A FLASH of white lights up the blue, and Kate Bush leads her five backing vocalists, who include her 16-year-old son Bertie, on to the stage in a jaunty conga as her seven-piece band kick into Lily, from Bush's 1993 album The Red Shoes.
Twelve nights into her 22-night marathon, it's a playful opening to Bush's live show, her first performances since her three-date stint in 1979 at the same Hammersmith Apollo venue in west London.
Those concerts all of 35 years ago set a new standard for mixing genres on a rock stage, and her latest "production" has rightly generated screeds of praise for its inherent theatricality.
Over the course of three acts, a delighted Bush returns to her pub-band roots in the first six numbers of sophisticated funk and a couple of hits punctuated by showbizzy "I really hope you enjoy this" cooings.
This is followed by two suites, firstly, The Ninth Wave from her much-adored 1985 album Hounds of Love then, following an interval, A Sky of Honey, from 2005's Aerial, performed in their entirety.
With dialogue by novelist David Mitchell and co-direction by former RSC boss Adrian Noble, the suites are revealed as a pair of magical-realist prog-pastoral operettas. The first features sea creatures of the sort seen in Dr Who, circa 1970s, and a living-room scene that could have been scripted by playwright Caryl Churchill by way of Monty Python.
The pre-interval finale of The Morning Fog reinvents the song for the 16th century as much as the 21st, with the band cast as mediaeval minstrels while the sea monsters dance a slow jig of reconciliation akin to one of Shakespeare's frothiest rom-coms.
With the entire band dressed as birds in a second half of puppet-led narrative, this is as tastefully avant-garde as it gets in a show that is a joy to watch as much as it is to listen to.
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