To quote the great lady herself….. WOW! The anticipation for this gig as you all know was rather immense. I really felt for Ms Bush wondering how on earth she must be feeling as I cast my eyes down to my watch and saw it was five minutes till kick off. Then all of a sudden she was there before us, well to say the place erupted is an understatement! The only comparison I have really is the effect the end of the opening night of ‘Smile’ had on its audience the ovation went on for some minutes and Kate just stood there, rather bashful in her bare feet. Then once we had calmed, it began. It all started off quite sedately, I thought ok; so we are going to watch her sing her songs with a band behind her. As you will see from the set list, the first song was ‘Lily’ from ‘The Red Shoes’, She followed this with ‘Hounds of Love’ one of my favs and it really pounded out, she seemed to grow in confidence. The first few songs it was all brilliant but rather normal, then all of a sudden the lights went out and a chap with a lasso appeared in the spotlight and flourished it, thats when it all changed. Confetti sprayed out upon us and a screen appeared behind the band. Suddenly we were all lost at sea, we were introduced to the story by a film of an astronomer, telling us he had had an SOS of a shipwreck, but the coast guard was disinterested, then we had a helicopter going overhead as the lighting rig moved above us and lights flashing, great sheets billowing like waves with a wondrous light display, no wonder she thanks the chap who did the lighting at the beginning. Kate then took us through the 2nd half of the ‘Hounds of Love’ album ‘The Ninth Wave’ on the screen she was floating about in the sea singing, as lots of activity went on on the stage, she was to be seen popping up from the stage floor as people with axe’s opened it up. Talk about a multimedia experience, it made me laugh at the people who had said she was out of time banning filming and photos, she was far from out of time, but actually as always rather timeless… I caught myself wishing you could take memories with you when you go, as I don’t want to forget this evening anytime soon.
The stage sets changed to suit the songs, a life buoy a sitting room, sausages… (don’t ask) a puppet ambling about through the second suite of the evening “The Sky is Honey’ from ‘Aerial’, birds were a big feature of this, the band donned beaks and there were images of birds flying past on the big screen, all in all it was a visual as much as audio experience, she certainly didn’t disappoint,
After all the dramatics they all left the stage and after an amazing applause she returned alone to a piano situated beside a tree. She mentioned ”we seem to have a tree’, or some such and did a solo haunting performance of ‘Among Angels’. then much to my delight the band returned for the closer a rousing Cloudbusting which had us all singing along. At the end of the night she thanked us all and said what a wonderful response and that she hoped we had enjoyed it, queue huge roar! we sure did!
Set List:
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ps image at top was not during the performance, everyone played fair which was great to see!
