Kate Bush: A Woman's Work

"Artists shouldn't be made famous."

There's something weirdly comforting about the story of Kate Bush's life and career. It provides proof that sometimes good things really can happen to good people. Fortune has smiled upon Bush for almost all of her life, sometimes in ways that beggar all belief. This despite the fact that she has spent her professional life working in the music business - an industry that has typically taken good people, stolen from them, abused them, and then fed them to the dogs. And that's if they were men. Women have always had it much worse.

She was born in July 1958, the youngest of three children born to Robert and Hannah Bush. The family might be described as affluent middle class. Her father was a doctor; her mother, a nurse, had emigrated from Dungarvan on the southern Irish coast. Her two brothers are considerably older: John Carder Bush (known to everyone as Jay) was born in 1944, and Paddy Bush was born in 1952. That was the year the family moved into East Wickham Farm.

East Wickham Farm is a remarkable place. It must have been a wonderful place to grow up. It's in Kent, south of the Thames, and the main house, while surrounded (if not submerged) by trees does face out onto a moderately busy suburban artery. It's just ten minutes from the heart of downtown London. But in back of the house there are acres of open land, with an eighteenth century rose garden, a Victorian pond, various outbuildings, and an ancient farm house, known to all in the family as "the barn" in the midst of it all. It was a mildly eccentric and deeply artistic household. Her father played the piano well enough to find his way through bits of the standard classical repertoire; her mother had been a dancer back in Ireland. Their daughter would inherit both gifts, while having the run of this wonderful old place, and the complete and utter support of her parents and her brothers as she began to chart her own artistic path. She took to the piano naturally, and began writing her own songs at age 11.

Her brothers weren't always around, as both were charting their own unusual artistic paths. Jay had gone off to Cambridge just as Kate was beginning her schooling and made a career for himself as a photographer and poet. Paddy had become a specialist in ancient European instruments - he actually made medieval instruments for a living. Both were involved in the English folk music scene as their little sister, a young teenager by now, began writing all these striking songs. They made tapes of them, and played them for friends. And it turned out that one of Jay Bush's friends from Cambridge, a man named Ricky Hopper, was actually acquainted with a famous rock star.

Really, how likely is that?

But there was once a time when famous rock stars felt, as if it were some sort of civic duty, to lend a helping hand to young artists. David Gilmour was impressed enough by what he heard on this 15 year old girl's demo tape that he helped her record a demo at his home studio, and played on it himself (one of the tracks from this session was actually issued as the b-side to "Army Dreamers" in 1980.) It was the first time in Bush's life that she had even played with other musicians - that fascinated her, along with the range of sounds generated by an electric piano. Gilmour also went round to East Wickham Farm and made several recordings of her performing her songs at the piano. He tried playing the tapes for his friends in the industry, but had trouble getting anyone interested. Eventually, he simply organized and paid for a professional session himself in an EMI studio, with Andrew Powell at the helm. This took place in the summer of 1975, and this did the trick. EMI signed her to be a recording artist. But she was still only 17 years old, and everyone - her family, Gilmour, the record company itself - agreed that she was too young to begin her professional career right away. It was agreed that she should finish her schooling first, and make her first record in a couple of years. 

So that's what they did. Bush prepared for her first recording sessions by forming a band. They called it the KT Bush Band - she was joined by drummer Vic King, guitarist Brian Bath (who would later be part of the Tour of Life), and bassist Del Palmer. It wasn't a terribly ambitious project. They played a couple dozen gigs around London in the spring of 1977, performing early versions of some of the songs from her debut and a collection of covers. The real point was to get Bush accustomed to playing with other musicians. But something else happened. Bush and Del Palmer fell in love.

It's one of the crucial relationships of her life. They were a couple for almost fifteen years, they remain friends and collaborators to this day - indeed, Palmer plays, along with Bush's husband, on her most recent work. And Palmer brought something crucial to the table, which she almost instantly recognized was something she very much needed. He would challenge her. Bush grew up the favoured baby in the bosom of the family. Her parents and her brothers were fiercely supportive of her, and fiercely protective as well. They were, however, just a little capable of approving of everything she did. Their little girl was a prodigy. Every song was wonderful. Every idea was worth pursuing. Palmer would have none of that, and had no hesitation in telling her what he thought. (By all accounts, her husband Danny McIntosh is similarly unimpressed by her genius!)

