Happy Birthday, Kate Bush!

Today is Kate Bush's 57th birthday.

Hope she has a lovely day with her family and friends.

 

Where do we line up for the traditional birthday spankings?...

Happy Birthday Kate!!!

 

Saw it in the paper today. Happy Birthday, Kate.

Doesn't seem 5 minutes since she was debuting 'Wuthering Heights' on Top Of The Pops...

 

Gigwise had a cool birthday bit:

Happy Birthday Kate Bush: 15 artists we wouldn't have without her

 

Happy Birthday, would love to come to the party and hopefully there will be a live blu-ray of last years shows in the goody bags for the party goers.

 

One of my all time favorite artists. I actually priced out flights to England to see if I could catch one of her recent live shows. Alas, it was not to be.

 

Happy birthday to the artist I rediscovered this year (and bought the whole cataloge by), Kate Bush.

 

I don't know a lot of these acts, but how do you make such a list without Tori Amos? I'd put Joanna Newsom in there as well.

 

A true legend. Happy Birthday, Kate!

 

My wife, who I met because she is also a huge Kate fan, managed to go to the September 2nd Before the Dawn show. I worked by butt off all last summer to make it happen and don't regret the expense. I've told the story here before, but it is so freaking cool that it's worth repeating:

I was at my apartment in Kansas City, when my wife called me from our home in Chicago waking me up with the news that Hell had frozen over and that Kate was going to play some shows. We both had signed up with KateBush.com and got the e-mail with the presale code. It wasn't clear from the instructions if you'd have to present the original credit card at the venue, so my brother had to rush around to find a place to wire money onto my wife's debit card just before the presale began. Then the sale opened, but the place to enter the code never appeared! So it was a good ten minutes into the pre-sale before I found out that you had to click on the link in the e-mail - by that time, we were more limited in the dates available, but we wound up with seats in the 26th row (which later became the 20th row due to stage expansion) on the floor on September 2nd. Still, excellent tickets - we would have gone if we'd have to have hung by our fingernails from the rafters.

After that, it was the long wait for the show. I worked to raise money for the plane and hotel, managing to get a decent fare and interesting places to stay. My wife, meanwhile, spent a huge amount of time on a Facebook group. Because the ticket sales were designed to minimize scalping, nobody could buy more than 4 tickets on one credit card, their name was on the ticket and they had to present ID to get into the venue. But inevitably, some people bought tickets for friends who weren't able to go. Vickie spent her time connecting people who had extra tickets with people who needed them. She wanted to make sure couples (like us) both got in.

So, here we were with very good seats. But it turns out that a friend of ours, a Scot named Andy, had three extra tickets. His friends couldn't go, and did we want to come with him?

His tickets were in the sixth row.

We bought Andy's extra tickets and contacted our friend Richard who wanted to come and only needed one. He had been traveling around the world and was in Bali at the moment.

One of our original tickets went to one of Vickie's old friends, Genesis photographer Armando Gallo. We hadn't seen Armando since 1984. The other one went to another Italian photographer, Guido Harari, who had done some beautiful shots of Kate. Neither had managed to get tickets and we were overjoyed to get two wonderful people in. Here's Armando, Vickie and Guido at The Swan, a pub near the Hammersmith Apollo:



I'm 90% sure the show at Snap gallery featuring the work of Guido and Gered Mankowitz was a direct result of getting Guido a ticket.

We saw the show from the 6th row, with Kate maybe 2o feet from us during much of the first half of the show, and right next to the aisle that she was carried up and marched back down.

Unknown to us, in the same row, was the writer of the best Kate Bush biography Under the Ivy. A third edition was recently published, and the introduction is about him meeting a fan who had come halfway around the world - from Bali - for the show.

So many amazing things happened around and due to this show.

Thanks, Kate. Happy Birthday.

 

Yes, happy birthday to Kate. I hope you had a lovely day. I love every album you made and hope for some to come.

 

Happy Birthday, Kate. I hadn't planned on going and when I found out I could be in London, there were virtually no tickets on the resale market and they cost a fortune. Kept checking and a miracle - ticket drop at face value, around 15 rows back. Unfortunately, I was a bit tired from the travel, but I still had a great time.

But, I keep wondering, is that it? Will we get an opportunity to see her again?

 

Happy Birthday Kate! One of my favourite artists. Keep doing what you're doing girl!

 

She's still "Running Up That Hill", looking for the "Man With The Child In His Eyes".

 

Lovely story. Thank's for sharing it.

 

Here's to Kate, the one and only.

 

I hope it doesn't come across as bragging - most of the things were just the result of incredible luck. But the topper, the thing that brought it all together left a smile on my face for days, months after the event, was hearing Graeme Thomson being interviewed on the BBC about the new edition of Under the Ivy, and the first thing Tony Gillham asked was:

You've got to tell us the story that's right at the start of the book about this guy whose flown thousands of miles just to be at one of those concerts.

It was full of people like that. It was an extraordinary experience being there. The atmosphere was unlike...anything I've encountered before, very kind on edge and nervous and slightly hysterical. And yet this guy arrived really near the start of the show, just before it began. And he shook hands with... he was hugging people in our row, and shaking hands, and incredibly up...and then I noticed that he fell asleep actually halfway through! Which I thought was slightly bizarre for someone whose...so I grabbed him at the end, and then he disappeared for a bit as well, then he was crying at other parts, and punching the air at parts and singing along, and I grabbed him at the end, and he'd come all the way from Bali, from the other side of the world really. He was an American, and his life...his life was completely up in the air. All his stuff was in storage, he had no where to stay in London, he'd stayed out the night before. He was an old enough guy, he wasn't in his teens, probably in his 50s or 60s. And this seems to exemplify to me this incredible devotion and the kind of mania that surrounded those shows, that was just incredible amount of attention and excitement around her coming back to the stage. And this very nice man, who seemed to kind of exemplify how extraordinary it all was really. We shook hands and off he went, and I think he made a few friends that night and he seemed to have a great time.

I wish I had met Graeme as I really enjoyed Under the Ivy, and both Vickie and I are so tickled that we helped supply him with the introduction of his book.

 

Happy B-Day Kate its nice to see a positive B-Day thread here lol

 

The power of music is truly incredible, and it just goes to show there's something truly special about Kate's music.

 

Everything came together. I wish more people had been able to experience what we did, but it was an intimate venue by an artist would could have filled the O2.

 

Happy birthday Kate .
How about reversing tradition and giving your multitude of loyal fans the gift of news. October 1st 2014 will never be a fading memory but it would be wonderful to relive that glorious theatrical experience on a nightly basis.

 

She's got a lot to answer for!!

 

Nice to see this thread bumped for Kate's 58th.

Still no DVD or BluRay of Before the Dawn.

It occurs to me that Kate has the same sense of time as an immortal Elf princess.

 

Happy Birthday, Kate.