Kate Bush
In 1978, a 19-year-old Catholic girl from South London reconfigured the rock landscape. Forty years on, her strange phenomenon endures.
In 1978, this 19-year-old Catholic girl from South London reconfigured the rock landscape.
It’s three months after the release of Never Mind The Bollocks, and a 19-yearold Catholic girl from a south-east London suburb who shares a birthday with author Emily Brontë is singing about Heathcliff and Cathy as she wafts about on Top Of The Pops, the embodiment of gothic romance, generally giving it plenty of interpretive dance and jazz hands.
Wuthering Heights, her debut single in January 1978, had its release date pushed back because the singer was unhappy with the photograph on the sleeve. Fortunately this means it avoids being smothered by Wings’ all-conquering Christmas singalong Mull Of Kintyre.
Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights also sees off competition from another female singer’s UK chart debut – Denis by Blondie – to reach No.1, displacing ABBA, in March. It stays there for a month. We have let her in at our window. Kate Bush has defied the laws of logic, gravity and punk. And she would continue to do so.
A huge chunk of time later it’s March 2014, and Kate Bush announces an epic 22-night, August-October residency at Hammersmith Apollo in London, the venue of her last gig, 35 years previously. Tickets sell out in 15 minutes, and that autumn she becomes the first female ever to have eight albums in the UK Top 40 simultaneously. Only The Beatles and Elvis have ever topped that tally; Bowie’s death later adds him to the list. The shows are the buzz event of the year, even before they’ve taken place. When they do, she owns every front page, even though she barely plays any of her hits. All this despite a reclusive, off-camera relationship with publicity that could best be described as ‘sparing’.
Kate Bush is now established as both a national treasure and an enduring enigma. In a career in which she has usually done the opposite of the rational thing, she has maintained stellar status as a much-loved musical pioneer, transcending her initial pigeonhole as a kooky hippie girl with a highpitched voice. An imperishable influence on subsequent female artists, sure, and then some, yet Bush has primarily been significant beyond gender, her art and attitude a nudge to all idiosyncratic creative types who don’t follow formulae. She remains her own entity, and we grant her the awe – and occasionally forgiveness – afforded to the truly unique. She has even survived describing Theresa May as “wonderful”. The rules, and common sense, go out of the window in Kate Bush World. How did she pull this off?
Kate Bush was always something of a prodigy. Forty years ago this January, Wuthering Heights, the first ever British No.1 self-written by a female singer, brought a fresh and candid voice to music. Her debut album The Kick Inside followed a few weeks later. She had written most of the songs on it in her mid-teens. They were rich with pretentious references (in this case a good thing), mentioning Brontë and Gurdjieff with that manner of unselfconscious earnestness exhibited by young people who haven’t read many books but have therefore reacted really intensely to the ones that they have. Which is how most of us reacted to Bush’s music.
There was, at the time, a striking novelty to her upfront expressions of lust and eroticism through the female gaze. You can sweat the details, cite Bessie Smith and
Joni Mitchell, but it wasn’t yet the norm. And in an era when punk was on the rise, she was
– at least technically – its very antithesis. Her moods, chords and theatricality (mentored by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour) had more in common with prog. Her songs swooned and sighed with romance and yearning – not a current hot ticket. What she did share with punk was a free spirit, a doing-her-own-thing drive – the same young generation who queued to get gobbed on at Damned gigs embraced her.
Gilmour was thrilled by his young protégé’s success. “Kate is a complete oneoff,” he said. “I can’t think of anyone like her. Joni Mitchell was also a one-off, an original, but Kate is nothing like that.”
That debut was averse to self-editing; it was both unfettered and rhapsodic. Urges, fevers, visions, unfiltered. She somehow transcended the mundane categories of the here and now. She was atypical, not topical. Pansexual. We all know what an impressive musical career she’s gone on to have, keeping that differentness, that individualism. Along the way she’s evolved from TV light-entertainment regular and accidental sex symbol to arguably the most enigmatic recluse in the business, one who marches to her own eccentric drum beat.
“Every female you see at a piano is either Lynsey de Paul or Carole King,” Bush told Melody Maker in 1977. “And most male music – not all of it, but the good stuff – really lays it on you. It really puts you against the wall. And that’s what I like to do. I’d like my music to intrude. Not many females succeed with that.”
Her ‘intrusions’ are often Trojan horses, dark themes hosted by sweet melodies, a charm of charisma. She has become one of the most invaluable figures in British music, and has done so chiefly by being herself. Or, in earlier years, by being herself while inhabiting various characters. Then hiding herself away and letting us project on to the indelible impression she had made already. Bowie, to name the most blatant example, used a similar sleight of image, but it’s a tightrope act, this blend of striking personae and blank canvas.
As motherhood induced a 12-year gap between Bush albums, maybe this happened, in part, without a plan. Even after revealing her hand at those 2014
‘In an era when punk was on the rise, Bush was – at least technically – its very antithesis.’