Bush began, like many young songwriters, by setting her own poems to music. She was a pre-teen when she began this work, and her first two albums consist almost entirely of songs written by a teenager, by one in the process of growing from a girl to a woman, and interested in both the open innocence of childhood and what it means to be an adult. As she has been happy to acknowledge, the two greatest influences on her songcraft are clearly Elton John - "he was the only songwriter I knew of that played the piano" - and David Bowie. (Bush, aged 14, was in the house at the last Ziggy Stardust show in 1973 and like any good English schoolgirl had his picture on her wall. When she actually met him many years later, by chance one day at Abbey Road, she was so flustered she had to leave the room.) John and Bowie have both made much more use of elaborate and unpredictable song structures than is typical of American songwriters (who tend to be more straightforward Verse-Chorus writers.) Bush's early songs, like John's, were typically based on very clear, and very memorable, piano parts (this has changed as she's grown more adept with synthesizers and rhythm tracks.) But John, of course, has been prolific to a fault. He had already made eleven albums in his first seven years as a recording artist, before Bush made her debut - while she has issued just nine albums altogether in the more than 40 years since she made her debut, John has put out an additional 20. And John has never written his own words. Bush has her own stories to tell, and like Bowie, these do not have much to do with self-expression. That's a fairly small part of her work, especially as her writing has developed. From the very beginning, her songs could be about anything - in particular, whatever book she happens to be reading that week or whatever interesting thing came across her television.

But while she initially appeared to be another singer-songwriter, unusual only by being a woman in a man's game, and by being a teenager, it soon became quite evident that even the songs were merely a means to an end. Not to mention that the subject matter of so many of her songs was  itself extremely unusual. But as she developed as a musician and as a recording artist, she grew less exclusively interested in songs strictly for their own sake and equally interested in what could be achieved with sound itself. There has been an artistic price of sorts to pay, in that she's had very little real contact and interaction with her own audience for most of her career. Her work can sometimes seem very insular. 

She is also very, very English. It is, in fact, difficult to think of an artist who has been less influenced by American music and culture. She's only made a few brief visits to North America over the years, and performed there just once, on Saturday Night Live in 1978. The music and art and culture that have shaped her have been almost entirely European, and usually British. She has an obvious fondness for 1970s British prog-rock, in particular Pink Floyd and Genesis. It might be noted that these may have been the two British prog-rock bands with the least interest in instrumental virtuosity (for good reasons, of course!), and the ones most interested in mood and texture and, sometimes, narrative. David Gilmour, of course, was her key sponsor, and she would work with Peter Gabriel on multiple occasions. When Bush chooses to rock out -  which she generally does at least once on each album -  she rocks out like they would. One doesn't hear even a trace of The Blues. 

She is an extremely unusual artist, and she has charted for herself an extremely unusual career.  Her journey did not include any of those dreary lengthy periods of paying her dues, learning her craft in front of half-interested audiences, having to hustle for a record deal. She has never had to make a living apart from music. She was sponsored by a famous rock star, who helped her get a recording contract. Pop stardom practically sought her out while she was still in her teens. She neither embraced it nor turned her back on it. She simply didn't let it shape her course, in any way. She was able to opt out of the whole record-tour cycle that takes up the lives of most musicians. She did a series of concerts in 1979, when she was 20 years old. It would be 35 years before she would do it again, in 2014. She assumed complete control of her artistic life while still in her early 20s, and has followed her unpredictable muse with resolute single-mindedness wherever it led. 

"I'm not the shy, retiring, fragile butterfly creature you sometimes read about. I'm tough as nails."

9. The Red Shoes (November 1993)

For all her good fortune, the period leading up to this record was easily the most difficult time of Bush's life. Alan Murphy, who had first played guitar for her on the Tour of Life in 1979 and appeared on all of her records since that time, died of AIDS in late 1989. And her long relationship with Del Palmer was coming to an end. While it would not seem to damage their professional relationship, it still had to have been an upheaval. They had, after all, been a couple since Bush was eighteen years old. Worst of all, her mother died in early 1992. It seems to have left her a little unfocused when it came to the record she was working on. There are some very strange things about it. For one - famous guest stars? On a Kate Bush record? But that's Eric Clapton playing guitar on one track, Jeff Beck on another, and Procol Harum's Gary Brooker adding keyboards.

