APRIL 7, 1979 – Kate Bush takes to the stage of Southampton’s Gaumont theatre for the sixth night of her first ever UK and European tour.
As waves of whale song wash over the audience, a shimmering gauze curtain flutters aside to reveal a stage bathed in aquamarine light – and, starkly silhouetted at the centre, a tiny figure bending, gyrating and waving her arms as only a teenage singing sensation fresh out of dance and mime classes knows how.
She launches into the first number not with a rabble-rousing “How yer doing, Southampton?” or “Who’s in the mood for some Emily Bronte?!” but with an unearthly keening more at home in an Arabian Nights temple than a 1970s rock tour.
It’s heady and beguiling, and the audience is spellbound. Thirty-four years later, we (I wasn’t there, but frequently imagine I was) are patiently, if pointlessly, awaiting the follow-up tour.
And now here to console us comes Maaike Breijman, otherwise known as the Dutch Kate Bush, whirling through 20 of Bush’s best songs in a tribute show that works splendidly as a reminder of just what a mightly talent she is.
Obviously we know it’s not the real thing – my eyeballs would still be spinning, early KB-style, if it had been – but, taken on its own terms, it’s a fun night out with a few genuinely impressive moments.
With its multiple props, hasty costume changes and camply capering dancers, it occasionally verges on parody – and Breijman looks more than sounds like her musical heroine.
But she makes an impressive drama of Breathing, pleading for air from inside a collapsing womb-like ball while a nuclear mushroom blossoms behind her, and charmingly recreates the Cloudbusting video, even down to its rain-making contraption (but sadly not a guest appearance by Donald Sutherland).
The Wuthering Heights encore was predictably well-received, but the best moment for me was also the simplest – Breijman caressing the ivories of her grand piano, guitarist close at hand, on the quiet, but somehow urgent, and just downright lovely, And Dream of Sheep.
“Wow” indeed.
