Author: smngrx01

On some unspecified date in the 2004, during a music magazine interview, Nick Cave was asked for his thoughts on the music scene of the time.

“I’m forever near a stereo saying, What the fuck is this garbage?”, Cave replied. “And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds will be touring the US next month, perhaps giving Cave the opportunity o repeat his apology of sorts to other members of the LA quartet, should he be so inclined.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

Eighteen miles, give or take. That’s how far it is by road from Cardiff to Newport. Seven years ago, during the recording sessions for what would become their Resistance Is Futile album, the Manic Street Preachers ended their ongoing lease on Faster Studios in the heart of the capital (Nicky Wire: “grimy”) and moved east and bought the Door To The River Studios in Newport. The surrounding area can best be described as bucolic – an adjective we use about a half dozen times over the next few hours as we stare out of the studio’s picture window, through the thicket of ash trees and down to the transporter bridge in the distance. The scene, a Welsh archetype of lush countryside and heavy industry, is framed by a milky-white light that is part hazy sunshine and partly the promise of rain. Welcome to Wales.

The dauntingly large mixing desk, so big it had to come in through the picture window, dominates the room in this former family home-come-rehearsal space and studio. One of Richey Edwards’s old stage jackets sits framed at the top of the stairs. Smaller ante-rooms, once spare bedrooms one assumes, splinter off the main landing, one filled with shelves of drums, literally floor to ceiling, another with a row guitars that curves off around the corner and out of sight. “My few basses are shoved over there in the corner,” sighs Nicky Wire.

James Dean Bradfield is making coffee, and explaining how the desk was brought over from the famed Rockfield Studios and transplanted to a cottage in Caerleon. “A Farewell To Kings,” he says, listing some of the albums that were captured on that mixing desk in its former home. “A little bit of Queen, we believe, and definitely stuff like Graham Parker And The Rumour and Echo And The Bunnymen. We’ve just bought ten grand of parts for it which will see us through, because when stuff breaks in it it’s nearly gone. Like an old Porsche.”

It’s a far cry from their former studio, and given the changing face of the last few Manics albums – the highly polished, harder edged record like Resistance Is Futile (made at Faster and this place), the lilting The Ultra Vivid Lament, and their latest, Critical Thinking, which outwardly and musically is as serene and calming as staring out at the ocean, before realising that below the surface hides a cruel undertow.

“Has our environment seeped into the music?” Bradfield ponders, repeating the question.

“Yeah, I think things are a bit gentler. But that coincides with the age too, doesn’t it? And we were working on those Faster studio songs in 2016, so that’s nearly ten years ago. I don’t know, it may have affected it. I think this window and the view may have affected it, definitely. I do know that I like the isolation, that you can come in and record on your own, and I like that we’re recording in a home. It’s like we’re in Slow Horses or a witness-relocation program.”

He sets the coffee down.

“Toffee Crisp, or Wispa?”

“I think the last two in particular, the mixture of doing it here and at Rockfield, there is a calm in both those albums. I don’t know, a calm euphoria at times.”

That’s what Nicky Wire says on the subject of upping sticks and leaving Faster studios for the Welsh countryside. The Manics’ fifteenth album is notable for a few things, not least that it’s bookended with tracks with Wire on lead vocals, and Bradfield has contributed three sets of – very good – lyrics. It might not be reinventing the wheel, but it shows a thirst for ongoing innovation and experimentation only enabled by anytime access to their own studio space. Their in-house engineer, Loz Williams, lives just down the hill, and Wire can drive here in 15 minutes. Which is what he did on the day of the Queen’s funeral. “It wasn’t a big ‘fuck you’,” he says, “I just wanted to avoid it.”

We’re on the first floor of the studio, which is dominated by a giant TV; the Manics watch a lot of sport in their down time. A glass table, on which sit a collage of the handwritten lyrics to Faster, the last remnant of the band’s former home, sits between us.

“So, I came to the studio,” Wire explains, “and all I had was Paul Cook’s drum loop from No Fun as a guide – we never used it in the finished song – not much else, really, and wrote One Man Militia. I played the guitar, bass, used the drum loop, and did all the vocals. And then, obviously, the boys piled in and made it ten times better.”

