1979 Kate Bush UK tour
As we started to get into rehearsals, it was decided to hire a venue for dress rehearsals and full production rehearsals. I went to a number of venues to check out their availability and we ended up hiring the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park for a couple of weeks.
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A photo of Gungi to the left, not on this particular tour but from coming down to Australia when I was there with Duran Duran. Anyway, I tell the story of the headset on an audio clip here. I will add one from Gungi himself at some point. He had come with ML Executives sound system, and we also had another Scot come on board because of Gungi, Cameron Crosby. Cameron was the technical whizz kid of the tour, not only did we have to create a microphone that Kate could use whilst dancing, but it had to be wireless, which was also a new technology in 1979. I remember Cameron having some real problems in soundcheck, as the radio microphone systems picked up taxi signals as cabs went past the venues.
Billy Duffield was my friend. I saw him and his girlfriend socially as well working with him on previous tours. I tell this whole sad story as it happened on this audio clip but it's important to me that he's remembered for giving the whole show a massive boost of confidence as we went through the dress rehearsals at the Rainbow. Billy was not one of the original crew hired for the tour, it was deemed necessary to bring in a lighting desk operator at the very last moment with 2 or 3 days of rehearsals left before the first show. I suggested Billy be called and he was available, and between tours. He had worked last year with me on Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel and the band Sailor, and he was the LD for Peter Gabriel as well.
So he came in and got to grips with the show and instantly made the light show snappier and more dramatic. He had amazing reactions and could pull and push a fader in an instant. The management team were delighted and as I said, as we left for Poole Arts centre everyone was very excited.
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We had decided before the tour began to have a spare room for "Mr Smith" at every hotel to meet up and chill out in after the shows. It was a communal room, band and crew alike just hanging out, having a beer and a smoke.
It was in this room at the hotel in Bournemouth after the Poole show that I got the awful phone call from Nick Levitt that there had been an accident, that Billy had fallen through a hole in the audience seating and landed on his head 15 feet below. I got down to the venue, walked through the scene and then went straight to the hospital. I spent the rest of the night there trying to locate the phone number of his parents, the only persons the hospital were interested in talking to.....
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Well Edinburgh was just a little insane. The mess we made of Mr Smith's room cost a packet and I tell Paul the story in the audio clip above. It's not just rock and roll bands that get a little out of hand you know!!!
I must also tell the short story of our first night at the London Palladium. Kate had the 'star' dressing room and somehow, I just don't know how, the TV got stoved in, broken, it was an accident. Well, the staff there thought we were hooligans for some reason and very nearly banned Kate from the room for the rest of our stay. We begged and pleaded with them and it was forgotten about the next day, thank God.
Well, to play Oxford was truly amazing for me, my home town and I got to invite my mother to the show and have her meet Kate at the hotel for drinks after the show. It hasn't been often that I got to play in Oxford, I think was my second or third time, as in 1978 we played the Oxford Polytechnic with The Cars. Anyway we stayed there overnight at a little 3-star hotel called the Linton Lodge off of the Banbury Road.
In the morning as it wasn't so far to Southampton, we took a small detour and went 2 miles up the road to my favorite pub, The Trout in Wolvercote. As a schoolboy I used to work there in the summer holidays, a beautiful place right next to the river. It's still going strong. Anyway we stopped there for a pint of beer before legging it down to Southampton for the next show.
