Calling all ‘fish people’: The ultimate tribute to a reclusive icon
It may not star Kate Bush but an evening without her reaches great heights and includes many of her greatest hits.
To call singer/songwriter, dancer, choreographer and producer Kate Bush the single most influential artist of her generation is not to indulge in either exaggeration or hyperbole.
Bush, now 68, took the world by storm with Wuthering Heights and album The Kick Inside in 1978. She followed it with six extraordinary, genre-defying albums that included Lionheart, Never for Ever, The Dreaming, Hounds of Love, The Sensual World and The Red Shoes.
For many years after the 1993 release of The Red Shoes, the world and her fans impatiently awaited her return. For more than a decade she was entirely absent from public life until, in 2005, she returned with her first double studio record in many years, Aerial.
For an artist renowned for her reclusiveness, she further shocked the world by performing a series of London residency shows at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2014, her first live performances in 35 years, all of which sold out in less than 15 minutes.
Fellow English songstress and performer Sarah-Louise Young remembers the time well. The co-creator of the critically acclaimed cabaret show, An Evening Without Kate Bush, and lifelong Bush aficionado, was on tour in Europe when Bush announced the shows and, much to her eternal chagrin, was unable to break from her tour schedule to attend.
Chatting on the phone from Melbourne, Young is in good spirits when we talk about Kate Bush and her remarkable creative output. She returns to QPAC’s Cremorne Theatre with her show this month and says that Australian audiences are some of the “most real and the most open and accepting” she has performed before anywhere in the world.
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Young says she became aware of the ‘enormous responsibility’ of performing a show about an artist’s life and career
Young is an accomplished actress, writer, director and cabaret performer. She garnered critical acclaim for her body-and-soul performance enacting the life and career of Julie Andrews in Julie Madly Deeply and also for her cabaret show, Cabaret Whore, which saw her take the Adelaide Cabaret Festival by storm in 2010.
Indeed, it was when internationally touring her show about Andrews that Young says she became aware of the “enormous responsibility” of performing a show about an artist’s life and career. With that awareness, she and her co-creator and collaborator Russell Lucas stepped into paying tribute not only to Bush and her esteemed career but also the experiences and reverence of her fans, known as fish people.
“Touring that show (Julie Madly Deeply) we became aware of the responsibility that comes when you’re making a show about somebody who is hugely well loved and that you’re holding in your hands the audience’s experience of that person as an artist,” she says.
“We are both massive Kate Bush fans. Literally my earliest memory is probably dancing around the living room to Wuthering Heights, but we were both like, ‘We couldn’t make a show about Kate Bush, could we?’ She’s so iconic and I would never want to try to impersonate her.
“That would be dreadful! But there was this question of an absence that was there. Because she hadn’t performed for over 30 years and we were wondering how fans are supposed to engage with her if she isn’t there as an artist?”
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It was while performing Julie Madly Deeply in Australia that the idea for the show about Kate Bush, her fans and her music, was really percolating in Young’s consciousness. The following year, in 2014, Bush returned to London stages for a series of entirely unanticipated but critically acclaimed live performances and Young was driven to temporarily shelve performances of the show that she and Russell had created, An Evening Without Kate Bush.
“We felt really conflicted because we were scheduled to do it at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, but it just felt wrong. We didn’t want people to get the wrong idea entirely about the show and think that we were just doing it to cash in on her return and so, quite heavy heartedly, we put it on mothballs. Then, in 2019, we thought perhaps it had been long enough now that we could bring it back out.”
For Young, as both a performer and a Bush fan, an important part of the impetus behind the show has been successfully exploring how it is that we, as human beings, can experience music as part of a communal event.
Given Bush’s sporadic career as a live performer and the long periods of time that have elapsed between her live shows, the legacy created by the enduring nature of her studio recordings – as well as word-of-mouth accounts of her live shows and officially released recordings – have proven central to the success of the show.
Those recordings include select live performances such as Before The Dawn, which was released in 2016 and marked only the second official live recording release since Live at Hammersmith Odeon in 1994.
Still, choosing which songs from Bush’s extensive oeuvre to include in the show proved a near insurmountable challenge for both Young and Russell. She candidly admits to feeling “massively out of my depth and completely overwhelmed when it came to song selection”. In the end, however, they narrowed the field and she says that she remains pleased with the song selections that they made.
“My God,” she says. “It was hard. It was so hard. We spent months. Russell and I had these big pieces of paper, with all the songs written on them, and there’s over 100, and we kept rearranging them.
“We did a poll on Facebook, amongst our friends, asking them which songs they would choose, which songs would they never forgive us for not including. In the end, it kind of came down to finding a perfect mix of those songs, the songs we love, and then the kind of wild card inclusions that would be fun.
“We did end up with songs that we desperately wanted to include but then, in the end, we couldn’t, so it was a really rough journey to get to a place of what we included. We hope we brought something for everyone to the table.
“We hope that everyone walks away happy with something they have heard. It’s ultimately a show for the fans and we count ourselves among them, so the ultimate aim was really always for a deeper sense of connection and understanding that was, sort of, both by and through Kate’s music.”
An Evening Without Kate Bush, Cremorne Theatre, QPAC, October 21 to 24.
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