One Man Militia is a fitting end to an album, although initially it wasn’t intended to be the closer. It’s hard as nails, scathing and funny, dripping with Wire’s ire. It’s one of the earliest tenets of the Manics’ sound: racked with impotent anger. It’s bleakly funny, too, and ends with the band at full bore, crashing around the studio, Sean Moore hammering away at his kit, the band thrashing away at their instruments. It’s a glorious crescendo.

“I love that ending, it’s euphoric. I love what we all brought to it, you know, the first solo is me, you know, the surf one, and I told James to replay it, make it better, basically. He went: ‘Oh no,’ and he was taking the piss, but he went: ‘You’ve got a really good vibrato! Which you can only say after forty years of knowing each other.

“But at first it was about this mantra, rather than trying to write a massive verse and a massive chorus. Just this mantra, which took off. That was a magic moment. It was just me and Loz here, and we resisted building on it too much: ‘Let’s do this fucking choir, let’s put an orchestra here, less Postcards From A Young Man,’ you know? We’ve defragged ourselves in terms of that, undoubtedly. Hiding In Plain Sight is the perfect example where we could have made that bigger and bigger.”

Hiding, the second single from the album, with a Wire vocal and which is somehow saddened, angry and reflective, was written in just 15 minutes.

“I’ve still got that just-off-kilter rage, which I’ve controlled now but it’s still there,” says Wire. “When that goes, I’ll probably just drop dead.”

You enjoy the discomfort?

“Yeah, I need the discomfort. I need hard work and discomfort.”

There’s a real note of regret in the song where you sing about wanting to be in love with the man you used to be, in a decade when you felt free.

“I think most people would think that’s probably the nineties I’m talking about, being in the band and everything being brilliant. Which is all true, but I think it’s more a reference to the unadulterated beauty and innocence of the seventies. A lot of people think the seventies are some derelict fucking era, strikes, steelworks closing down. I’m not saying we were the richest people on earth or anything, but the one thing I’m more grateful for than anything else is growing up where I did with my mum and dad and my brother. It’s just a fucking fluke of wonderment. I think there’s no consequences when you’re a child like that. Even when you’re a big band later in life and things are going amazingly well, and having your own kids, there are so many amazing things, but there’s always a consequence. Good and bad. But when you’re at that point in my life, there were no consequences, it was just watching the telly, playing football, running everywhere. Days at the beach, endless skies, innocence.”

“I still think about the single first, I’m a traditionalist like that,” says Bradfield when asked about the first songs that gelled and began to feel like the beginning of the album, when they thought they might have something.

“So, when we got Decline And Fall down, I remember thinking: ‘Okay, we’ve got a candidate for the first single,’ that Skids vibe to it. Then when we put People Ruin Paintings together, I realised that we were coalescing around something a bit more thoughtful. So between those two was when I’d say I thought we had something to build on.”

While Wire has taken to lead vocals with relative zeal (‘zeal’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence), Bradfield, who showed flashes of lyrical brilliance on his solo album The Great Western, and then practically ignored the whole discipline for the best part of two decades, delivered three sets of lyrics for Critical Thinking: Brushstrokes Of Reunion, Out Of Time Revival and (Was I) Being Baptised, the latter prompting Wire to remark: “I wish I could have written that.” It was inspired by a day spent in the company of legendary songwriter Allen Toussaint for the BBC programme Songwriters’ Circle broadcast in 2011, recorded at London’s Bush Hall, when Bradfield, Toussaint and John Grant performed and discussed their craft. It was peak introspective BBC 4 fare, but in a good way.

“We did the soundcheck, hung around the dressing room together, went up to his little room, went for a walk with him, spoke to him before the show, after the show. And inside I was like, fuck me, this is musical history, this is the man who wrote Southern Nights – and I fucking love Southern Nights. It makes me feel free, I don’t know why. And he was talking about being young, breaking into the industry, talking without any bitterness, that was the thing. Whether he was talking about the impact of hurricane Katrina or tacit racism, or just what he thought of other people’s versions of his songs, it was just gracefulness personified.

“Later I went searching for some old interviews with him. And he was talking about Katrina, and I remembered he had said something similar to me on that day, about when the floodwater was coming and he was thinking: ‘Were we going to drown or were we being baptised.’ And that duality of the way he was thinking, I love the idea of being able to twist something like that. If you have some kind of faith in something, which I think he did, not that I do, he could actually see the other side of the coin. When I left him I felt as if I’d learned something. I’d learned a new way of dealing with people. Just after half a day being with somebody, you know, that’s a gift.”

