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Kate Bush doesn’t even want to play stupid Coachella
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 12 April 2017
Kate Bush, just so you know, doesn’t want to play Coachella. She’s never wanted to play Coachella. I don’t know why you keep banging on about Coachella, to be honest.
That Bush might want to play the festival was extrapolated from a recent article in The New Yorker on the ins and outs of how the event is run. Describing a typical negotiation with Coachella founder Paul Tollett, Marc Geiger of booking agency WME said: “I’ll say, ‘Kate Bush!’ and he’ll go, ‘No!’ and we’ll talk through it. I’ll say, ‘She’s never played here, and she just did 30 shows in the UK for the first time since the late 70s. You gotta do it! Have to!’ ‘No! No one is going to understand it'”.
It did seem likely that Geiger was describing a hypothetical situation – Bush having shown little to no interest in touring her 2014 Hammersmith Apollo show ‘Before The Dawn’ – but it’s still interesting that he came up with that example. Perhaps he did put her forward tentatively in 2015, or perhaps he just plucked her name out of thin air while talking to the New Yorker’s journalist. Either way, to give some credit to both Tollett and his audience, a highly theatrical multi-media show like the ‘Before The Dawn’ concert would not work at a festival at all. As has now been noted by Bush’s people too.
In a statement, a spokesperson said yesterday: “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”.
So there you go. Although, after all the publicity that brief portion of a very long article has got, we should probably now start taking bets on whether or not Coachella can coax Bush into headlining next year’s festival. Coachella co-owner AEG runs West London’s Hammersmith Apollo after all, it could just relocate the whole building to the festival’s site in California.
