Fact #102565

KATE BUSH'S FIRST LIVE TOUR

by Johnny Black

feature first appeared in Mojo magazine, July 2006


Backstage, the air was crackling, supercharged with the electricity of fevered artistic anticipation.

It was April 2, 1979, and at the Arts Centre, Poole, Dorset, after three months of intense training and exhaustingly disciplined rehearsal, twenty year old Kate Bush was about to take to the stage for her first ever live concert. “We were all beside ourselves with stage nerves,” remembers Simon Drake, the magician who performed alongside Kate on seven numbers during the show.

This was the preview night of the lavish and ambitious spectacle that went by the name of The Tour Of Life. What none of the forty-strong cast and crew could possibly have known was that Kate Bush’s first tour would also be her last.

Looking back at it years later, she remembered that preview gig as, “the first real test as to whether it was going to happen or not, and the reaction really surprised me - it was lovely, and the greatest encouragement I could have possibly had.”

Kate, her band, her dancers and her magician wowed their first audience with a show that was unlike any rock concert they’d ever seen.

By the time they came off stage, the nervous anticipation was banished, replaced by euphoria. “Everyone was very up,” is how tour manager Richard Ames remembers it. Amid the laughter and inevitable back-slapping, they repaired to their hotel to celebrate what now looked set to be an appropriately successful debut tour for the young woman who, with Wuthering Heights, had become the first female to reach No1 in the UK singles chart with her own composition.

And then the phone rang. Richard Ames’ heart sank as he learned that the tour’s lighting technician, Bill Duffield, had been involved in a horrific accident. “He was doing the ‘idiot check’. You rush up after everything’s in the truck to make sure nothing’s forgotten,“ remembers Ames. “Someone from the auditorium had lifted up a panel from the flooring on the very last step of the aisle between the seats and placed it on the step below the top. Bill rushed up, tripped over it ‘cos it wasn’t lit very well, and went head first down seventeen feet onto concrete. He lasted a week on the life support machine.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Discovered and nurtured by Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd, Catherine Bush was signed to EMI Records just as punk rock was laying waste to the land in July of 1976. “We had signed up The Sex Pistols,” remembers Bob Mercer, EMI’s MD at the time, “but here we were trying to develop this young artist, this very sweet little creature, who was about as diametrically opposed to the punk ethic as it was possible to be.”

Nor was there any shortage of doubters at EMI’s Manchester Square HQ who couldn’t grasp what it was that Gilmour and Mercer saw in the precocious helium-voiced ingenue who sang songs about men with children in their eyes. “Nobody really knew what to do with her,” says Colin Miles, who was then the Artist Relations manager at EMI’s prog subsidiary label Harvest Records. “A lot of people at EMI heard her voice, which was unique by any standards, and were far from convinced.”

Mercer proved admirably resolute in sticking with Kate despite the dissenters, and despite her own sometimes infuriating stubbornness. When Mercer chose James And The Coal Gun as Kate’s first single, she confronted him in his office, making it very plain that she wanted Wuthering Heights. “I fixed her with my sternest avuncular stare,” he recalls, “and carefully explained that she was the artist and it was her job to make the music, but we were the record company, so it was up to us with our superior knowledge of marketing and public taste to decide which single to put out.”

At which point the headstrong young firebrand burst into tears. “I had no way of dealing with it,” admits Mercer. “I caved in and said “OK, I’ll put out Wuthering Heights, if only to teach you not to interfere with us by trying to choose your own singles. Four weeks later, of course, it was No1.”

Gratifying as the success of Wuthering Heights was, it deprived Kate Bush of the standard option of easing herself into the rock touring circuit via a series of well-chosen support slots. Preparations started almost immediately for a headlining tour, set to hit the road in the middle of 1978 but the summer came and went with little progress having been made. It was October before an announcement was made that Kate’s first tour would start in February of 1979, but even that date would not be met.