Less positive inspiration and more existential crises – which is very Manics – is the chiming Out Of Time Revival, which marries the ebullient – musically, at least – and the rueful beautifully. A song looking for meaning, just as the singer realises that seeking meaning in the everyday might be meaningless.

“We were coming out of lockdown when I started writing that,” Bradfield recalls. “I’d go down to the beach and walk my dog, and each time I came back from the walk there’d be a new line for the song. And I was coming to this realisation as I stood on that beach: why do I put so much pressure on myself to find an answer in everything? I’ve watched too many films and I’m trying to find answers in the wrong places. There’s too much symbolism. This beach hasn’t got the answer, my dog hasn’t got the answer, my brain hasn’t got the answer, the horizon has not got the answer. I’m trying to find hope in all the wrong places.

“I’m trying to learn French, and I’m something of a Welsh speaker now, but that’s some kind of ability. But that has no answer, they’re just things in life. Not everything is a narrative, be pragmatic Welsh, there’s no poetry in this. That’s what the song is about. It’s actually a bit of my dad; come on, fucking dig in. I look back at some of the stuff I learnt and believed and lived my life by, certain tropes, and you think: fuck me, did I waste my time?”

Do you think that’s also partly because of where you are on the journey now, entering the third and final act?

“Yeah, because you realise it’s maths, you know, and we have lost quite a lot of people from around the band over the years, and that continues to happen. We lost a good friend this year. You realise that you have emotions that come out of the experiences, you have hangovers that come out of these moments, the drunkenness of melancholy and sadness and tragedy, but when you come out the other side you actually realise that the race is the prize. You’ve just got to keep going.”

Do you still enjoy the process, do you still enjoy making albums, not least this one?

“Yes. Because we have this place, the albums evolve more now. It’s not like we switch on a light and the sessions start, and sometimes it’s a full week, sometimes two days and sometimes you’re alone or we’re all here. Then we’ll go to Rockfield and disappear from our families and the day to day to finish the process. We are talking about making an album where we just do something with a bit less thought, be a bit more organic, where it’s just us and we go to one place and say we’re doing it and get it done. That would be a different record to this one, but that’s for another time. And you asked if I enjoyed making this album…”

He points at the ceiling conspiratorially.

“He didn’t.”

“It’s not like I was in a fucking permanent crisis,” says Wire, “I just found it really fucking hard work. That’s probably a good thing. You know, sometimes you do get a lot out of that perceived hard work. But it’s just because we weren’t together that much, and again, it’s worked in our favour. There’s an energy on this album which has probably come through a bit of friction. But, you know, you spend a lot of time analysing how things work or don’t work, especially with us, and sometimes it’s the friction that works for you. I mean, bizarrely, The Holy Bible was an absolute dream to make. We were completely zoned in on the same page. You know, brutally rehearsed, there was no winging it at all. You can’t with an album like The Holy Bible. It was just fucking great.”

Was Richey okay then?

“Yeah, he was, to be honest. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the year went on. We’ve done a lot of our growing up in public, made our mistakes too, but took our audience with us. We’ve suffered at times with that. Which is understandable because our extremes are, you know, extreme. But it’ s unbelievably rewarding now when you see the audience and you know they’ve got their kids with them, kids who are Manics fans too, coming full circle.”

Critical Thinking is out now via Columbia

Kate Bush’s 1979 road trip, The Tour Of Life, has become the stuff of myth and legend – especially since it’s the only time in her career she ever toured. In 2014, ahead of her return to the stage with Before The Dawn, Prog looked back at The Tour Of Life.

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Kate Bush has long cornered the market in reclusive, media-averse mystique, but it wasn’t always that way. On April 3, 1979, early evening news show Nationwide dedicated a show to the 20-year-old singer.

The event on which the 25-minute special was hung was the opening night of her first – and to date only – tour. “Most live artists make their mistakes either in private or in front of a very small audience,” intoned the moustachioed reporter. “Tonight, Kate Bush starts at the top, in front of several thousand. She can’t afford to fail.”

