Kate Bush Hammersmith Apollo review: still crazy after all these years

It says something about Kate Bush’s standing in the music world that, perhaps uniquely in the history of long-awaited live comebacks, nobody has suggested — or possibly even thought — that her motives might be financial. After all, this is a woman who’s stuck to her artistic guns ever since, aged 19, she defied EMI by insisting that her first single should be the abidingly peculiar ‘Wuthering Heights’.  So, a famous 35 years after her last stage appearance, how on earth could she live up to such a fiercely idiosyncratic career, now regarded with almost universal awe?

(Photo: Ken McKay/Rex)

 Well, at first the answer seemed to be by doing the most unexpected thing of all: serving up a bog-standard rock concert.  The lights dimmed, the cheers resounded and on she came to give us a rather workmanlike performance of well-liked album tracks interspersed with the classic hits ‘Running up that Hill’ and ‘Hounds of Love’.