The Ninth Wave

I saw Kate Bush perform a week ago today, accompanied by my parents. It was an evening of pure spectacle – an entire, self-enclosed world of narratives - by turns joyful, by turns dark. A world peopled by birds, puppets, fish people, dancers, astronomers, family members – and, to re-purpose a T.S Eliot quote, “at the still point of the turning world”, Kate. Yet, really, she wasn’t that still. The stage was hers to dance upon and spin over and be hauled around. But, being the one we’d all ultimately come to see (and hear), there was of course a heady sense of the performance hinging on her presence – although she was quick to remind everyone (quite rightly) of the extraordinary work of the ensemble around her, from band members and backing dancers to all those hidden behind the curtains.
The first glimpse of her was ever so exciting, with whoops and cheers booming loud. The whoops were repeated on the opening chords of various songs in that thrilling instance of recognition as Running Up That Hill or Cloudbusting began. Applause became the stitching, with each song – so well known and adored by the audience – seamed together with our clapping hands.
I could spend pages discussing the minutiae of the show: the different stories enacted, the extraordinary combination of music and visuals, the striking set designs and lighting, the privilege of spending a few hours immersed in the inventions of a particularly dynamic imagination. But even attempting to condense down the scope of it to a few hundred words feels wrong.
What struck me particularly though is how, while everyone seated in the Hammersmith Apollo was seeing the same show, we were all viewing it with different eyes. Maybe some saw Kate perform on her original tour in 1979. Maybe some had particular connections with one album or another. Maybe some, like me, had discovered her afresh via a combination of family vinyls, CDs and Youtube videos. All of us, in one way or another, were projecting our own image of ‘Kate Bush’ onto that stage – one based on, but not the same as that woman standing in front of us. She’s been mythologized and written about and discussed to the point that her public status can almost be seen in separation to whoever she may be in her private life.
This awareness of varied perspectives and projections held a particular weight for me that evening for two reasons. The first is that Hounds of Love has a continuing place of resonance for me, being one of three albums I listened to repeatedly while I spent a week in hospital recovering from spinal surgery. It became so charged that there were certain songs, such as Hello Earth, that I then found too unsettling to listen to for months afterwards.
The second, more immediate reason was that we had found out the day before the performance that my grandad was gravely ill. A very rapid decline following an illness assumed to be temporary meant that my mum was suddenly facing the loss of her sole remaining parent. He had lived in a residential care home for the last few years, leading a quiet, contained, relatively content life.
This news meant that the themes of the show suddenly took on an extra layer of poignancy. The Ninth Wave sequence – drawn from the second half of Hounds of Love – explores ideas of sinking, surfacing, drowning, movement, loss, love, letting go. A more perfect metaphor for what was happening within our family would be hard to find. Mum wept through the opening song, while I held her hand as it drew to a close. The entire sequence of billowing silk waves, helicopter lights, icy encounters and a single, flashing beacon was as beautiful as it was devastating.
It wasn’t merely about pathos. The absolute celebration of life and living was just as important. Kate Bush still strikes me as being an artist whose work is underpinned by heart and humanity in a way that few others achieve. But as the night drew to a close, following the exuberance and (occasional slight) menace of a Sky of Honey, our family returned once more to thoughts of grandad. The penultimate song, played by Kate on the piano, was Among Angels. It finishes:
“I can see angels around you. They shimmer like mirrors in Summer. There’s someone who’s loved you forever but you don’t know it You might feel it and just not show it.”
My grandad was of the generation that didn’t display or verbalize emotion, but he was a good, kind, thoughtful, sensitive man who showed in all his actions that he loved my mum and us, fiercely. So, as he lay, warm and cared-for, in a bed miles and miles away from that show, we sat in the dark at the Apollo and marveled at how the songs on stage could have such an unexpected, personal connection to us that night.

In the following days after we’d returned home, when mum was spending her time sitting with him; talking/ reading/ singing to him, she recalled another, much earlier, Kate Bush song – Breathing. The chorus is a series of cries of “out, in, out, in.” That was the rhythm of his room in those last few days, his breath the background sound. Finally that out, in, out faded slowly to silence on Friday. He died on a day where a sky of honey stretched above the hills.
In one of those weeks full of seeming coincidences and moments of concordance, Sunday began with the sea (in these photos) and six days later, Friday ended with sky.
We'd chosen the watery location as a deliberate reference to the content of the show (knowing that The Ninth Wave would figure) - and what a perfect choice. However, there was a slight clash of time-period references, with the vintage 70s dress from eBay much more Wuthering Heights than Hounds of Love.