But then Bush was big news. Her star had been arcing across the firmament ever since she first appeared on Top Of The Pops just over a year earlier. That memorable performance, playing her first single, Wuthering Heights, had introduced her as an utterly new and fresh talent. There had been an instant clamour for her to play live, though it would be 14 months before she did.

Looking at Nationwide from the vantage point of 2014, it’s amazing how much unguarded access she granted the filmmakers over a six-month build-up. Footage of early production meetings where people are crammed onto chairs and sofas in a tiny dressing room is followed by a clip of a leotard-and-leggings-clad Bush being worked hard by choreographer Anthony Van Laast during three initial weeks of “gruelling exertion” just to prepare her for several weeks of even more intense choreography.

Remarkably, the camera was allowed into Wood Wharf Studio in Greenwich, south London, where the singer was drilling her eight-piece band through Kite and Wow. Here, it’s possible to get a real sense of the pub gigs she’d started out playing just a couple of years before. “I think the main reason they listen to me is because I’m paying their wages,” she says of the rest of the band, her girlish, sing-song voice cut with chewy south London vocals.

Towards the end, after a brief post-gig chat with an exhausted but exhilarated Bush at the Liverpool Empire, the camera cuts back to an earlier interview. Sitting with her back to a studio mixing desk, she puts a ‘posh’ interview voice on as she answers a string of questions.

At one point, the off-screen interviewer asks, given that she’s achieved so much so swiftly, what has she got left to achieve? “Everything – I haven’t really begun yet,” she says, offering a glimpse of the maturity and self-awareness that have always driven her. “I’ve begun on one level, but that’s all gone now, so you begin again.”

She would “begin again” many times over during the ensuing years, but never would she do it onstage. She didn’t retire entirely from live performances – there would be the odd one-off here and there throughout the 80s – but never again would Kate Bush put herself through such an exhilarating, groundbreaking, draining experience as her 1979 tour.

I feel I owe people a chance to see me in the flesh. It’s the only opportunity they have without media obstruction

When Bush announced 15 dates at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2014 (a figure since bumped up to 22 dates) under the banner Before The Dawn, the reaction was shock and awe. Shock that she was finally following up that original tour, a promise she’d made many times but all but her most optimistic fans had long given up hope on her ever keeping. And awe at the prospect of what a woman who broke so much ground could deliver with 35 years of artistic and technological advancements at her disposal.

But there was also a question of just how she could follow up the original spectacle, retrospectively dubbed The Tour Of Life. 35 years on, that extravaganza had grown to almost mythical status – a strange state of affairs given that it was witnessed by more than 100,000 people at the time.

Footage of an hour or so of the show is available on YouTube, highlighting a performance that bridged the worlds of music, dance, theatre and art. But there’s even more footage that has never been made public – including that of the magician Simon Drake, who played seven different characters during the show.

But in many other respects, the tour was utterly grounded in reality. The singer spent six months beforehand working herself to the bone as she attempted to forge a brand new model of what a live show could be, then another two months doing the same as she took it around Britain and Europe. And it was hit by tragedy when lighting engineer Bill Duffield was killed in an accident after a warm-up show, his death almost bringing the whole juggernaut to a halt before it had even started.

But all that was in the future when the idea for the tour was conceived. Ironically, Bush herself was the first to admit that there was no need for her to do it. “There’s no pressure,” she said in 1979. “But I do feel that I owe people a chance to see me in the flesh. It’s the only opportunity they have without media obstruction.”

“Kate was never at ease in the public eye,” says Brian Southall, who worked in artist development at Bush’s label, EMI, and had collaborated with the singer since she was signed. “Whether that was performing on Top Of The Pops or doing interviews. She was very reserved, very wary, I think by nature shy. So this spotlight on her was new.”

The story was that you put singles out, you put albums out, you went on Top Of The Pops, you toured. She wouldn’t do the conventional thing

The singer was fully aware that anything she did would have to raise the bar on everything that came before. But even then, she was trying to manage expectations – not least her own. “If you look at it, it’s my reputation,” she said 1979. “And yes, I hope that it’ll be something special.”

EMI were unsure what the show would involve, so the costs were reportedly split between the label and Bush herself. In return, they got an artist who threw everything into her biggest endeavour so far.

