TOUR DE FORCE
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 TV news program 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 Bush’s first – and to date only – tour. “Most live artists make their mistakes either in private or in front of a very small audience,” intoned Nationwide’s moustachioed reporter. “Tonight, Kate Bush starts at the top, in front of several thousand. She can’t afford to fail.”
But then in ’79 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 of 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. It would be 14 months before she did.
Looking at Nationwide all these years later, it’s amazing how much unguarded access she granted the programme makers during a sixmonth build-up. Footage of early production meetings where people are crammed on to 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 an initial three 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 she 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 a chewy South London vocal).
Towards the end of the film, after a
