What could be better than an evening with Kate Bush? It’s not really a trick question but here’s the answer – An Evening Without Kate Bush.
Multi-award-winning British performer Sarah-Louise Young thought she’d make it clear from the get-go that her Kate Bush show happens sans Kate Bush, although in spirit and through her music Kate Bush is mysteriously present.
The mystery would probably be appreciated by the actual Kate Bush, who is something of an enigma and keeps a low profile. The woman who we all got to know through her massive 1978 hit song, the other-worldly Wuthering Heights.
Bush was just 19 at the time. Her debut album, The Kick Inside, released that same year, established her as a unique presence in contemporary music with her exquisite voice and ethereal presence.
Bush, now 66, is still making music but she doesn’t tour or perform live. Not to worry, Sarah-Louise Young is here to help and right now she is dishing out the Kate Bush songs and the uninhibited dancing (“enthusiastic movement,” she calls it) at the Adelaide Fringe.
She’s playing at Le Cascadeur in the Garden of Unearthly Delights until March 23, after which she tours New Zealand then returns to play in Queensland and the Northern Territory. Her last gig on this tour of Down Under is in Cairns (her website tells us her next gig is Doncaster in the UK. Quite a stretch).
And even though Kate Bush is not in the show, she kind of is, although Young wants to make one thing quite clear.
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“I don’t impersonate Kate Bush,” she says. “And it’s not a biographical show. Besides, everything you need to know about her is in her music.”
Doing a show based on a famous personage can be tricky at times. Young’s show Julie Madly Deeply, a tribute to Julie Andrews, was a hit too, but the star’s “people” did send cease-and-desist letters. Though there was no actual legal action, it was stressful for a while there.
Sarah-Louise Young as Kate Bush.
Kate Bush’s “people” have certainly not protested against Young’s show. Is Kate Bush even aware of it?
“I haven’t met her – I’d love to – and I don’t know if she knows about the show,” Young says. “She hasn’t seen it but I know some of her cousins have, along with her doctor’s niece and one of her backing singers from the ’70s.”
Young hopes Kate Bush knows that it is a tribute, an homage, not an impersonation, and it’s done, as Kenny Everett used to say …“in the best possible taste”.
It was created with fellow theatre-maker Russell Lucas, with whom she also created her Julie Andrews show.
Young is an actor, writer director and internationally renowned cabaret star. Her Kate Bush show is just one of a string of hits. She has performed in Australia before with Julie Madly Deeply and this is her second time here with An Evening Without Kate Bush.
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“I’ve been here several times for the Adelaide Cabaret Festival and last year we did two weeks of this show in Adelaide,” she says.
Two weeks was not enough, though, for Kate Bush-loving Australians apparently, so Young’s back for a longer stint.
And the audiences cut across generations, particularly since a whole new wave of younger punters are now Kate Bush fans, thanks to the Netflix Series Stranger Things, which featured, as a kind of theme song, Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill. It has since had more than one billion streams on Spotify.
Is Young cashing in on that? Well, no, it’s just serendipitous, really. Cashing in is not her thing. In fact, when the show was first devised back in 2013 it was put on ice because Kate Bush announced a series of comeback gigs for 2014 in the UK.
“As theatre makers we thought it would be awful if people just thought we were cashing in on that,” Young says. “So, we mothballed it.”
Then it finally resurfaced in 2019, only to suffer some COVID interruptus. But now it is running freely and unfettered.
Young, 49, says the show is interactive and that she has a sixth sense about who in her audience to interact with.
“I have a good grasp of body language,” she says. “You can tell if someone doesn’t want to be interacted with.” So, fear not.
She says one of the most requested songs is the beautiful The Man With the Child in His Eyes, but be assured all the hits are there including Babushka, Running Up That Hill and Wuthering Heights, which ends up being a bit of a singalong.
Young is, she says “having the loveliest time” in Australia right now … with and without Kate Bush.
An Evening Without Kate Bush plays the Adelaide Fringe until March 23, followed by a national tour that includes shows at Brisbane Powerhouse, May 20-21.
adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/an-evening-without-katebush-af2025
For full tour schedule, visit withoutkatebush.com