“She was very determined about how her music was presented and performed – that was pretty obvious from her first album,” says Southall. “So no one saw any reason to step in and stop it. The rock’n’roll story was that you put singles out, you put albums out, you went on Top Of The Pops, you toured. But she wasn’t prepared to do the conventional thing.”

In fact no one realised just how unconventional it would be – with its choreography, dancers, props, multiple costume changes, poetry and in-house magician, there was no precedent with which it could be compared.

Rehearsals began in late 1978. Bush had already trained with experimental dancer/mime artist Lindsay Kemp, one-time mentor of David Bowie. But this tour would entail a new level of aptitude entirely, and the stamina to simultaneously dance and sing for more than two hours every night.

Dance teacher Anthony Van Laast was brought in from the London School Of Contemporary Dance to choreograph the shows and help hone Bush’s abilities. Van Laast brought with him two protégés, dancers Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst. Van Laast put the singer through the equivalent of boot camp at The Place studio in Euston, working with her for two hours each morning. Bush’s own input was crucial to the developing routines.

You have to make things more obvious so people can hear them,. Maybe make them faster

“Kate knew what she wanted – she had very specific ideas,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “What she wanted was in her head, and she wanted people around her who could help her put it into movement. She had so many hats on at that point – artistic, creative, musical.”

If the mornings were for the dance aspect of the slowly coalescing show, then the afternoons were for the music. As soon as she was done with Van Laast, Bush would make the eight mile journey to Wood Wharf Studio in Greenwich, south London, where she would meet up with a band that included Del Palmer, guitarists Brian Bath and Alan Murphy and her multi-instrumentalist brother, Paddy Bush. Also present was her other brother, John Carder Bush, who would perform poetry (and whose wife would provide vegetarian food for the tour). It was hard work for everyone involved and as the show neared, Bush would work 14 hours a day, six days a week.

“You have to make things more obvious so people can hear them,” she said of the live interpretation of her songs. “Maybe make them faster.”

While Bush was utterly in command, sometimes necessity was the mother of invention. With the singer literally throwing her whole body into her performance, holding a traditional mic would be difficult. So a mic that could be worn around the head was devised.

“I wanted to be able to move around, dance and use my hands,” she said. “The sound engineer came up with the idea of adapting a coat hanger. He opened it out and put it into the shape, so that was the prototype.”

In early spring 1979, the various creative wings finally came together at Shepperton Studios. There was the odd stumbling block. Del Palmer, Bush’s bassist and boyfriend, was less than impressed with some aspects of the choreography when he first saw it.

“In those days, dance wasn’t as popular as it is now, and I don’t think Del was clear on what we were doing,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “There was a bit where we picked Kate up. I remember him going, ‘What they hell are they doing to Kate! They’re holding her between the legs!’”

In late March, a week before the tour was due to start, the whole production moved to the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, north London, for dress rehearsals. Like everything over the past six months, the whole endeavour was undertaken in secrecy.

If money was her concern, she’d have been making albums every year rather than every 10 years… creativity was all-important

“It’s like a present that shouldn’t be unwrapped until everyone is there,” reasoned the singer. “It’s like hearing about a film. Everybody tells you it’s amazing – and you could end up disappointed. You shouldn’t get people’s expectations up like that.”

By the time the tour was due to start on April 3 in Liverpool, everyone drilled to within an inch of their existence. If Bush was nervous, she wasn’t letting on.

“There was no suggestion that Kate was scared about going on the road,” says Brian Southall. “I certainly never got a sense that she was nervous about the financial aspect of it. If money was her concern, she’d have been out making albums every year rather than every 10 years. It’s not something that crossed her mind. The creativity was all-important.”

Still, to iron out any potential last-minute problems, a low-key warm up show had been arranged at the Poole Arts Centre in Dorset. It was there that tragedy struck.

Lighting director Bill Duffield was an integral part of the show. A 21-year-old boy wonder who had worked with Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley, he shared the same forward-thinking mindset as Bush herself.

The circumstances of what happened in Poole remain unclear. Some reports said that Duffield fell from the lighting rig while helping to clear the stage away following the show, others said that he fell 20 feet through a hole in the stage. Either way, Duffield sustained serious injuries that would result in his death a week later.

“People were concerned for his wellbeing,” says Brian Southall, who met up with the Bush entourage in Liverpool the following night. “They were wondering how he was and if and when he would recover. Sadly he didn’t. I think the real shock came when his death was announced.”

