There’s a man outside, holding up a sign explaining how he has flown all the way from South Africa, without a ticket – just to be near the building Kate Bush is in. News crews film audience members going through the doors as if they are entering the spaceship in Close Encounters, about to experience something those left on the ground will never truly understand.
It’s the first time Kate Bush has performed since 1979: just the one tour, with the big hair and the ballet and the exploding. And then she disappeared so utterly, she started to feel mythic – something we all dreamt of after drinking too much red wine and falling asleep on an opened copy of Wuthering Heights.
Now she’s 56, and suddenly she’s back, and we don’t know why she’s back. Did we do something good? Did we do something bad? All the conversation beforehand is split between hysterical explanations of why she’s a goddess, and the professionally sour noting that she has become fat. Both of which might be why she disappeared for 35 years.
Foyer, ticket, seat, waiting, lights down, roaring – a sound of love I have never heard before. Kate Bush walks on stage, a tangleof black hair and a pale face like the Moon, but beaming, like the Moon never did. We expected drama, or fear, or perhaps a ghost, but not someone beatific in a state of simultaneous calm and joy that you see in yogis and lamas, and very old couples holding hands on park benches, still in love.
But the drama comes. Still smiling, from a cold start, Bush opens fire on the audience with Hounds of Love, which is like having every emotion you’ve ever experienced in your life all turn up at once, unannounced, as you’re leaving the house at 8am. It’s quantifiably too much. “Take my shoes off/ And THRRRROW them in the lake … Oh, here I go!”
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Over the following three hours, you realise this isn’t a rock gig at all or, if it is, it’s from some Philip Pullman alternative universewhere punk never happened and ballet is as important as bass and, instead of dry ice, you have snow. In the first half of the show, Bush turns the Hounds of Love album into a lavish, voltaic piece of theatre, where she is lost at sea, drowning, clinging to the side of a lifebuoy, singing. Helicopters search for her, strafing the auditorium with lights, rotor blades whirring. Apparently, this is what she had always planned for the album, but it has taken 30 years for technology to catch up with what she imagined in a second. You feel pretty good about being the same species as someone who can imagine stuff like this, in a puff of smoke, and then wait a whole lifetime for the machines to catch up.
Interval. Foyer. The darker and deeper neurones have been fired up. Everyone here feels as if they are part of something on-rushing and huge. People touch more, use words that they never usually use in the supermarket queue or, tired, in the bathroom: “euphoric”, “astonishing”, “voltaic” (it means electric).
The second half takes us from the sea to the land and the sky. This is the second half of Aerial, and if we didn’t know what it was about then, we do now. Just: a day. A beautiful day. And how one might go wild trying to pin it down. For, in your younger years, you live for moments – a kiss, a song, the email that changes everything.
But as you move into your thirties and forties, your moment-hunger becomes longer, and you shift your obsession to whole days, instead – vexed with the inability of a photo, or a single song, to capture the amazing ones, the ones that truly grieve you to know you can never live again. Just to have, and keep, a whole day – that is the greatest magic you can imagine. It is all you wish, as you rush towards death. Where can we live but days?
In A Sea of Honey’s long day, nothing particularly remarkable happens, just as nothing really remarkable happens in Ulysses. The sun comes up, and “the sky is filled with birds”, and the Moon rises, and the protagonists swim in the sea, at night. But some people are just more alive than others, all eyes and mouth, and overloading senses – and that’s what Joyce was, and that’s what Kate Bush is. They appear in your life to remind you that to watch a sunrise is to watch a burning star, and that pollen is sperm, and summer is fleeting, and everything on Earth is so unlikely – so improbable – that we might as well live somewhere where Kate Bush can end a concert by turning into a one-winged bird and flying out into the auditorium, as 4,000 people roar for her return.
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So what is it that you know, as you stagger out into Hammersmith – rattled, high and newborn again? This: that you have patiently waited 35 years to be reminded that you are alive.