It all started so normally. Kate Bush, barefoot and in black, sang into a microphone with a seven-piece band behind her. After her second song, Hounds of Love, she declared “I need a drink of water” and swigged from a bottle at the side of the stage.
This could have been any gig almost anywhere. Perhaps Bush had decided to abandon the lavish theatricals of her one and only tour 35 years earlier in favour of something more conventional. But then, six songs in, everything changed.
There was even a bizarre mini-play – with Bush’s teenage son Bertie as one of the characters – about cooking sausages. And in the midst of it all Bush herself was carried off by what can only be described as fish skeleton creatures. This was the stuff of nightmares. Even lovers of Kate Bush’s music – and the Hammersmith Apollo was packed with them – were not expecting something so off the chart.