24 hours later, with the Nationwide TV cameras posted outside the Liverpool Empire, Kate Bush’s first tour got properly underway under a cloud – albeit one the public weren’t aware of.

If the build up had been intense, then the show itself was a magnificent release. Theatrically divided into three acts, the 24-song set featured tracks from her first two albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart, plus two as-yet-unheard tracks, Egypt and Violin.

When I perform it just takes over. It’s like suddenly feeling that you’ve leapt into another structure, almost like another person

But that was where any similarity with a standard rock show began and ended. On an ever-shifting stage of which only a central ramp was the sole constant physical factor, Bush was a human conductor’s baton leading the entire show. As the scenery shifted through the opening Moving, Room For The Life and Them Heavy People, so did the costumes – and the atmosphere.

“I saw our show as not just people on stage playing the music, but as a complete experience,” she later explained. “A lot of people would say ‘Pooah!’ but for me that’s what it was. Like a play.”

Indeed it was – or perhaps several plays in one. On Egypt, she emerged dressed as a seductive Cleopatra. On Strange Phenomena, she was a magician in top hat and tails, dancing with a pair of spacemen. Former single Hammer Horror replicated the video, with a black-clad Bush dancing with a sinister, black-masked figure behind her, while Oh England My Lionheart cast her as a World War II pilot.

Like every actor, she was surrounded by a cast of strong supporting characters. As well as dancers Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst, several songs featured Drake, who performed his signature ‘floating cane’ trick during L’Amour Looks Something Like You. And then there was John Carder Bush reciting his poetry before The Kick Inside, Symphony In Blue (fused with elements of experimental composer Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie 1) and the inevitable encore, Wuthering Heights.

But at the heart of it all was Bush, whirling and waving, reaching for the sky one moment, swooping to the floor the next. Occasionally she looked like she was concentrating on what was coming next. More often, she looked lost in the moment.

“When I perform, that’s just something that happens in me,” she later said. “It just takes over, you know. It’s like suddenly feeling that you’ve leapt into another structure, almost like another person, and you just do it.”

Brian Southall was in the audience at the Liverpool Empire. Despite the fact he worked for EMI, he had no idea what to expect. “You just sat in the audience and went, ‘Wow’. It was extraordinary. Bands didn’t take a dancer onstage, they didn’t take a magician onstage, even Queen at their most lavish or Floyd at their most extravangant. They might have used tricks and props in videos, but not other people onstage.

“That was the most interesting thing about it – her handing it over to other people, who became the focus of attention. That’s something that never bothered Kate – that ‘I will be onstage all the time and you will only see me.’ It was like a concept album, except it was a concept show.”

Like most support acts, she was going to get half an hour, no dancers and no magicians… she wasn’t prepared to do that

Two and a quarter hours later, this ‘concept show’ was done and the real world intruded once again. If there was any sense of celebration afterwards, then the main attraction was keeping it to herself. “I remember sitting in the bar after the show at Liverpool and Kate wasn’t there. She was with Del,” says Southall. “She wasn’t an extrovert offstage. There were two people. There was that person you saw onstage, in that extraordinary performance, and then offstage there was this fairly shy, reserved person.”

Her reluctance to indulge in the usual rock’n’roll behaviour was both characteristic and understandable. It was a draining performance, night after night as the tour continued around Britain and then into Europe. It was hard work for everyone involved.

“We went out, but not exceptionally,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “We weren’t out raving until seven o’clock in the morning on heroin. There’s no way we could have done the show the next day.”

They occasionally found time to let their hair down. The Sunday Mail reported that certain members of the touring party indulged in a water-and-pillow fight at a hotel in Glasgow, causing a reported £1,000 damage. EMI allegedly agreed to foot the bill, though they stressed that the singer wasn’t present during this PG-rated display of on-the-road carnage.

After 10 shows in mainland Europe, the tour returned to London for three climactic dates at the Hammersmith Odeon between May 12 and 14. The second of these shows was arranged as tribute to the late Bill Duffield. Bush and her band were joined onstage by Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley. The pair tackled various Bush songs (Them Heavy People, a renamed The Woman With the Child In Her Eyes) and played their own songs (Gabriel’s Here Comes The Flood and I Don’t Remember, Harley’s Best Years Of Our Lives and Come Up And See Me), before everyone came onstage for a cover of The Beatles’ Let It Be.