 Even stranger was the appearance of Prince, who had expressed interest in helping out. Bush sent him "Why Should I Love You"  and asked him to do some background vocals. Prince, being Prince, remade the entire thing. It was now effectively a Prince track with Bush singing lead. Del Palmer says he and Bush spent two years trying to figure out how they could turn it back into a Kate Bush track. In the end, being a polite English lady, Bush seems to have decided it would be rude to turn down Prince's gift, so she issued it more or less as he'd remade it. It fits very strangely with the rest of the record. Which does have its moments - the lead single "Rubberband Girl" is glorious, utterly irresistible, as close as Bush would ever get to duplicating Madonna's sense of sheer pop fun. But those moments are in short supply here.

Bush ended up quite unhappy with the whole thing. It was the one time she recorded digitally, and she soon decided she much preferred analog. Almost twenty years later she would remake three of the tracks here entirely from scratch. She would also record new vocals and drum tracks for four other tracks and release the new versions of those seven songs from this album as part of her strange 2011 project Director's Cut (which also revamped four tracks from The Sensual World.) But that was far in the future. For the moment, she simply disappeared. She dropped completely out of sight for twelve years, with no music, no public appearances of any sort, no interviews. It was as if she had fallen off the face of the earth.

8. 50 Words For Snow (November 2011)

The shortest of the seven tracks here comes in at just under seven minutes, and the first thing one notices about the project are the two very distinguished male voices making guest appearances. The title cut basically just explores a groove for eight minutes while the estimable Stephen Fry, one of Britain's two great national treasures (David Attenborough being the other, of course!) intones, with varying degrees of dramatic emphasis, fifty different words for snow. And "Snowed in at Wheeler Street," about two lovers somehow unstuck in time, who keep meeting and being torn apart, is a duet with Sir Elton John. The longest track, "Misty," is about a sexual encounter between a woman and a snowman; "Snowflake" is literally about the life of a snowflake, from its birth in the clouds until it falls to earth.  

It's pretty obvious that Bush couldn't care less about pop success anymore, not that she ever cared all that much. She's simply following her wayward muse and sculpting more extended and idiosyncratic soundscapes.  It's a record for people who have been with her all along on her strange journey. This is her most recent recording - it's now eleven years old - and yet it's not the last we've heard from her. Three years later, to the astonishment of her fans and followers everywhere, she performed a 22 date residency at the London Apollo, with a show every bit as wild and ambitious as the Tour of Life had been back in 1979. And, at least according to the testimony of those fortunate enough to be there, every bit as astonishing. The live recording she issued two years later confirms that she and her musicians sounded fabulous. The few scattered videos available on YouTube (Bush requested that her fans not film and photograph shows, and for the most part they actually did as she requested) do suggest that this was a truly remarkable show.

7. Lionheart (November 1978)

Bush felt that EMI rushed her into this second album, and she would never, never permit that to happen again. She still had plenty of songs lying around that hadn't found a place on her debut, and this is still a singer-songwriter album, with Andrew Powell still in the producer's seat. The players are mostly experienced pros from the UK scene - Stuart Elliott and Duncan Mackay from Cockney Rebel, Frances Monkman from Curved Air, David Paton from Pilot,  although players from Bush's inner circle are present as well - Brian Bath and Del Palmer, who would soon be joining her in concert, and brother Paddy plays on more than half the tracks. But the songs for the most part aren't quite as striking as the ones on her debut. Furthermore, she hasn't quite taken control of her own sound yet - partially because she's not completely in charge, and partially because she hasn't yet quite figured out how. She only turned 20 while it was being recorded. But she had an idea of where she wanted to go and what she wanted to be. Powell speaks regretfully about the omission of a song called "Never For Ever" which didn't make the cut for this album (nor the succeeding album of the same name.) Powell describes it as a gorgeous, intimate ballad, with the best string arrangement he ever wrote. But Bush was already making a determined effort not to repeat herself, and not to be placed in any particular pigeon-hole, saying she didn't want to forever be associated with "soft, romantic vibes."

