Tour of Life
Still unfinished. Might have to postpone finishing until next week. Sorry, all.
Tour of Life
Hammersmith Odeon
Manchester Apollo
Let It Be
I Don’t Remember
Nationwide documentary
In the BBC Nationwide documentary about her, Kate Bush is shown sitting in a studio in the midst of her first and only tour. Exhilarated from months of prep and the prospect of a couple more months of it, she is as lively as she’s ever been during an interview, answering each question enthusiastically and in depth. Then she’s asked the most important question of the interview: what’s next for her? She smiles disarmingly, and says in all sincerity, “everything.”
It’s a true answer. The Tour of Life is the most ambitious project of Kate Bush’s early career. As challenging as The Dreaming, Hounds of Love, or Aerial are, they’re studio-locked affairs. The Tour of Life is in many ways Bush’s magnum opus as a performing artist, synthesizing music, theater, mime, and poetry in one of Seventies rock’s most spectacular tours. It is also her only long-term tour, spanning twenty-eight dates in six weeks across seven countries. Outside of a few live performances and a major concert residency, Bush hasn’t returned to the stage. Her legacy as a live artist is mostly based on the year after her debut. The fact she has longevity despite this either says a lot about her albums or that one tour. Perhaps it’s both, or in Bush’s terms, “everything.” Certainly that’s what she threw at her audience. The world-storming triumph of The Kick Inside and the introspective aesthetic clout of Lionheart met onstage to create a firestorm that would keep Bush in people’s memories forever. Let’s see how she went about it.
The Tour of Life is a misleading name, as it was coined after the tour was done. In context (and early in the naming process), Bush’s only tour was the Lionheart tour, making her sophomore album the only one she did concerts for. Given the theatricality of the album, this is a solid decision. For all Lionheart’s flaws, it offers a idiosyncratic vision of pop music as theater. While the album didn’t give it enough time to stretch its legs, a stage show could do it more justice.
Of course in a more meaningful sense (and it its literal name), this was the Kate Bush Tour. People weren’t going to see Bush primarily because of Lionheart, which sold 300,00 units against The Kick Inside’s 1 million. They wanted to see the singer of “Wuthering Heights” strut her stuff. Her debut single was still her signature song, and people’s feelings about Bush could be measured by their opinions on “Wuthering Heights.” Any tour Bush undertook would have to be at least as big as “Wuthering,” and then some.
The press, of course, had its voyeuristic eyes on her. Gross misogynistic journalism filled the pages of papers around the country, from the Daily Mail’s “Wow! It’s Kate Bush scaling erotic heights” to the Daily Express’ “Kate’s sexy TV shocker!” and (perhaps the horniest and most emblematic of all) “her posturing is blatantly sexual, her hennaed hair is wild and witching, her dress slinky and revealing, her mouth pouting, and her eyes flashing unmistakable signals,” once again from the Daily Express. The thirst of the music press is never quenched, especially when a young woman is around. You can’t get a lengthy story about Bush without a discussion of her perceived “feyness,” her sex appeal (usually from journalists more than a decade the 21-year-old’s senior), or a comparison to female songwriters like Joni Mitchell (I dare anyone to find meaningful similarities between Mitchell’s jazz fusion albums of the late Seventies and what Bush was producing around the same time). To many onlookers, she was just a Young and Sexy Female Songwriter. She had an image carved out for her, one that had little to do with anything Bush had done herself, and she was accordingly judged by it.
It’s not that Bush has dodged sex in her work — far from it. We’ve already talked about “Feel It” and “In the Warm Room,” and those are only her more explicit tracks. Across her work she’s embraced the utopian ideal of sexual liberation, despite having a relatively conservative approach to it. Sex as a creative subject is as rife with ideas as geography, war, or fashion. Bush has taken it seriously and as a source of beauty and forward movement. Of course whenever a woman displays an awareness of sex, she is immediately sexualized. If Bush had a pound for every time she was asked about being a sex symbol in an interview… well, it wouldn’t quite match her “Wuthering Heights” royalties, but it might be somewhere in the vicinity of what she was paid for “Wow.” She would (perhaps naively but understandably) deny that she was a sex symbol, insisting she wanted foremost to be “a person who was presenting music.” Yet people don’t get to choose how they’re seen: they’re allowed to build their legacy and aesthetic, but what they are to the public is decided by everyone except themselves. All Bush could really do what keep making her music and hope people listened to it.
No one was more aware of the pressure on Bush than she was herself, as she put her marketing skills to good use. She did scads of interviews hyping up her tour, made a number of TV appearances, and giving tickets to members of her fan club. Her most striking publicity stunt, however, was a photo-op with then-Prime Minister Jim Callaghan. Aside from the basic media savvy of “get your picture taken with the PM,” there’s of course plenty going on here, as there is in any photograph of a world leader. Callaghan was gearing up for the 1979 general election following the devastating Winter of Discontent. To briefly explain for the uninitiated in British political history, workers and trade unions had been striking across the country after Callaghan’s Labour government’s imposed regulations on pay raises, stipulating they couldn’t rise above 5%. At any point in history, this would have been a disastrous turn of events for the British working class. The winter of 1979 was just about the worst time for this policy to be enforced, as it was the coldest winter the UK had seen in fourteen years. The Labour Party’s popularity was destabilized, and an eventual Conservative victory became inevitable (Margaret Thatcher would go on to enact even harsher crackdowns on unions and workers). The very least Callaghan could do at this stage was pose with England’s new favorite popstar. Whether Bush knew it or not, she was now a cultural force to be reckoned with.
Per usual, Bush’s motivations were not particularly ideological. It’s quite likely she was asked to pose for a photo with Callaghan, although there doesn’t seem to be a detailed account of how the photo came to be taken. Bush has odd blind spots, possessing insight into some subjects while mostly overlooking others, or getting them altogether wrong. Her unfortunate comments about Theresa May a few years ago, while not as much of a ringing endorsement as they’ve been made out to be, suggest more narcissistic white feminism than genuine reactionary politics. So it’s no surprise she posed with Callaghan. Supporting Labour in the Seventies and praising a Tory PM in the 21st century aren’t mutually exclusive positions, but the existence of both in her arsenal of publicity decisions suggest that opinions and spectacle are more significant to her than ideology.
Brand consciousness, however, is a constant with Bush. She has her own label called Fish People, for fuck’s sake. Everything she does is eccentric enough to make headlines. While her eccentricity is often exaggerated, the strangeness of her music is not. Part of the anticipation around Bush’s tour was that nobody knew what the hell to expect. Perhaps she didn’t either. She was disoriented by showbiz herself. “When I’m on stage I get possessed really… it’s almost like seeing God, man,” she said. Whatever she was going to do, it would be a massive surprise to herself too.
The production of the tour was thus a hectic storm of planning, staging, and prepping. Bush spent mornings on dance rehearsals, worked with her band in the afternoons, and was in evenings all night.