Now that Kate Bush’s run of 22 ambitiously staged, rapturously received London concerts has come to an end, Ms. Bush has written a lavish thank-you note to her fans, and posted it on the web page where she announced the shows – her first since 1979 – in March.
“Now that the shows are over,” Ms. Bush wrote on her Fish People website, “it’s pretty difficult to explain how I feel about it all. It was quite a surreal journey that kept its level of intensity right from the early stages to the end of the very last show. It was also such great fun.”
Ms. Bush, who has performed live infrequently during her 40-year career, had become something of a mystery to her admirers, occasionally releasing poetically charged, musically variegated albums, and leaving her fans to wonder why she avoided the stage. Prominent theories included a fear of flying and a level of perfectionism, evident in her studio recordings, that was unlikely to be satisfied in live performance. In the program book for the shows – which turned out to have been in the planning for 18 months – Ms. Bush wrote that she had been “frightened to commit to pushing the ‘go’ button.”
But the day tickets for her “Before the Dawn” shows went on sale, Ms. Bush sold out the full run, originally 15 concerts, in less than 15 minutes, and added another seven, which sold out as well. And a few days into the series, eight of her albums returned to the British top 40 (with three more charting just below them).
“I was really delighted that the shows were received so positively and so warmly but the really unexpected part of it all was the audiences,” Ms. Bush wrote in her message, which she posted on Tuesday. “One of the main reasons for wanting to perform live again was to have contact with that audience. They took my breath away. Every single night they were so behind us. You could feel their support from the minute we walked on stage. I just never imagined it would be possible to connect with an audience on such a powerful and intimate level; to feel such, well quite frankly, love. It was like this at every single show.”
What she did not say was whether all that love is enough to encourage her to take her lavish show on the road, or even whether she plans to return to the London stage again soon. An email to Ms. Bush’s American manager, posing these questions, was not immediately answered.