Having made two albums, surely it was time to do some live shows. That's what musicians do, after all. But Bush, of course, had not come up the way most musicians do, attracting notice with their live performances and being allowed to record. She had always been a self-contained player, and very much a creature of the studio. She went into her first serious live performances free of any pre-conceptions of what a live performance of popular music should be like, and she devised a two hour show that was absolutely stunning in its ambition and originality. The only musicians who had even scratched the surface of what she would present on what she called the Tour of Life were David Bowie, with the wild sets for the Diamond Dogs tour, and Peter Gabriel with his numerous costume changes while performing with Genesis. Along with the elaborate set, and seventeen costume changes, Bush included magicians, dancers, poetry, and a very well rehearsed band. There were 24 performances over six weeks in April-May 1979, and it  remains a remarkable achievement to this day. Luckily the highlights were preserved on a film, Kate Bush at Hammersmith Odeon. 

Having demonstrated her complete mastery of live performance, she would not perform another show for the next 35 years. Typical.

6. The Sensual World (October 1989)

A quick word about the album cover, and how carefully Bush has tended her own image. The original photograph is in colour, and slightly more revealing - her entire hand and other shoulder can be seen clearly. But it's also far too sexy for how Bush likes to present herself - she'd had a big fight with EMI early in her career about that very subject, almost all of it over a single promotional photograph. So for this album cover, this picture was cropped, put into black and white, and one shoulder was completely lost in shadow. The album itself doesn't seem as ambitious as Hounds of Love, but it's still something more than a simple collection of songs. Bush said she thought of it as a collection of stories, which does help give the songs a kind of perspective. These are generally somewhat odd stories that don't have much to do with each other. The problem is that these stories are joined to the least interesting and the least varied collection of musical settings of her career. But it does, of course, have its moments. The title track had to be rethought when Bush couldn't get permission from James Joyce's estate to use a lyric based on Molly Bloom's soliloquy (they would relent a generation later, and she would recut the song as originally intended for Director's Cut.) She turned it instead into a fantasy about Molly Bloom stepping out of the book and into the real world. And "Love and Anger" is impossible to follow or make much sense of, but strangely memorable anyway. I think the record bogs down after that, but it rallies impressively towards the end. Bush had discovered the Trio Bulgarka, a group of women who sang traditional Bulgarian folk music, and had made use of them of two tracks. But being Bush, she didn't feel right about only asking them to fit themselves into her music and wanted to provide them with something more in their own comfort zone. That would be "Rocket's Tail," but after a couple of minutes the drums crash in and it turns into a hard rock track driven by her old friend David Gilmour's guitar. I know, it makes no sense. It still works. And the album concludes with "This Woman's Work," which is simply breathtaking in its delicate beauty, its aching passion, its raw power, its desperate urgency - yes, all of these things, as great an achievement as anything this artist has done in her remarkable career. The song was actually written to accompany a specific scene in a forgotten John Hughes movie, and was almost left off the album. (She says that Del Palmer absolutely insisted it be included.)

5. The Dreaming (September 1982)

A very weird album cover - there are chains, and there's a tiny key on her tongue. What does it it all mean? Who knows. And this was, in its moment, a very weird album. It's taken us many years to catch up with it. She very much wanted to leave her past behind - she even regretfully cut ties with Jon Kelly, her co-producer on Never For Ever and the engineer on all of her records, solely because she wanted to build a new sound from scratch. This is her first fully mature record, where she leaves behind the singer-songwriter, alone in her big house with her piano, and emerges as a completely different kind of artist altogether. Bush takes total control of her sound - her discovery of the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, which was a very early sampler and digital audio workstation, greatly reduced her dependence on other musicians to get the sounds she was after. It gave her new ways to develop her songs, building them up for rhythm loops or samples of other instruments, rather than piano melodies. And in fact, the melodies are not particularly memorable, by Bush's standards at  least. The abrasive lead single, "Sat in Your Lap," released more than a year ahead of the album, was the first clue - it's  built on a jagged rhythm part, with Bush screeching parts of the vocal. On the album's next track, she sings about a failed robbery in a Cockney accent - later on she adopts a broad Australian voice for the title cut and literally brays "hee-haw" like a donkey in the concluding "Get Out of My House." It sounds like a deliberate attempt to confound expectations, and it did succeed in confusing her fanbase. It also worried her record company - the album only went to number three, and all Bush's sonic experimentation used up a great deal of expensive studio time. EMI conveyed their concerns. Bush responded by building her own 48 track studio at East Wickham.

