Baby Bushka - Something Better Than Good
When Baby Bushka play the final date of their final tour in Edinburgh this week, it will likely be an emotional occasion. This will be as much the case for the eight young American women behind this Kate Bush inspired extravaganza as it will for those of us who saw them when they first appeared here.
That was back in 2018, when they debuted at the Mash House as part of their first self-promoted UK tour. I’m not sure how I got wind of them, but they sounded much more interesting than some cabaret tribute act. ‘The Kate Bush experience of your dreams is finally here’ said the publicity material boldly.
Like an old school punk band, Baby Bushka had nicknames. Bad Bush. Heavy Bush. Fancy Bush. Hella Bush. Mighty Bush. Buffalo Bush. Dark Bush. Latterly there was Sugar Bush, Midnight Bush and Little Bush too. This multi talented amalgam had been founded and led from the start by the mistress of ceremonies that is Boss Bush, better known to her parents as Natasha Kozaily,
Watching the trailer for the show, it was clear that Baby Bushka was much more than a covers band. Coming straight outta San Diego, they not only sang, played and acted out elaborately choreographed routines to each song that made them more akin to a theatre troupe. As their tongue in cheek nicknames suggested, they were also a very tuneful girl gang.
I’d seen the real Kate Bush at Hammersmith Apollo in 2014 as part of her Before the Dawn show, when she played her first full live concerts for thirty-five years, wowing those who managed to snag a ticket across a sold out twenty-two-night run.
It was a wonderful experience, watching this elder stateswoman of leftfield pop captivate a devoted audience by bringing to life a never before performed back catalogue rewinding as far as Hounds of Love (1985). This included a fully theatricalised rendition of The Ninth Wave, Hounds of Love’s second side featuring a narrative about a woman who loses herself in the sea. This part of the show ended with ‘The Morning Fog’, the album closer and a favourite of mine, as Bush comes back to life, embracing the things and the people who matter.
Credited as director of Before the Dawn was Adrian Noble, the theatre director who between 1990 and 2003 had been artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Bush was good at bringing in the best of a certain type of artist as collaborators. She’s always done similar on her records, be it drafting in classical guitarist John Williams on ‘The Morning Fog’, or else enlisting Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour on ‘Love and Anger’ and ‘Rocket’s Tail’, both on The Sensual World (1989). Gilmour had funded Bush’s first professionally recorded demo that got her signed way back when, so fair enough.
Noble fitted in with this sense of excellence Bush brought to her work, and overall his staging worked a treat. For ‘The Morning Fog’, this included a very Shakespearian reconciliation scene that could have been choreographed by numbers for any one of the bard’s set text rom-coms. As much as such a classical English staging fitted, I remember thinking at the time Bush should maybe have been bolder. Imagine if she’d brought in Ivo van Hove, the Dutch theatrical auteur with a refreshingly European attitude to the classics, where nothing is sacred. That would have really shaken things up.
I could have sworn Bush encored with a solo piano rendition of ‘Moments of Pleasure’, The Red Shoes’ deeply personal hymn to everyday epiphanies that have stayed with Bush, which ends with namechecks to some of those no longer around. I was wrong. Checking set lists online, it was actually ‘Among Angels’, from 50 Words for Snow (2011) that she played. This was followed, as it had to be, by a euphoric ‘Cloudbusting’, which I do remember, because everyone was on their feet by then. Funny how memory works, conjuring up little imagined moments of its own.
Incidentally, if you want to know the full back-story to Kate Bush and her exquisite, unique and wilfully individual artistry, let me point you towards Under the Ivy, Graeme Thomson’s recently updated and now even more comprehensive biography of Bush. First published in 2010, my mates Steve and Jetta gifted me a copy for my birthday the year of the Before the Dawn shows. It was the perfect pre show primer.
Back at the Mash House, beyond the publicity, I pondered if Baby Bushka could top the real thing? Where Bush’s live shows understandably skipped her first four albums in all their kooky glory entirely - no ‘Wuthering Heights’, no ‘Babooshka’, no ‘The Man with the Child in his Eyes’ - Baby Bushka were happy to bask in her formative years and plunder her entire canon.
Where Bush brought in RSC alumni, Baby Bushka went for a full on production of their own. Rather than play copycat karaoke versions of the hits, Baby Bushka danced, threw shapes and created little abstract scenarios that brought Bush’s videos to glorious life and took them further. In Baby Bushka’s hands and voices, for instance, ‘This Woman’s Work’ was reinvented as an epic soul ballad. It sounded enormous.
Shortly after that first tour, a wonderful twenty-minute tour diary video appeared on the Baby Bushka website. Cut and pasted from phone footage taken at work, rest and play in every city they played in the UK and Ireland, the film features snippets of concert footage interspersed with little comic snapshots of life on the road.
