Kate Bush announces new London residency... 35 years after her retirement from touring
The announcement was, as is customary with Kate Bush, a complete surprise.
Early yesterday, the 55-year-old, who has lived as a recluse for the past two decades, posted a notice on her website saying she will play 15 shows at the Eventim Apollo Hammersmith in London starting this summer.
Demand for the tickets, which go on sale next week priced between £49 and £135, will be fierce and they are expected to sell out within minutes.
New plans: Kate Bush has announced a London tour - 35 years after she retired
‘I hope you will be able to join us and I look forward to seeing you there,’ Bush wrote.
Her site crashed under the weight of interest.
Some fans cried tears of joy at the unexpected announcement.
Others said they expect the concerts to be ‘the most important of the decade.’ But will they live up to the hype and the hysteria of her fans?
Worn out: Kate said that the reason she hasn't toured is simply because she finds it too tiring
The singer, who became famous for her strangely ethereal voice on the song Wuthering Heights, hasn’t played a tour since 1979.
Indeed that famously ill-fated exercise was the only tour of her entire career.
She told an interviewer it had been a disaster.
‘By
the end I felt a terrific need to retreat as a person, because I felt
that my sexuality – which in a way I hadn’t really had a chance to
explore myself – was being given to the world in a way which I found
impersonal.’
To her horror, she was presented as a sexually desirable plaything in a leotard, when all she wanted was to be taken seriously as an artist.
She developed a fear of appearing on stage and an overwhelming fear of stalkers and kidnappers which has conspired to keep her an almost complete recluse for more than two decades.
Indeed in a rare TV interview in 2011, she confessed she is still haunted by stage fright.
A
friend of the singer said yesterday: ‘She was asked about whether she
might tour again in every single interview she did for the last album in
2011 and maybe that made her consider it.
'The answer was always that she hadn’t closed her mind to it.
'And now she has just decided she wants to.
'It’s not about the money, because she could have done bigger venues, and in any case she is wealthy.’
1979: The leotard years - Kate Bush during her last your
It may also have something to do with the fact her son Bertie is 16 and she feels she can now spend time away from the family home.
It is possible, say friends, that she would like Bertie to see her perform.
Although she turned down an invitation to play at the Olympics closing ceremony in 2012, she has been preparing herself to return to the spotlight by degrees.
When her 2011 album 50 Words For Snow was released, she agreed to interviews to promote the album but only so long as they were conducted over the phone or, bizarrely, via Skype – but with the video link switched off.
Former fame: Kate in a stunning silver outfit performing on stage back in the 1980s
When
she was nominated for a Brit award in February 2011, she stayed at
home, but she astonished everyone in 2012 when she turned up to receive a
South Bank Arts award. She could be seen trembling under the stage
lights.
During her hermit-like absence, many myths had circulated.
She had mental health problems, she was a compulsive over-eater, she was a complete recluse.
But at the South Bank awards audiences saw a charming, if nervous, woman of breath-taking talent.
Worth
an estimated £30million, Bush has a hideaway eyrie in Devon and another
place in the home counties where she lives with her partner Danny
McIntosh, a guitarist she met in 1992.
Bush has always required solitude and quiet to write her curious, elegiac songs.
Her retreat from showbusiness began in the early 1990s and when her son was born in 1998, he became her first priority.
‘She has spent the past 30 years backing away,’ says biographer Graeme Thomson. ‘Her career has been an incremental process of withdrawal.’
Which makes the announcement that the raven-haired singer is ready to leave her Devon retreat all the more intriguing.
Fans who have followed her through the wilderness years will be breathlessly waiting to see if she can still cast the same spell she did all those years ago when she first wore her red dress on the moors of Wuthering Heights.
BEAUTY ANXIOUS ABOUT HER BODY IMAGE
2013: Proud - Receiving her CBE
2014: Flawless - In promo shots for her new show
The leotard-clad waif-like figure of Kate Bush adorned the bedrooms of thousands of teenage boys back in the Seventies and Eighties.
But during the years that she shut herself away, her changing size became a sensitive issue.
Director Jimmy Murakami, who was asked to shoot the video for her single King Of The Mountain in 2005, later told biographer Graeme Thomson: ‘I thought she looked fabulous, but she kept bringing up her weight.’
Pictured receiving her CBE from the Queen at Windsor Castle last year she certainly looked more matronly than she did in her heyday, but her skin was as luminous and her hair as much as a waterfall as it ever was.
Her anxiety about her looks is such that in promotional material released for her upcoming tour, showing Bush floating in water while wearing a life jacket, her jawline and skin appear to have been airbrushed.
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James, Crimora VA USA, 4 hours ago
Anyone who'd dare to insult this truly great lady over her weight is a fool. She's a musical genius, right up there with legends like Joni Mitchell & Van Morrison.