Descending down the stairs of Melbourne’s iconic not-quite-Eiffel-Tower of an Arts Centre and into the Fairfax Studio, I was quite confused as to what An Evening Without Kate Bush would look like. Any other evening, perhaps? I don’t know about you, but I’m not spending any time with Kate Bush herself—but I, like many others attending the performance, had spent many evenings with her music, taking comfort in the complete weirdness of her immaculately produced pop. As the show began, writer and solo performer Sarah-Louise Young taking the stage, it became obvious that the physical presence of the beloved singer wasn’t the point: “she’s not here,” Young points out, “but you, Melbourne, are.”

An Evening Without Kate Bush, co-created by Young and Russell Lucas, is a show that isn’t scared of being a tribute act, taking Bush’s greatest hits and creating a mix between a cabaret, a comedy routine and a musical performance. Young’s voice and stage presence is nothing short of stunning, delivering Bush’s rather elaborate vocal lines with ease and a generous helping of whimsy—even if this show was just a tribute concert, I would have left satisfied. 

It’s the many ways An Evening Without Kate Bush expands on this performance that truly makes it a delight to watch, taking each song and turning them into a demonstration of the love and community that Bush’s music gathers. Affectionately referred to as “fish people”, the “fans of the Bush” that turned up to the performance were endlessly dedicated, many dressing up in the signature red of the Wuthering Heights music video and all of them having interesting stories of their own experience with the music. Very early into the show, Young went around asking for audience members’ favourite songs, and I was happy to hear just how much taste was in the room—I’m always overjoyed to hear love for The Wedding List!

Whilst it did feel like parts of the performance were very tailored towards people who got into Kate Bush through Stranger Things (“she will be reborn,” Young claims, “stranger things have happened”), the mix of songs was really quite varied—for every Running Up That Hill or Wuthering Heights, there was a less-known song like And Dream of Sheep, Peter Gabriel collab Don’t Give Up, or personal favourite James and the Cold Gun. And each of these were infused with their own unique story: a dance through the darkness waving a red light, a school assembly in which a younger Young dons a makeshift wig and sings, a narrated list of YouTube comments showing how much “the Bush” brings people together. And the hits, of course, were also transformed by Young’s quirky theatrics, with Army Dreamers transforming into an interpretive dance where she waved around a pair of glowing eyeballs, and Babooshka sung entirely in Russian.

That being said, the aforementioned James and the Cold Gun, along with some of the other faster songs, unfortunately didn’t land quite as well. For a venue as formal-seeming and wide as the Fairfax Studio, the intimate fringe-festival aesthetic of the show didn’t necessarily translate, leaving Young’s singing feeling like it was being thrown out into an empty space. It would have been nice to have something else happening on stage—or, even better, having the show performed on a slightly smaller stage, avoiding the issue altogether and letting the music reach the audience in the way it needs.

The highlights of the night came when the show embraced its closeness with its audience, Young interacting with the crowd and making the room feel much smaller and more intimate than it was. During Don’t Give Up, Young attempted to recreate the iconic music video, picking a married couple from the audience and having them take the role of the embracing lovers as her voice soared through the room, in a moment that fully exemplified the community that Bush’s music builds. 

Similarly community-focused were Hounds of Love and Cloudbusting, where the audience were arranged into a choir of backing vocals in the latter and encouraged to make barking noises in the former, as well as the uplifting finale that was Wuthering Heights. The result of an entire show’s worth of coaxing out the voice of the audience, Young simply stands back on the stage and presents her microphone towards the crowd, transforming a sea of passionate-yet-shy theatregoers into a cathartic chorus of “wutherers”. 

Even if Kate Bush herself, ever elusive, was nowhere to be seen, her music still seems to draw out entire schools of these excited “fish people”, swimming and dancing to the music in their own weird way. Young moves freely around the stage to Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God), dancing in the kind of way you only dance when you’re at home and slightly out of your mind, flailing her arms and legs in a series of Kate Bush-esque movements (all of which have names, apparently, such as the “champagne whip-crack” or the “body-led-head”). 

The entire point is that, even without the titular Bush, the music becomes yours, yours to take and sing and make fun of and dance around to as you please. And An Evening Without Kate Bush offers a space for like-minded fans to swim with the fish and share the ways in which they connect with this timeless music.