Hammersmith notes

[Peter Byrne Manchester <PMANCHESTER@ccmail.sunysb.edu>]

       It's exciting to see the Tour of Life making waves again through the 
renewed availability of the "Live at Hammersmith" tape.  That tape was my 
first encounter with KB, and has permanently shaped my response to her work.  
A buddy played it for me starting with "Feel It," and by the time we got half 
way through "Kite" my previous life was over.  I can play that tape in my soul 
nearly frame by frame.  I thought I'd pass along a few observations about the 
performances.

       "James and the Cold Gun" always left me speechless, but for a while at 
first the pantomime over the long rave-up at the end gave me problems.  It 
seemed to extend the obvious far too long, to be self-indulgent.  Then a 
dancer friend pointed out to me the complexity of the choreographical concept. 
In this company we need not belabor the woman's phallic fixation. denial, and 
anger, established so affectingly during the song.  Just note that in the 
finale' the first gunslinger appears stage right.  It takes the woman quite a 
lot of effort to get him down, finish him off.  She reacts with complicated 
emotion, finally lament.  The second enters stage left.  Now she knows what 
she is about; she gets him off more quickly, and then exults.  BUT!  then one 
appears OUT OF HER OWN ORIFICE!  Down HER ramp!  Now it's cosmic, and the end 
is apocalyptic.  She shoots him down, the band, the audience, the universe!  

       During 1985 and 1986, the late lamented USA Network "Nightflight" 
played LaH so often they virtually put it in the public domain--except for the 
fact that they deleted "Wow" to make room for extra ads.  I have always found 
it -interesting- (NB special KB technical concept) that this deletion made 
that performance of "Wow" very special goods indeed.  The same basic 
choreographical concept is executed in the version on "The Single File," but 
the lighting isn't nearly so magical, and that stupid purple tube dress she 
wears there turns the sex-and-gender send-up into slapstick.  On the LaH tape 
Kate is Total Goddess; I cannot think of anywhere else she has appeared so 
catastrophically beautiful.  "Wow" on "The Whole Story" seems almost 
deliberately to deny us the full vision.

       What drove me most crazy for many months after I had obtained my own 
copy of LaH was that I couldn't tell what Kate Bush LOOKED like!  Her 
investment as performer in the persona singing each song was so complete and 
so accomplished that she would look altogether different to me from song to 
song.  How could the neurotically tense singer of "Violin" be the same being 
as the liquid lady of "Moving"?   The street-strut rocker of "Heartbrake" the 
same singer as the guileless schoolgirl of "Feel It"?

       That moment at the top of the ramp at the end of the show that others 
have commented on recently, when Kate sets down the flowers, and, unable to 
get enough of her whole body into her waves to the audience in return for 
their admiring love, leaps into the air in girlish abandon, moves us because 
there, finally, she appears as herself.

       This woman is no small phenomenon.

............................................................................
                                                            Peter Manchester
"C'mon, we all sing!"                            pmanches@sbccmail  (BITNET)
                                   pmanchester@ccmail.sunysb.edu  (INTERNET)