Part of the problem was that Kate’s vision of her first tour was constantly evolving. In nurturing their young star, EMI had paid for dance lessons, instruction in mime by the legendary Lindsay Kemp and much more. As a result, Kate was sponging up new concepts daily and, naturally, she wanted to introduce them into her live show.

Her dance teacher, Anthony Van Laast, revealed that, “One of our problems is that Kate is dancing better and better ... It's incredible how far she's got. I wouldn't have thought it was possible. And the problem is that she's getting so good at dancing that it's going to be hard now to keep her from dancing so that she can sing properly.”

“We wanted to do something special,” Kate explained subsequently, “and I guess really because of my influences from people like Lindsay Kemp we wanted to make it kind of theatrical. And so it would incorporate lots of different things, like dance, and we had a magician, and some poetry and just all different elements thrown together and it had a kind of a circus feel. In terms of what we were doing then it was very experimental. I mean apart from musicals, or opera production, it was kind of unheard of to involve so many elements.”

Serious rehearsals for The Tour Of Life finally got underway in January of 1979, but it quickly became apparent that, as Anthony Van Laast had forseen, simultaneous singing and dancing wasn’t going to be simple, because the technology of the era wasn’t as far advanced as Kate’s imagination required. “I needed a microphone that I didn't have to hold,” she later explained, “because we wanted to do dance that involved two other dancers so I could be lifted and we could run across the stage, and holding a microphone was very inhibiting. So the sound guy that we had for the tour, I said to him, ‘I want you to invent a microphone for me that I don't have to carry'. So he basically invented the radio mikes that you see now, but he made it out of a coat hanger … he got an old coat hanger and kind of bent it into shape.”

Bringing a magician on board also demanded some radical new thinking. “I was involved with the creative meetings at Kate’s home in Lewisham for ages,” remembers Drake. “We would sit around on big cushions on the floor and roll around in hysterics at some of the mad ideas. We would discuss every song and put forward ideas for visuals and characters. Occasionally we would go on excursions to see technicians. I remember taking them to see some strange chap doing video synthesis in West London and a robot builder in North London.”

The rehearsals themselves, in Covent Garden, proved more arduous than Drake had anticipated. “We all put in long hours, especially Kate because she had a lot of dancing to do as well as singing, and dozens of costume changes. So as time passed and more was added into the mix, the rehearsals got harder and harder.”

Tickets went on sale on March 5 and, despite a tight veil of secrecy drawn around the content of the shows, they were completely sold out by the 20th, requiring a clutch of extra gigs to be added, including additional nights in Birmingham, Manchester and at the London Palladium. Meanwhile, the gruelling pace of rehearsals was ratcheted up even further as the entourage moved from Covent Garden to Shepperton Film Studios where they could work with the newly constructed stage sets.

“The staging was very ambitious and complicated for that time,” points out Drake. “The whole stage was transportable and based on an Egyptian cross called an Ankh. There was a huge ramp which raised and lowered centre stage, making up the centre of the Ankh. On one occasion they hadn’t bolted it to the stage, and the entire thing lurched forward and slipped out of the grips of the four roadies. It was only seconds after Kate and two dancers had got clear, and I was emerging to do my solo bit. The heaviest part of this huge ramp came down on my head and knocked me out cold. I came to with cartoon birds circling my head, clasped firmly to Kate’s bosom with her crying, ‘Are you all right, Simon?’ I was very lucky not to have been hit by a sharp square-edged steel girder which went down the middle of the ramp, missing my skull by a few centimetres.”

Tender-hearted as Kate could be with stricken comrades, she was also not averse to tearing them off a strip, although not always to the desired effect. “Once, at Shepperton, some of the team were late and she tried to tell us off,” recounts Drake. “It was very funny, this tiny person with big hair and a squeaky voice trying to be tough and authoritative to 40 people, including seasoned roadies and tattooed riggers, saying, “I understand one or two of you were a little bit late today and I am sorry but it’s just not going to doooo.” Everyone just roared with laughter. Suffice to say, from that moment, Richard Ames did any telling off that was required.”