4. Aerial (November 2005)

After twelve years of complete silence, Bush dropped this double set out of a clear blue sky. Asked why it had taken so long, Bush smiled and said that having a little child running about rather cut down on the time available to her for messing around in the studio. She didn't begin to make any real progress  on the record until little Bertie started school. Like almost all double sets it would have made a remarkable single album instead, but we'll be happy to have it all nevertheless. The first of the two records tends to be more oriented towards songs. The second is an extended piece of connected songs called A Sky of Honey, which would form the concluding portion of her Before the Dawn performances in 2014. In that respect it's structured like a larger Hounds of Love, which had dedicated one album side to songs and one side to an extended conceptual piece (which would also be part of the Before the Dawn performances.)  

More here than anywhere else in her career Bush reminds us how she grew up a fan of English prog-rock. Her version of it is quite without vanity. She has no interest in demonstrating how clever she is as a composer, or how skilled her band members (which generally includes her husband) are on their instruments.  I, of course, am always more interested in the songs than anything else and happily there are indeed some very strong ones here, including some of the extended ones on the second half of the record, like "Nocturn" and "Sunset." Two tracks in particular are especially notable: "How to Be Invisible" and the remarkable "Mrs Bartolozzi," a reverie about watching clothes splash about in a washing machine. Really, that's what it's about. It's marvellous. Alas, the lone single, "King of the Mountain," is not one of them. It has something to do with Elvis Presley and America, but Bush has never had much interest in or understanding of America. It's a big album (running 81 minutes), and a dense album that takes some time to sink in. But it's also reassuring to discover that she hadn't lost a thing in twelve years, as a musician, as a singer, or as a writer.

3. The Kick Inside (February 1978)

An amazing debut, and quite possibly the finest record ever made by a teenager. She was 19 years old when this was issued, on my birthday in 1978 - and two of the tracks actually date back to her sessions with David Gilmour back in 1975. The idea that the record that is "The Man With the Child In His Eyes" was made by a girl of 16 is very hard to grasp, in the same way that quantum physics is hard to grasp. How does even happen, how does it possibly work? This is very much a singer-songwriter album, and the songwriting can be a little uneven, I suppose, especially on the first side. The melodies, however, are all outstanding, as are the performances. And no one was writing like this. There were some distinguished female songwriters, even in the 1970s, but not all that many, and women like Joni Mitchell and Janis Ian often seemed preoccupied with finding a place, or carving one out, in a man's world. Bush had come from a very different place in the world, she hadn't scuffled for years in the industry, and it gave her a freedom all her own, to write about desire and sexuality as casually and as naturally as men had been writing about it all along. 

Bush was very young when most of these songs were written and she could honestly summon a child's sense of wonder and discovery at the world in ways that simply are no longer accessible to older writers. She happily incorporated themes and ideas from her wide and idiosyncratic reading, some of which were very strange indeed. The stunning title track, which concludes the album, is a love song to a brother; it's also a suicide note from a woman who has been committing incest with that brother and is now pregnant. The seven songs that make up the second side of the vinyl are all brilliant, without exception. And of course "Wuthering Heights," with that unforgettable opening piano fill and Bush's wild vocal - keening, pleading, sighing - was like nothing anyone had ever heard before. Bush insisted - insisted, like the stubborn teenager she was - that this extremely weird track be her first single. EMI wanted to issue "James and the Cold Gun" instead, and it's a great track as well, as close to hard rock as Bush would ever get. It had even been a live favourite with the KT Bush Band. But Bush got her way, and "Wuthering Heights" quickly shot to the very top of the UK charts, where it stayed for a month. She was the first UK woman to write her own number one hit. 

In case you've forgotten, she was 19 years old when she did this.

(That's the Canadian album cover by the way. It's both a) the one I'm accustomed to, and b) much better than the awful UK original.) 