“Kate asked us all to come and sing with Peter and Steve,” says Avon Arnold. “We were onstage, singing chorus with these two icons. And I’m not a singer. It was an emotional night.”

48 hours later, the tour was over. And so was Kate Bush’s career as a live artist – at least for another 35 years.

She was the first one in this country to merge creative rock music with creative dance

Kate Bush hasn’t truly explained why she never took to the road again after that very first tour. Various theories have been posited – a fear of flying, the psychic damage inflicted by the death of Duffield, the sheer effort of will and vast reservoir of energy that it took to get what was in her head onto the stage. The latter seems most likely, though it could just as easily be a combination of all three. Or it could be none of them.

“I need five months to prepare a show and build up my strength for it, and in those five months I can’t be writing new songs and I can’t be promoting the album,” she once said, the closest approximation to a reason she has ever offered. “The problem is time… and money.”

Not that there wasn’t a call for it, especially overseas. America was one of the few countries where she didn’t sell records, and the idea was floated that she play a show at New York’s prestigious Radio City Music Hall so that her US label, Capitol, could bring all the important media and retail contacts to the show to see what the fuss was about. “She’s not a great flier,” says Southall. “And she wouldn’t do it.”

Even more tantalising was an offer to support Fleetwood Mac in the US in late ’79. A high-profile slot opening for one of the most successful bands in the world would was an open goal for most artists. But Bush wasn’t most artists.

“Like most support acts, she was going to get half an hour, no dancers and no magicians, so just going up there with four musicians and banging out a couple of hits,” says Brian Southall. “And she wasn’t prepared to do that.”

Not that she has ever ruled it out. In fact, in all of the increasingly infrequent interviews she has given since then, she’s been asked when she would next tour. The answer has always been a charmingly vague tease that, sure, it could happen if the circumstances were right. She once floated the idea that she would write
a concept album specifically to base a stage show around (it never materialised), while at one point she was rumoured to be working with Muppet creator Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop on a new idea, even announcing in 1990 that she would be playing live the following year (that never materialised either).

But now, out of the blue, she’s finally delivered on that promise (though, tellingly, it’s for a residency rather than a tour). “She’s only playing one venue,” says Southall. “That means she can nest without the hassle of taking it all on the road for weeks on end.”

What exactly her belated live return holds in store for her fans isn’t clear. “I don’t know whether she’ll refer back to the original show in any way,” says Southall. “Will there be dancers, will there be magicians, will there be dancing elephants? I think she feels comfortable with more people onstage with her. I think the idea of her sitting down at a piano and playing an hour and a half of Kate Bush songs would terrify the life out of her. The idea of having people around who she is comfortable with and finds some support from, whether that’s Dave Gilmour turning up or whoever.”

The only thing that’s certain is that it won’t be a by-the-numbers live show.

“She’s an innovator,” says Avon Arnold. “She did things that had never been done before. She was the first one in this country to merge creative rock music with creative dance. She didn’t have a genre. She had a mentality.”

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.

Hats off to Jon Anderson. The set-list here – a full show from August 2023 – is immaculate. The cream of three classic studio works – The Yes Album, Fragile and Close To The Edge – plus Relayer epic The Gates Of Delirium, and Awaken from Going For The One. Anderson’s band is up to the task, respectfully reproducing songs created five decades ago.

This two-CD/triple vinyl set has a listening time of more than two hours, but if you’ve read this far then that probably won’t bother you at all.

The big question, though, remains: has Anderson’s voice withstood the test of time? The answer is an emphatic yes (no pun intended). Five of the six musicians deliver stunning backing vocals, but not as a crutch. Jon’s voice still soars. A sublime instrument, making this album ridiculously good.

Freelance contributor to Classic Rock and several of its offshoots since 2006. In the 1980s he began a 15-year spell working for Kerrang! intially as a cub reviewer and later as Geoff Barton’s deputy and then pouring precious metal into test tubes as editor of its Special Projects division. Has spent quality time with Robert Plant, Keith Richards, Ritchie Blackmore, Rory Gallagher and Gary Moore – and also spent time in a maximum security prison alongside Love/Hate. Loves Rush, Aerosmith and beer. Will work for food.