JUST OVER A MINUTE INTO THE

precision frenzy of Sat In Your Lap, there’s a clue as to what it might be like inside Kate Bush’s head. “I’ve been doing this for years,” she observes, though at this point she has been a recording artist for less than four. “My goal is moving near/It says, Look, I’m over here/Then it up and disappears.”

How to capture that elusive sound? Clearly, the process can be long and exasperating. Since Sat In Your Lap came out as a single, 40 years ago this summer, Bush has released six albums of new songs: three more in the 1980s, then one per decade subsequently. The perfectionism, the innovation, the belief that pop music can be transformative and somehow magical, the strategic reticence – all of this contributes to Kate Bush’s enduring mystery, accruing over time. This month, MOJO is once more emboldened to unpick that mystery. Hence a cornucopia of Kateness: a feast of profound lost interviews, insiders’ confessions, esoteric digressions, eyewitness epiphanies and much more. It’s a portrait of an artist on a relentless quest for the radically improbable – and we remain dedicated in our quest to understand what she’s been chasing all this time. Coming through the trees…

JOHN MULVEY, EDITOR