Kate Bush opens up her five-week stint at the Eventim Apollo theatre in London on Tuesday, with her first live performances in 35 years. The whole run of 88,000 tickets sold out in 15 minutes.
From the moment she burst onto the scene as a teenager in the late 1970s, she has been an enigmatic figure. She only toured once and she took long breaks away from recording during the 1990s and early 2000s to be a mom but she's been busy again over the past five years, releasing new material and now offering to take to the stage once more, even if it's not a tour.
Jian Ghomesi, the host of CBC Radio's Q, who will be visiting Prince George next month for a speaking engagement at Vanier Hall (get your tickets now at The Citizen!) interviewed Bush in 2011 and the child of all great music made in the early 1980s could barely contain his excitement talking to her for half an hour (check it out at http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2011/11/22/kate-bush-on-q/).
In 1985, she released her best album and one of the greatest discs of the 1980s, Hounds of Love, which featured her most commercially successful and accessible material on side one (Running Up That Hill, Hounds of Love, Big Sky, Cloudbusting) and a seven-song half-concept album called The Ninth Wave on side two. About 18 months later, her record company put out a greatest hits package unfortunately and inaccurately called The Whole Story, which featured a new song called Experiment IV.
While the video for Cloudbusting is considered a high-water mark for music videos, with Kate playing a young boy and Donald Sutherland playing her genius scientist father, Experiment IV, both the song and the video, capture the increased militaristic paranoia under Margaret Thatcher of the 1980s in the UK.
A starring role in the video goes to a young British actor who went on first to great comedic fame in his own country and then dramatic fame on American TV but without his accent. He also got to play Stuart Little's dad in two live-action movies. That's Hugh Laurie playing one of the scientists developing "a sound that could kill someone from a distance."
Hopefully Bush includes Experiment IV on her set list and hopefully Ghomesi talks about his interview with this music legend during his visit here. To check out Experiment IV (and a very young Hugh Laurie), go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTUcoR8_pyE.
