Kate Bush at the Hammersmith Apollo

Not a review, just love.

Once upon a time there was a girl in a house at the very edge of nowhere. One day this girl walked into a room and something, someone on the TV stopped her in her tracks.

Kate Bush.

And so, in the flicker of an eyelid, there I was, enthralled, enchanted. Tick-tock, the years fly past. On Tuesday I went with Joanna, with Nick, with Amber, to see Kate Bush perform live.

Song and story – and what a storyteller she is. And magic. Yes. Hallucinatory, a long glorious dream of such intensity we’re still shattered two days on

There was a full moon, so huge you felt like you could just reach out and and… or drift through the thin air into zero gravity, ghost the silver.

A woman drowning in a flinty ocean, under a skyful of stars. Find her, find her.

Fish skulls, seahorses with manes of spines, down in the deep. The air swimmy as water.

The sun rises, the sun sets.

A wooden boy, a puppet with no strings, looking for a way in, or a way out, a boy who wants to know what’s behind the door.

A painter, echoing the sky on his canvas.

It’s raining. All my colours are running.

And the birds. Let’s talk about the birds.

Pigeons, blue tits, starlings, woodpeckers, siskins, wild geese, crows.

Gazing towards unseen horizons. The lift and fall of wings.

A silver forest.

Behind the screen, a raggedy shaman dances, becomes shadow, becomes bird.

 

You’re here in my head

Like the sun coming out

Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen

And I don’t know when

But just saying it could even make it happen.

And out we go, into the huge night.

Into the strange dark.

But the sun’s coming out. Yeah, the sun’s coming out.