Kate Bush and the K Fellowship - Before the Dawn

The Guardian 80

This surprisingly raw audio record of her 2014 multisensory concerts finds Bush in fantastic voice and on dazzling form

A pressing question looms over Kate Bush’s new live release, her first since Live at Hammersmith Odeon in 1994, an album drawn from her then most recent live shows, some 15 years before. That question being: what’s the point? Live albums can only ever hope to give the faintest flavour of the multi-sensory experience of attending a gig, and Bush’s 2014 shows at the Hammersmith Odeon were about as multi-sensory an experience as gigs get. The subsequent album isn’t credited to Bush but the K Fellowship, presumably in recognition of the vast ancillary cast of musicians, technicians and actors required to bring Before the Dawn to fruition – but it obviously doesn’t capture most of the results of their work. You get a vague sense of the crackling excitement in the audience, but despite the plentiful photos in the CD booklet (“Note the parked helicopter at the top,” reads one caption) it can’t give you any real sense of the overwhelming visual spectacle of the shows, which the DVD that was mooted to appear last year, but never did, might have done. There are moments on the album when the audience break into spontaneous applause during a song. If you were there, you find yourself scrolling through your memory to work out what provoked it – not an easy task, given that audiences frequently seemed to be so overwhelmed to be in Bush’s presence that they applauded pretty much everything she did. If you weren’t, it’s doubtless even more frustrating.

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