2. Never For Ever (September 1980)

 Let us first praise the cover illustration, a striking pencil drawing by Nick Price depicting a horde of strange creatures, animals and monsters, all flying out from under Kate's skirt. Brilliantly done, and utterly hilarious as well. Definitely her best cover art. The sessions for this third album were interrupted by the filming of a Christmas TV special for the BBC. Did she perform her biggest hit, the song that had made her famous? Of course she didn't. Of the ten songs she sang on the program, only four had even been released to the public. Two would one day come out on b-sides, and one was a short piece written for the occasion to introduce Peter Gabriel, her sole guest. Her other three songs would eventually appear on this album when it was released. That would happen almost a year after their television premiere. (She also performed a brief piece by Erik Satie, and sang a duet with Gabriel on a Roy Harper song.)

Bush had by now had taken full complete artistic control of her work. She felt no need to go out on tour again - been there, done that - she promoted the record entirely with interviews featuring her polite and gracious self, and a series of very memorable videos. It turned out to be all that was necessary, as it became her first UK number one album. It's a big step forward. Bush has taken over production duties herself, with the assistance of engineer Jon Kelly (who had engineered her first two albums) It's a wild and wooly batch of songs - "Babooshka" is about a wife destroying her marriage through her own paranoia and "The Wedding List" is about a widow's quest for revenge. The other songs generally cover even stranger ground. But the highlight is surely the remarkable finale, "Breathing," sung from the viewpoint of a child in the womb contemplating a world devastated by nuclear fallout. 

1. Hounds of Love (September 1985)

This is her most complete achievement, the one that best displays all her varied abilities and ambitions - as a songwriter, as an artist of pure sound, as a singer. It was the first record she made entirely on her own terms, literally in her own backyard at East Wickham Farm. The second side is a concept piece called The Ninth Wave - she would perform it in full as part of her Before the Dawn show almost 30 years later. It's a connected series of songs that's basically about someone who has fallen overboard and is passing the night alone in the ocean, afraid of drowning, afraid of falling asleep, hoping to be rescued.

The first side is more conventional, consisting of five ordinary songs - well, as ordinary as you're likely to get from Kate Bush. The unforgettable "Cloudbusting" is based on Peter Reich's memories of growing up with his deeply eccentric father, the psychologist Wilhelm Reich who came to believe that he had built a machine that could make it rain. "Mother Stands For Comfort" is not very comforting - the child being comforted is a murderer, a madman secure in the knowledge that his mother will always protect him. The wonderful title track, inspired by a couple of her beloved horror movies, compares falling in love to being pursued by a pack of hounds and is built entirely around pounding drums and cellos sawing away furiously. 

Hounds of Love also includes what must now be her most famous song of all,"Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God.)" It opens the album, and the premise is strange and interesting enough - the deal with God is that a man and woman be able to swap bodies so they might better understand each other. It's built on a galloping rhythm track and a strange, eerie hook from the Fairlight. It stalled at #30 on the US charts, but made top ten in Bush's traditional areas of support - the UK and the commonwealth, parts of Europe.  Then, in 2022, the song became a key motif in the fourth season of the hit Netflix show Stranger Things. In the modern world, licensing music for television and movies has become a crucial revenue stream for musicians. But Bush doesn't need the money, and has generally not allowed her songs to be so used. But she happened to be a fan of the show, so in this case she made an exception. Much to her surprise, and everyone else's as well, at age 64 she ended up with by far the biggest hit of her career. It would become her first top ten song in the US, and a number one everywhere else. All this more than thirty years after she had originally issued the song, and more than ten years since her last record of any kind. Who else could this happen to? Good fortune, on a level that truly surpasses belief, simply follows this woman around.

And why not? She is, by all accounts, an absolute sweetheart of a human being - still somewhat shy even now, but unfailingly friendly, modest, and generous. Good things should happen to good people more often. But as an artist, however, Bush is as ruthlessly single-minded as any artist could possibly be. She is not one for half measures. She does not aim to please. You have to reckon with her and her work on her terms. She isn't coming to meet you half way. Her way is the only way. She hopes people will like what she does, and is grateful and appreciative when they do - but whether they do or not ultimately doesn't matter in the slightest. She will do what she wants to do. She always has. She always will.

 "I'd like my music to intrude."