For most of three decades the settled assumption among people who cared about this music was that they would never see any of it performed. The Tour of Life had ended in May 1979. There had been no tour since, no festival appearance, essentially nothing, and the reasons offered over the years were various and mostly speculative. It had become one of the fixed facts of British music, like the weather.
The announcement came in March 2014 and the tickets went on sale a week later. They were gone in something close to a quarter of an hour. Additional nights were added, taking the run to twenty two, and even then the demand was not close to met.
The same building
The venue was the Apollo in Hammersmith, west London, which under a previous name is where the 1979 tour had finished. That was not an accident and the audience understood it immediately. A theatre of that size, somewhere around three and a half thousand seats, is small for an artist of this stature, and choosing it meant the run could only ever serve a fraction of the people who wanted to come.
It also meant the thing could be staged properly. Everything about the production, which ran to something over three hours, depended on the audience being close enough to follow a narrative, and that is not available in an arena.
Three acts, and the middle one is the reason
- The opening setAround forty minutes of songs performed conventionally, with a band and singers, drawing on material from across the catalogue. Deliberately reassuring, and deliberately short.
- The Ninth WaveThe second side of Hounds of Love, staged in full, with film, a rescue helicopter, actors, and a set that put a domestic interior on stage while its occupant was lost at sea. Roughly an hour, and the centre of the whole enterprise.
- A Sky of HoneyThe second disc of the 2005 album Aerial, performed as a continuous piece: one summer day from afternoon light to the following dawn, with birdsong, a painter, and a wooden artist’s figure brought to life.
Putting the two long suites at the heart of the evening was the boldest decision in the production. A performer returning after thirty five years has every commercial incentive to play the hits and go home. Instead the bulk of the running time went to two extended narrative works, one of them almost entirely unfamiliar to the general audience, and the room stayed with it.
If you want to understand why The Ninth Wave could carry an hour of staged theatre, our essay on the album goes through the sequence part by part. It was written as a piece of drama in 1985 and simply waited twenty nine years for a stage.
The request about phones
Before the run began she asked audiences not to photograph or film, and to experience the show without screens between themselves and the stage. It was a request rather than a rule and there was no confiscation at the doors.
It was, by every account we have heard and read, honoured almost completely. In 2014 that was remarkable and it is more remarkable now. Several people who were there have described that shared decision by three and a half thousand strangers as the thing they remember most vividly about the evening, ahead of any individual moment in the performance.
There is a lesson in it for anybody who runs events, which is why we keep coming back to it. Asking an audience for something, explaining why, and trusting them works far better than policing them. We say much the same thing rather less grandly in our guide to starting a gathering, where the equivalent request is simply not talking over the second side.
What it did to the charts, and to us
In the weeks around the residency her back catalogue returned in force, with eight of her albums in the UK top forty at the same time, a first for a female artist in this country. Records that had been out of the conversation for years were suddenly being bought by people who had just seen material from them staged.
The effect on small gatherings was immediate and lasted about two years. Attendance rose, the average age of a room fell, and a lot of the new arrivals came in through A Sky of Honey, which very few casual listeners had previously heard at all. It was the first of two moments in the last decade when this fandom suddenly acquired a large number of new people, the second being the streaming revival of 2022 discussed in the Hounds of Love essay.
The recording, and whether it substitutes
A live album of the residency was released in 2016, across three discs, taken from the run. It is a genuine document and worth having, particularly for the staged version of The Ninth Wave, which differs from the studio sequence in ways that reward attention.
What it cannot do is carry the visual half, and this was a production in which a considerable amount of the meaning was on stage rather than in the sound. No film of the residency has been released. That absence is deliberate, consistent with a career’s worth of decisions about when and how the work is seen, and it means the show survives mainly as an audio recording and as several thousand people’s accounts of it.
How to programme it at a gathering
The live album is difficult to play whole to a room, because three discs is more than any evening can absorb. What works is to take the staged Ninth Wave on its own, introduce it as a piece of theatre rather than as a live version of a familiar record, and let people who know the 1985 album hear how much was rebuilt for the stage.
Follow it with a conversation rather than more music. In our experience this is the single most reliable discussion starter in the whole catalogue, because half the room was there and the other half was not, and both halves want to talk about it.