Maaike Breijman performing Kate Bush songs. Epstein Theatre, Liverpool. Photograph by Ian D. Hall.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

When Kate Bush announced her first live shows for 35 years, there were bound to be a lot of people that were going to be left disappointed in being unable to see one of Britain’s perhaps most reclusive, certainly iconic, exceptionally gifted female artists of the last 50 years.

Time has moved on, Kate Bush quite rightly has been thrilling audiences in London but there is a sadness attached that for some it is just far too far to go for one night of treasured bliss but also there is always the nagging doubt that for some it was more of a chance to be seen rather that appreciating what Ms. Bush can do. Tales of people asking for their money back on the basis that Kate Bush didn’t play the big hits or their favourite songs is mind boggling. As good as Kate Bush is, and let’s face it, she is that good, there are just some things that cannot be done as you get older and reaching arguably a certain note in a song to capture the authenticity of four decades ago is one of them.

This is of course where the Dutch singer/performer Maaike Breijman comes into her own.

Inside the Epstein Theatre, as the lights began to lower, the normal dying chatter of pregnant expectation that lingers in the air at any gig, was stilled, silenced as if a veil had been dropped across each person’s mouth. The only sound was one of the slightest and singular breath escaping involuntary as each person dug deep and mentally prepared to hope for the absolute best. No one was to leave the Epstein Theatre disappointed, this was artistry at its most scintillating, of a dream in which no price or a reasonably priced hotel in London could ever achieve. Turn the clocks back 35 years and it would have matched the intensity and almost ground breaking, pain staking approach to the performance that Ms. Bush herself would have applauded.

With the evening split into two acts, Maaike Breijman cajoled, enticed and danced rhythmically to a beat that would send pulses racing, that would make women in the audience aspire to be Maaike and for gentlemen to acknowledge that some moments in time are unobtainable but can be replicated.

With songs such as James and the Cold Gun, Babooshka, WoW, Army Dreamers, This Women’s Work, the superb Running Up That Hill, the exceptional Cloudbusting, Big Sky and of course Wuthering Heights all being given life on stage in front of an appreciative Liverpool audience, Maaike Breijman gave each person in the stalls more than a glimpse into what could have been over the lost decades.

The sheer artistry, the perfection of the spirit that Maaike Breijman brings to the performance is one that at times both ensnares the audience and beguiles the individual. There is something in each aspect of the overall performance in which nothing is left to chance, nothing is overlooked and nothing left out. The hypnotising way in which Ms. Breijman captures the look, the feel of Kate Bush’s music, the interpretation of each softly glided emotion is something in which both fascinates and compels each person to truly believe that the concert is something so magnetic that it could attract even the most iron of dullest wills.

Standing ovations are not just the reserve of the artist who comes back to the arena or the stage after 35 years but also for those who sculpt a new way of looking at the classic, that have the courage to continue the work during the period of abandonment that receive such adornment, and in the case of Maaike Breijman and her band, that honour was every bit as rewarding as it should have been.

Ian D. Hall