As great as it would have been to watch her first-ever U.S. live performance from the air-conditioned comfort of your own private safari tent, turns out that the possibility of Kate Bush playing Coachella was never more than an eccentric English gleam in Goldenvoice CEO Paul Tollett‘s eye. Or more of an eccentric English exaggeration: As it turns out, the matter was never under discussion until a recent New Yorker feature on the festival quoted booking agent Marc Gieger as follows.
I’ll say, ‘Kate Bush!’ And [Tollett will] go, ‘No!,’ and we’ll talk through it. I’ll say, ‘She’s never played here, and she just did thirty shows in the U.K. for the first time since the late seventies. You gotta do it! Have to!’ ‘No! No one is going to understand it.’
Since then, Bush’s reps have since released a statement saying, in part, “It was never Kate’s intention to play any more shows than she did in London,” referring to her 22-show run back in 2014. “No discussions were ever had with Kate about playing any festival, including Coachella,” the statement adds, meaning that Gieger was just using Kate Bush as a rhetorical example of a high-profile, difficult-to-book act that Tollett would, hypothetically, have turned down if it was hypothetically offered to him. You know, the old “I wouldn’t have gone to her party if she had asked me” routine.