79 Tour of Life 'the most magnificent spectacle ever encountered in the world of rock' but that was then.Times have changed.Has the groundbreaking Ms Bush, formerly streets ahead of the pack, managed to keep up?

The reminder, just before kick off, to turn phones off - a special request of Kate's much reported - is greeted with a loud cheer and there's a standing ovation before she even comes on.No pressure then.

She leads the company in conga style, barefoot in black with plenty of fringing, her hair is waist length with a small Amy Winehouse bit of height.

It's a sort of witchy grande dame look.

Her first song is an album track but it might as well be her biggest hit.There is going to be no shortage of standing ovations tonight.

From there, like a regular rock gig, she mixes album tracks with smashes like "Running Up That Hill" and "Hounds of Love" and just when you think you know what this night is about, off she goes proving she is still very much the eccentric storyteller we love.


What look like Post-It notes are blasted into the audience and a whole theatrical sequence about a drowning woman complete with introductory film starring Downton Abbeys Kevin Doyle begins complete with a helicopter, men dressed as fish, an underwater room, a ghost, a life size marine buoy...

Anyone here for the hits must find it all very confusing but this is what Kate Bush does.

The second half sits halfway between the early set and the conceptual with Kate's hippy side coming to the fore on tracks from Aerial with giant projections of birds in flight, characters playing painters, an artist's dummy the size of a child...

It would be easy to laugh just like it's always been easy to laugh: some of it is daft, some of it wilfully daft but that's what makes English eccentricity so cherished.

By the end, she has done not one single song from that last concert.That means no "Wuthering Heights", no "Man with the Child In His Eyes", no "Wow".Unbelievable!It takes a brave woman...

The whole show takes a brave woman. Kate Bush is that woman. And then she flies.

Pierre a écrit:Pour les photos grande taille ou haute-résolution, merci de les poster en lien (url), je l'ai déjà demandé.