WOW: A Celebration of the Music and Artistry of Kate
Bush @ Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool
Kate Bush, a singer
famous for her love of privacy and seclusion, only ever toured once in 1979, so
it is understandable that people will pay good money to see musicians attempt
to capture the magic of her records in a live setting. The band behind WOW: A
Celebration of the Music and Artistry of Kate Bush are able to do just that,
with a little help from some special effects and a ‘troupe’ of dancers.
Maaike Breijman, the
Kate of the show, is an outstanding tribute artist whose impressive attention
to detail means that even her hand gestures and facial expressions are spot on,
let alone the dancing prowess and huge vocal range required for the part. Seeing
her act out the story lines of lesser known tracks such as James And The
Cold Gun and The Wedding List (with the help of two male dancers) really
made the unique creativity of Kate’s peculiar brand of pop come alive.
The band, most of whom
are Liverpool-based musicians, managed to make their relatively small ensemble
of guitar, bass, drums, keys and backing vocals sound huge, which ensured that
nothing was lost in the transition from record to stage. Breijman herself
created a beautiful contrast to their full sound in the second half, when she
performed The Man With The Child In His Eyes and a haunting This
Woman’s Work at a grand piano.
The visual aspect of
the show was clearly heavily influenced by Kate’s (often eccentric) music
videos, so Breijman danced with a double bass as a partner for Babooshka,
fought with men in trilbies for Them Heavy People and during Cloudbusting
actually operated a rain-making machine that was pushed onstage. Indeed, the
most spectacular moment of the night came when Breijman, re-enacting the video,
performed Breathing from within a large, transparent sphere. The
apocalyptic lyrics about a foetus in a nuclear fallout zone were intensified
considerably when delivered by a woman lying in a plastic ‘womb’.
Perhaps inevitably,
they finished with the classic Wuthering Heights, but as Wow have
successfully demonstrated, there is much more to Kate Bush’s body of work than
a woman in a white dress singing about Heathcliff.
@AmyMinshull
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