The final dress rehearsals began at London’s Rainbow Theatre on March 22 where, despite tight security, one determined freelance photographer snuck in and snapped some shots of the show, only to have his film confiscated and be given a personal ticking off by Kate herself.

All that was left now was to get The Tour Of Life on the road.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Understandably, Bill Duffield’s hospitalization after his injury at the preview show in Poole had a huge emotional impact not just on Kate but on the whole touring party. One evening paper reported that her first reaction had been to cancel the entire tour.

The official first night took place at the Liverpool Empire just one day after Duffield’s accident but, troopers to the core, the cast and crew rose to the challenge. “Ms Bush's world debut began modestly with a straight rendition of 'Moving' from the first album, the lady gesticulating in front of a panoramic cinema screen awash with effects,” reported Mike Nicholls of Record Mirror. “Her unabashed obsession with sex manifested itself on 'Feel it', 'In The Warm Room' and 'The Kick Inside' where she revealed a soft spot for incest, something she had dwelt upon at the previous afternoon's press conference.”

The next night, in Birmingham, Sandy Robertson of Sounds found himself impressed by Kate’s band, singling out, “Del Palmer, a bassist who plays like a dream. And Brian Bath on searing but delicate lead guitar, and what seems like 40 dozen other people, sonically speaking, who are so good that most of the time you don't even notice their presence. Forgiveable, when you're being distracted by Katy being wheeled around in a giant sized satin-lined choc box contraption.”

Bill Duffield’s death on the 6th, after several days on life support in Southampton, must have dampened spirits that night at Oxford’s New Theatre and he must have remained uppermost in their thoughts the next night when they received a five minute standing ovation from the crowd at Southampton’s Gaumont Theatre. “Bill was an extremely talented young lighting designer,” remembers Simon Drake. “His death cast a long shadow and we were all very upset by it, but we had to carry on and try to make the best of things all the same.”

By the time the Tour Of Life hit Edinburgh on the 13th, they were ready to let off a little steam. After a celebratory show in the Usher Hall, the hi jinx continued until 5am with a water battle and a pillow fight in the city’s snooty Caledonian Hotel. EMI ended up footing a bill for just over £1000.

The UK leg of the tour climaxed with five universally acclaimed nights at The London Palladium. “Everyone and their mum was there,” recalls Drake. “It was a showbiz bunfight. The shows were great but afterwards it was a mad scrum of fans and liggers.”
The Daily Telegraph hailed it as “A dazzling testimony to a remarkable talent”; Melody Maker declared it, “A triumph of energy, imagination, music and dance”, and Record Mirror raved, "The best welding of rock and theatrical presentation that we're ever likely to see."
Exhilarating as the adoration of the media must have been for her, the strain of the tour was finally taking its toll on Kate. Several gigs on the European leg were cancelled because of throat problems and, on her return to the UK she was faced with emotional turmoil of a benefit show for Bill Duffield which she had added at Hammersmith Odeon. She would never tour again.

In her more optimistic moments she has spoken of how much she learned from The Tour Of Life as an artist and as a human being, but she had serious problems adjusting to the fact that, “My sexuality, which in a way I hadn't really had a chance to explore myself, was being given to the world in a way which I found impersonal ... Whatever I wore, whatever I did, people were putting this incredible emphasis of sexuality on me, which I didn't feel.”

Thrown in at the deep end, Kate Bush had survived a lifetime’s worth of agony and ecstasy in the space of a few rollercoaster weeks. Her determination to see it through ensured that she was still standing, although emotionally battered and bruised, at the end. “I was at a point when I felt so exposed and so vulnerable I needed to retreat and just make albums - be a songwriter again.”

Although she has gone on to become Britain’s most cherished female singer-songwriter, she remains, a quarter of a century later, still on retreat.