Face it, we won’t see Kate Bush any time soon. But there is this ...

Sarah-Louise Young is one of the fish people now. “I think I must be, because I spend every night with them,” she says cheerfully. Last July the British cabaret performer also found herself in a flash mob running up some hill in a flouncy red frock for the annual Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever.

Fish people? It’s what the most fervent Kate Bush fans call themselves, a reference to both her record label and a mythical breed of aquatic humanoids. The beloved English pop maverick has only made nine albums between her legendary very long absences, so we have plenty of time to ponder such things.

An Evening Without Kate Bush takes this absence head-on. “It’s less about her elusiveness and more about the space that’s left when she’s gone,” says the co-writer and performer of the show that makes its Melbourne debut next month.

“Our entry point was, ‘How does this incredibly committed, passionate group of fans cope with her absence? How do they dream into the space when she’s not there?’”

“Somebody called me a parasite, and it really hurt,” says Sarah-Louise Young.

Young’s own distance is crucial, but in a different way. “I’m a fan, but I’m happier in the dark with the albums,” she confesses. “I mean, I don’t have a tattoo; I don’t worship at the altar of Kate … but making this show has made me incredibly open. There are so many ways of paying tribute.”

It’s not Young’s first venture into that grey area of postmodern performance. The “tribute show” is a loaded phenomenon, as she began to discover singing the songs of Julie Andrews in Julie Madly Deeply, her previous project with Russell Lucas, which she took from Adelaide to Broadway and the West End a decade ago.

“I’m someone who never liked tribute bands,” she says. She’s “not being Kate”, just as she wasn’t being Julie. “That show was very different, but that’s what tipped us into this interest in collective fandom, because what I realised when I stepped on stage was that we held in our hands a responsibility to people’s childhoods, to their memories, to all the things that they brought to the song or the artist.”

Sarah-Louise Young channels Julie Andrews in Julie Madly Deeply.

Young was born the last of five music-mad siblings. “It was a noisy house. There was so much music. Walking around a house with four older brothers, you’d just go from zone to zone and I honestly think you end up shouting louder to be heard.”

Her professional debut came about at 22, through a mix of invention and bluster. She’d written a 10-minute “exploration of the similarities between genders” called Drag King, drawing on Weimar, Lotte Lenya and Marlene Dietrich. Offered a suddenly vacant slot on a trip to Edinburgh Festival, “I lied and said I had a one-hour version”, she says.

“It was my first exploration of, ‘What’s it like to be on stage alone and inhabit that intimacy with an audience?’ And it was electric.”

Take 7: the answers according to Sarah-Louise Young

1. Worst habit. Checking social media before bed. I love chatting to our audiences after the show, and they often share photos and stories with me.
2. Greatest fear. A cease-and-desist from Kate Bush.
3. The line that stayed with you. “Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option” — Maya Angelou.
4. Biggest regret. Not starting stretching sooner. Looking after your body is something I have learnt to value more as I get older. Especially doing this show. There’s a lot of leaping around in Lycra, so I really appreciate my yoga mat and pot of Tiger Balm these days.
5. Favourite book. Graeme Thomson’s fantastic biography of Kate Bush, Under the Ivy. It’s such a brilliant analysis of her creative process and was a big part of our research for this show.
6.  The song you wish was yours. The Masochism Tango by Tom Lehrer. He is such an elegant wordsmith. Along with Fascinating Aida (who I ended up touring with for a year) and Victoria Wood, it inspired me to write my own comedy songs with Roulston & Young.
7.  If you could time travel, where would you go? May 14, 1979, Hammersmith Odeon: the final date of Kate Bush’s Tour of Life. I’ve watched some shaky footage on YouTube but to be in the room for this iconic moment would be really something. Nobody knew they would have to wait another 35 years to see her live.

She rode the UK’s early 2000s cabaret resurgence all the way to Adelaide, a city she credits with much of her subsequent momentum. Cabaret Whore in 2010 led to Julie Madly Deeply and a gradual honing of a unique relationship with close-up audiences.

“What is so important to me is the experience in the room,” she says. “For most of the shows I make, there is an element of improvisation, or an element where the show adapts and shifts to the room full of people there. I’m always looking at the intimacy of the relationship between the performer and the audience.”

Kate Bush circa 1970s.

She stresses that the deal is strictly “opt-in”. Casual Kate Bush fans and reluctant theatre spouses will not be expected to join in Babooshka cosplay, or an arranged chorus of Army Dreamers in the dark. But nor will they be sitting through anything as banal as a Kate Bush tribute show.

“I’ve had a lot of negative stuff online, and it’s usually from people who don’t like Kate Bush and that’s fine … but it’s sometimes from people who object to the idea that the show exists,” she says. “Somebody called me a parasite, and it really hurt. Even though I know I’m not … I decided to interrogate my own snobbery. I thought, maybe I’ve been a bit narrow-minded about what tributes are. So I actively started to go and see them.”

One memorable excursion was to Tribute Fest. “Eight bands for 22 quid in a car park” in Birmingham included Antarctic Monkeys, Guns 2 Roses and AKA Noel Gallagher. “It was a real eye-opener because of the people who were there: families who would never be able to afford to go to Glastonbury, sitting there with their picnic hampers.

“It was a wonderful spirit of celebration,” Young says. “I found myself rocking out to Guns 2 Roses. There was a gang of 16-year-olds who’d obviously never get to see Guns N’Roses and they were having the time of their life.

“I realised that the snobbery around tribute acts is often fear. It’s fear from someone who holds the artist in esteem. ‘What are you going to do to my icon?’ There’s a line in the show that says, ‘Not everybody wants to share their love of an artist in a room full of intimate strangers. But for those of us who do, we can always tribute’.”

The switch of noun to verb is key: it’s not so much about the show itself as what we bring to it. “I hope this doesn’t sound too schmaltzy, but I’m deeply humbled by the love and the vulnerability that people bring into the theatre,” Young says. “I do a meet-and-greet afterwards. I don’t have any merchandise; I feel very passionately about that. This is just a very clean, clear opportunity to chat to the audiences.

“The other day, this lady came and she’s in tears, and she said, ‘My husband died two years ago, and The Man with the Child in His Eyes was our song. And then I got diagnosed with cancer a year ago, and Don’t Give Up was my recovery song. I really felt that my husband was here tonight.’

“Now, that’s not me, that’s Kate’s music. But the show makes the space where that’s possible.”

An Evening Without Kate Bush is at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Fairfax Studio, Feb 5 to 8, and Sydney’s Bondi Pavilion, Feb 14 to 15; withoutkatebush.com