Kate Bush hits the heights again with new live album

A NEW Kate Bush album is always a cause for elation among fans. 

But anticipation for her latest release, Before the Dawn, has been especially high, and with good reason. In the autumn of 2014, the publicity-averse singer staged 22 concerts at London’s Hammersmith Apollo — her first live performances since 1979.

Bush’s website crashed in the stampede for tickets and, with demand exponentially outstripping available seats at the 3,400 capacity venue, many were denied an opportunity to see the enigmatic chanteuse in the flesh. Now they can experience the shows for the first time, via a three-disc live album that’s expected to give Bush her first chart-topper in 30 years.

Bush has always been more than just a singer and the devotion she inspires among believers can verge (in an entirely healthy sense) on obsessive. Thus it comes as no surprise that the Before The Dawn residency transcended simple pop revue. Bush insisted on a single venue for the entire run in order to maximise the theatricality of the experience (alas plans for a live DVD have been shelved). There would be no dismantling of sets or bundling of props into containers. For four weeks, Hammersmith Apollo was Bush’s magical playground: a rabbit-hole through which she could project her most dazzling visions.

This she did with a show that was both breathtaking and deeply cryptic. Rather than merely goose-step through her hits Bush instead re-purposed two of her most intense pieces — the dreamily menacing Ninth Wave suite that comprised the entire second half of 1985’s Hounds Of Love and Sky of Honey, a lush prog-rock odyssey released as part of her 2005 album Ariel.

“I was terrified,” she told BBC 6 Music of the process in a recent interview. “The idea of putting a live show together was something I found interesting. [But] I was terrified of doing life work as a performer again.”

The stage is often where artists reveal their true selves. Before The Dawn, however, merely deepens the enigma. The Ninth Wave presents the fragmented thoughts of a woman making peace with life as she is about to drown; a Sky of Honey may be read as both meditation on the afterlife and the bliss Bush has discovered in her reclusive existence in the British countryside. It’s anyone’s guess — she certainly isn’t going to lead you by the hand.

She’s adamant about retaining creative control of her work, and for live shows or recordings, surrounds herself with trusted collaborators.

Thus we arrive at one of the contradictions that has long sustained Bush. She is both a singular voice and instinctive collaborator and, if Before The Dawn is uniquely her vision, it is also, as she says, a collective vision (the record is credited to the “KT Fellowship”).

“She is such fun and is absolutely grounded in herself,” traditional musician Donal Lunny told me in 2012. He had collaborated with Bush on the traditional air Mná Na hEireann, a highlight of his 1996 album The Common Ground. “She also has an awareness of the Irish songwriting tradition. Working with her was tremendous fun.”

She remains intensely conscious of her Irish heritage. Bush’s mother is from Dungarvan and she grew up suffused in the culture of the old country, with her older brothers John and Paddy playing in trad bands.

“I’m very influenced in my writing by old or traditional folk songs, ballads handed down by new generations of musicians but with the original atmosphere and emotions still maintained,” she once said.

“The sort of music my mother, who’s Irish, would have listened to and danced to, and used to play for me when I was very little. It’s still probably my biggest influence.”

Before the Dawn is out now