RUNNING UP THE HILL: 50 VISIONS OF KATE BUSH

Tom Doyle NINE EIGHT BOOKS

WE’RE NEVER IN ANY DOUBT OF HER VISION OR BLOODY-MINDEDNESS.

A quixotic trip through the career of the iconic singer.

Few artists have impacted the collective consciousness like East Wickham’s 19-year-old Kate Bush, who got a whole nation talking when her spine-tingling debut single Wuthering Heights reached No.1 in the UK singles chart in 1978. The subsequent years have shown her to be a true one-off, a maverick who has rarely, if ever, compromised her vision, bending the world and her record company alike to her will, and never the other way round.

Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions Of Kate Bush by veteran music journalist Tom Doyle explores her uniqueness chronologically from many different angles, structured like one of Julian Barnes’ nonlinear works across 50 chapters.

One can expect the unexpected, from Noel Edmonds popping up on BBC kids’ TV show Swap Shop, to analysis of The Hounds Of Love album’s conceptual suite The Ninth Wave,

via intermissions of testimony from fans as diverse as crime author Ian Rankin and photographer Guido Harari. The 2014 Before The Dawn two-month residency at Hammersmith is also covered, as is the unexpected recent breakout of Kate Bush mania precipitated by the Netflix retro drama series Stranger Things.

While that might suggest an account heavy on detail, it’s offset by Doyle’s salutary style: a chapter on Bush’s close associations with the alternative comedy scene of the 1980s, where she made appearances in skits at events like the Secret Policeman’s Third Ball, is written with the levity of an article in a Sunday supplement. The author wears his erudition lightly to make it a book anyone can enjoy, and not just music nerds who’ll lap up details of how Bush came to absorb the Fairlight CMI into her work after being introduced to it by her pal Peter Gabriel.

Doyle gets the balance about right, and he’s almost certainly the journalist best placed to write this book, having been granted a four-hour interview at Bush’s Abingdon home when she was promoting her 2005 comeback album Aerial

(she even lets him smoke a roll-up in the kitchen). It’s the longest audience ever granted to anyone, and she’s at pains during the lengthy tête-à-tête to present her ordinariness and refute claims of reclusiveness. And yet it’s hard not to feel that the lady doth protest too much. One still comes away feeling that they know little about the enigmatic person behind the artist, even if we’re never in any doubt of her singular vision or bloody-mindedness. What Doyle does best is present an artist who conjures up images with music like few others can.