Lest you have it twisted that the only thing keeping the elusive genius Kate Bush from performing the first U.S. show of her 40-year career was the okay of the guy in charge of Coachella, the singer-songwriter’s spokesperson has issued a corrective statement.
It comes in response to an anecdote shared in a recent New Yorker profile of Goldenvoice C.E.O Paul Tollett, whose company stages Coachella. In the piece, William Morris Agency’s Marc Geiger describes pitching Bush for the festival only to be shot down by Tollett, who said of her act, “No! No one is going to understand it.”
Whether he has a point or not (would 19-year-olds on molly get Kate Bush?) is immaterial as certainly a lot of the aggregated press coverage of the piece made it sound like Bush already had her puppets and bird costumes packed, only to realize that this woman’s work had been cancelled by that buffoonish CEO.
According to Pitchfork, though, Bush’s spokesperson issued a statement to clear things up. It reads:
It was never Kate’s intention to play any more shows than she did in London. The show was conceived for a very specific type of venue. No discussions were ever had with Kate about playing any festival, including Coachella.
This refers to Before the Dawn, a 22-show residency Bush played at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2014 that was recently captured on a 3-disc live album. That recording is as close to experiencing Kate Bush live as most of the world was going to get. She wasn’t going to play Coachella—it’s highly unlikely she’d ever make it that easy for us to see her, for starters.