Of course, it’s all in the editing, but in its bite-size memoir of eight young women seeing the world, having the time of their lives and loving what they do, it captured some of those little unguarded moments of friendship and shared experience that can’t be planned. The laughter, the singing, the drinking, and the sheer in-the-moment joy of new experience is there, as is the not knowing or thinking about whatever may or may not happen next.
In the years since, and with everything that has happened, the film has become a precious document of times past to cherish, both for the band members in the film, and for those of us who watched it, and who got a glimpse of the lives beyond what happened on stage. These are Baby Bushka’s very own moments of pleasure.
There was another video of Baby Bushka that appeared on YouTube after the first tour that was filmed in Edinburgh. Not at the Mash House gig itself, but later, when everything was packed up and the Bushes got to let their hair down. They had managed to find themselves in the Royal Oak, the legendary folk pub not far from the Mash House on Infirmary Street.
Infirmary Street, incidentally, runs parallel with Drummond Street. It was here that flamboyant mime artiste Lindsay Kemp lived for a short period in a basement flat with David Bowie. And it was Kemp, remember, who briefly taught Bush which shapes to throw. You can see his influence all over Bush’s early videos. I’d babbled on about this piece of Edinburgh trivia to one of Baby Bushka at the merch stall after the show, but I’m not sure I made any sense. Whatever, they found themselves in the Royal Oak, anyway.
In the YouTube video, the Bushes are huddled around Dark Bush at the piano, with Bad Bush and Mighty Bush squeezed into the seats playing fiddle and acoustic guitar. A packed room of old folkies, barflies and tourists in search of the real Edinburgh experience look on as these remarkable young women light up the room with a soaring version of ‘Running Up That Hill’. Oh, to have been in that room.
Baby Bushka made an album, which they released themselves to coincide with what was supposed to be their second UK tour in 2020. Covid had other plans, alas, and the world closed down. Then tragedy happened, and everything changed.
In June 2020, Nina Leilani Deering, aka Dark Bush, who played piano at the Royal Oak, and who transformed ‘This Woman’s Work’ so gigantically at the Mash House, was killed in a car accident. There is footage on the band’s website of them playing ‘This Woman’s Work’ at a memorial service for Deering. It is a beautiful and brave way to honour their friend, as much as it must have been agony to put themselves through the experience.
Deering’s bandmates were still in mourning when the world opened up again and they eventually made it back to Edinburgh in 2022. A segment of the new show at the Voodoo Rooms featured a tribute to Deering across several songs that made up an elaborate ceremonial. It was a deeply personal purging for the group. Coming out of lockdown, with the world still reeling from so many losses, the ritual seemed to have a resonance that chimed with the times.
And now Baby Bushka are back again to say goodbye, not just to Dark Bush, but to their audience too in one last homage to the unique artist who changed their lives.
For Boss Bush, Bad Bush, Heavy Bush, Fancy Bush and Hella Bush, for Mighty Bush and Buffalo Bush, for Sugar Bush, Midnight Bush and Little Bush too, and for the memory of Dark Bush, Baby Bushka has been a rites of passage. The experience will bond them forever, the way summer camp might, or how university possibly still does.
I imagine Baby Bushka stepping out into the world like the characters in Mary McCarthy’s 1963 best selling novel, The Group, filmed three years later by Sidney Lumet, and which charts the fortunes of a group of independently minded female graduates. Like them, the eight Bushes will go their separate ways and each do their own thing, on their individual pathway to whatever they do next. They will go places, surprise themselves, and may end up somewhere else entirely en route to their various successes. But whatever they do, they will always have the moments of pleasure and heartbreak they made together as Baby Bushka.
You can still hear them on that record they made, which features Dark Bush’s mighty vocal on ‘This Woman’s Work’. And you can still watch them on their website, where they’ve made a series of little films for their Patreon, in which each Bush talks candidly about their personal Baby Bushka experience as part of their collective goodbye.
Before they’re gone forever, almost six years to the day they arrived here, Baby Bushka have two final shows to play in Glasgow and Edinburgh this week. Whatever comes next, you know that something better than good is about to happen.
Stereo, Glasgow, Monday October 7th - Tickets - https://432presents.seetickets.com/event/baby-bushka/stereo/2995507 ;
Summerhall, Edinburgh, Tuesday October 8th - Tickets - https://www.summerhall.co.uk/sh-event/baby-bushka/
All things Baby Bushka can be found at https://www.ilovebabybushka.com/#:~:text=BABY%20BUSHKA.%20The%20Kate%20Bush%20experience%20of%20your%20dreams%20is
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