Kate Bush, the revered Greta Garbo of pop, rarely performs live. Her last concerts were in 2014, in the Before the Dawn residency at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, after a drought of 35 years when she’d taken time off to raise her son, Bertie. Tickets to the 22 shows sold out in 15 minutes.
When the residency wrapped up, she slipped back to her private world. Occasionally, her songs shimmer across the cultural spectrum as reminders of her eternal relevance: Running Up That Hill in the TV series Stranger Things and This Woman’s Work in a horrific episode of A Handmaid’s Tale.
Last year, Bush released a deeply affecting short animation film, Little Shrew, lamenting the war in Ukraine, with proceeds going to the War Child charity. She was also in the line-up of artists in the recent silent album Is This What We Want? protesting against the British government’s A1 music copyright proposals.
These are tantalising, fleeting glimpses. Meanwhile, Bush devotees have developed singular ways of connecting with their goddess through communal gatherings such as the annual Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever, Shambush! and A Night of 1000 Bushes.
Tribute acts are inevitable, sometimes even pretty good: see Cloudbusting and Moments of Pleasure. Then there is English performer Sarah-Louise Young, whose cult cabaret show, An Evening Without Kate Bush, flips the focus around and centres on the fans. As its tagline says, “Kate’s not there, but you are.”
“The inciting passion was not to create a replica of Kate Bush,” says Young in a Zoom call from Eltham, near Melbourne, during a long Australian tour.
It’s her third outing of the one-hour show in that country, which she’s interrupting in April for a series of dates in New Zealand. “We call it ‘the essence of Kate’. She is unique, I don’t impersonate her, and that’s not what people need. People have their own relationship with her, but in Australia in particular, they say, ‘We will never get to see her live and this is as close as it gets.’’'
Manchester-based Young debuted the show – made with writer-actor Russell Lucas – at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019. She and Lucas had already explored the absence of a beloved icon in an earlier production, Julie Madly Deeply, about The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins star Julie Andrews, who lost her singing voice in 1997 after a surgical accident which damaged her vocal cords.
“I am absolutely a fan of Kate Bush’s music,” Young says, “but I was very interested in the relationship the fans have with her.
“When we first started making this, she hadn’t performed live for 35 years and there were so many public celebrations, almost vigils, for her work. She hadn’t gone away, she was still creating work. There’s a lot of mythology about her, a beat-up that she’s this aloof, quirky artist but she has always been quite an ordinary person who’s had an extraordinary life.”
About six months after Young and Lucas started developing An Evening Without, Bush announced the residency at the Apollo.
“So, we said we cannot make this because it would be seen as parasitic. We decided to stop, and it was really sad.”
Young even had tickets to one of the Apollo gigs. “But we were invited to bring our Julie Andrews show to Toronto and it wouldn’t have made any sense not to go. Heartbreaking as it was, it means I have had the same experience as a lot of the people who come to my show. I know how it feels.”
Young and Lucas restarted An Evening Without in 2018. Its packed-out Edinburgh launch a year later was praised as hilarious, bonkers and mind-blowing.
“We were about to tour but the pandemic happened, so we had another false start,” she says. “Then we began touring and Stranger Things happened – how bizarre was that timing?
“So, we’ve always had multiple generations coming. She’s a legacy artist. Parents bring their children; children play the music to their parents.”
As with the Julie Andrews production, Young sees herself as “a creative facilitator”.
“The audience already have, in their emotional palette, this relationship with the music and my job is to remind them and fuse together those memories. So, they are doing a lot of work in their head.”
Using a recorded backing track, Young’s repertoire rotates through a moveable feast of Bush songs.
“I sing all of the songs in the same key and there are such recognisable, iconic beginnings to her songs in the rhythmic patterns. You hear the first bars, and you are hotwired back to where you were when you first heard it.”
Young interacts with the audience during and after the shows. “I meet people afterwards and they share stories which are endlessly fascinating, often about the connection between the songs and the death of a partner or parent.”
She briefly brought An Evening Without to New Zealand in 2023, performing it in Inglewood as part of the Taranaki Arts Festival. This time, she is running up the hills and across the windy moors of both islands, “an incredible gift to visit this much of the country”.
Back home in Britain, the possibility of Bush herself slipping into the audience of An Evening Without remains an unlikely dream.
“When we made it, we always wanted to create something she would approve of. We have had friends and family of hers come, including one of the original backing singers in her 1979 Tour of Life, and her son’s ex-girlfriend.
“You never know, she might turn up. She’d need to come heavily disguised though. The audience would not cope with her presence. She is a quasi-religious figure to some people so it might be a bit like them meeting God.”
Tour dates: The Piano, Christchurch, March 30; Wānaka Festival of Colour, April 1; Dunedin Arts Festival, April 3-4; Ōamaru Opera House, April 5; Theatre Royal Nelson, April 8; Hannah Playhouse, Wellington, April 12-13; Century Theatre, Napier, April 15; Turner Centre, Kerikeri, April 17; Tapac, Auckland, April 18-19.
