Among Angels
Before The Dawn – The K Fellowship finds Kate Bush still King of the music mountain.
The release of any recorded material by Kate Bush has become such an event of mythical wonder that even when unnecessary re-workings of album tracks in the form of Directors Cut disappointed in 2011; fans and critics alike spoke positively of the collection with a respectful if slightly distant warmth. Bush has managed to sustain such a loyal support base from both fans and critics alike she can do no wrong, even when she perhaps might. Fortunate then that a good 99% of this latest live release is near perfection.
Before The Dawn is a full audio record of Bush’s now legendary 22 shows at The Hammersmith Apollo in Autumn 2014, with the addition of Never Be Mine (in its Director’s Cut reworking) apparently recorded in late rehearsals and then dropped from the set list at the eleventh hour: “the show would have been too too long” she recently explained in a BBC interview. Split into three acts, the first is a straight up gig running between some of her mammoth career staples, Hounds of Love, Running Up That Hill, King of the Mountain and some of her more anthemic album tracks from the later part of her career including a spectacular opener in Lily from The Red Shoes and again Director’s Cut. Concept albums The Ninth Wave from Hounds of Love, and A Sky of Honey; the second part of 2005’s double album Ariel make up the remainder and majority of what is on offer here.
On stage both these suites were directed by former RSC stalwart Adrian Noble and were as theatrical in performance as expected. The recordings here offer the perfect reminder of those live shows (the promised DVD is nowhere to be seen), and for those whose hours online to Ticketmaster were in vain, this collection is a worthy alternative to what might have been.
In short this is the kind of live album that littered the charts in the 70s, the decade that gave us the slightly more shrill Kate almost forty years ago, it stands up as a work on its own. The production is magnificent and the crowd suitably distant but at the centre of every track, a more mature and impeccable sounding Kate.
We can be in little doubt that Queen of the studio and perfectionist Madame Bush has spent the past two years trawling through the hours and hours of recordings, including her rehearsals, and what is offered here is the best of the best rather than one enchanted evening from the 2014 dates, and the spoken word segments which linked the theatrical elements of both The Ninth Wave and A Sky of Honey are a fraction clumsy out of context. These are the 1% irritations that will no doubt in time evaporate. Largely, with every listen the overwhelming response will be ‘Wow. Wow. Wow.
Unbelievable’. *****