Kate Bush

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Kate Bush was born on the 30th of July 1958 in Bexleyheath, Kent, and by the time she was nineteen she had done something no woman in pop history had ever managed: topped the UK Singles Chart with a song she wrote entirely herself. That song was "Wuthering Heights". It arrived out of nowhere in 1978, a soprano voice swooping over a Kate Bush nobody had heard before, telling the story of Emily Brontë's ghost from the ghost's own point of view. Radio programmers did not know quite what to do with it. Neither did the record industry. And yet it went to number one for four weeks.

  How does a girl from a former farmhouse in East Wickham, taught piano by no one but herself, end up at the summit of British pop? How does she hold onto her own artistic vision against the pressure of a major label, an exhausted body after a punishing tour, and a public that sometimes wanted her to be something simpler? And how does a song released in 1985 return forty-four years later to break chart records it had no business breaking?

  Those questions thread through one of the most singular careers in British music. Bush has released nine studio albums, all of them reaching the UK top ten. She has produced every one of them since 1982. She has made two number-one singles separated by nearly half a century. She has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She has influenced artists from Björk to Beyoncé-adjacent, from Tricky to Chappell Roan, and an asteroid bears her name. This is the story of how all of that happened.

• 2. East Wickham to EMI

  ›

  The house that shaped Kate Bush was over three hundred and fifty years old, a former farmhouse near Welling where she grew up with her two elder brothers, John and Paddy. The family was steeped in music without being professional: her mother Hannah was an amateur traditional Irish dancer, her father Robert was an amateur pianist, Paddy made musical instruments by hand, and John was a poet and photographer who moved in the local folk music scene. Bush taught herself the piano at eleven. By the time she was composing her first songs, she had also taken up the organ in a barn behind the house and studied the violin.

  Her family produced a demonstration tape of more than fifty of her compositions. Every record label they approached turned it down. Then Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour received the tape from a mutual friend named Ricky Hopper. Gilmour was impressed enough to finance a more professional demo for the sixteen-year-old Bush. That tape consisted of three tracks, produced by Gilmour's friend Andrew Powell and the sound engineer Geoff Emerick, who had worked with the Beatles. The tape went to EMI executive Terry Slater, who signed her.

  EMI placed Bush on a two-year retainer under Bob Mercer, the managing director of EMI's group-repertoire division. Mercer believed her material was strong but worried she was too young to survive either failure or success. The large advance she received went toward interpretive dance classes with Lindsay Kemp, who had also taught David Bowie, and mime training with Adam Darius. For the first two years of her contract, she spent more time on schoolwork than recording, eventually leaving school after completing her mock A-Levels with ten GCE O-Level qualifications.

  During this period she wrote and recorded demos of almost two hundred songs, and from March to August 1977 she fronted the KT Bush Band at public houses across London. The band included bassist Del Palmer, guitarist Brian Bath, and drummer Vic King. She began recording her debut album in August 1977, just weeks after the KT Bush Band residency ended.

• 3. Wuthering Heights and the Kick Inside

  ›

  EMI wanted Bush's debut single to be "James and the Cold Gun", a harder rock track. Bush refused and insisted on "Wuthering Heights". It was an unusual choice by any measure: a dramatic soprano narrative delivered from the perspective of Cathy's ghost, based on the Brontë novel. The song topped both the UK and Australian charts and became an international hit. Guinness World Records confirmed that Bush was the first female artist in pop history to have written every track on a million-selling debut album.

  Two music videos accompanied the song. The studio version placed Bush in a dark, misty room wearing a white dress, presenting her as the ghost the lyrics described. The outdoor version was filmed on Salisbury Plain and showed her dancing in a red dress, referencing the moors of the novel. Both versions were choreographed by Bush herself.

  EMI's promotional choices for the album were not all ones Bush endorsed. The label marketed The Kick Inside with a poster emphasising her physical appearance. In a 1982 interview with NME, Bush was direct about the problem: "People weren't even generally aware that I wrote my own songs or played the piano. The media just promoted me as a female body. It's like I've had to prove that I'm an artist in a female body."

  The Kick Inside reached number three on the UK Albums Chart and included the single "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", which reached number 85 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in early 1979 and won her an Ivor Novello Award that year for Outstanding British Lyric. Late in 1978, EMI pushed Bush to record a follow-up album quickly. Lionheart was produced by Andrew Powell and reached number six in the UK, though Bush would later express dissatisfaction with it, feeling it had needed more time.

• 4. Tour of Life, 1979

  ›

  The Tour of Life began in April 1979 and ran for six weeks. It was the only full concert tour Bush ever undertook, and it remains one of the most ambitious theatrical spectacles in British rock history. The Guardian described it as "an extraordinary, hydra-headed beast, combining music, dance, poetry, mime, burlesque, magic and theatre." The show was co-devised with magician Simon Drake, and Bush was involved in every aspect of production, from choreography and set design to costume design and the hiring of personnel. Each show involved seventeen costume changes.

  Because Bush needed both hands free to perform the expressionist choreography while singing, sound engineers fashioned a headset microphone from a wire coat hanger and a radio microphone. It was the first use of such a device by a rock performer since the Spotnicks used a rudimentary version in the early 1960s. The idea was later adopted by other artists including Madonna and Peter Gabriel.

  Bush performed on television programmes during the same period, including Top of the Pops in the UK and Saturday Night Live in the United States, where she performed "The Man with the Child in His Eyes" with Paul Shaffer on piano, and later "Them Heavy People." That appearance remains her only live performance in the United States.

  The toll of the tour was significant. Bob Mercer, who had signed Bush to EMI, recalled watching her at the end of each show and seeing that "she was completely wiped out." Bush described the experience as "enormously enjoyable" but "absolutely exhausting." The BBC later suggested she may have withdrawn from touring partly because of the death of lighting engineer Bill Duffield, who was killed in an accident after a warm-up concert. Her first production credit came out of this period: the live On Stage EP, released in August 1979.

• 5. The Fairlight Years

  ›

  Never for Ever, released in September 1980, marked a decisive shift. Co-produced with Jon Kelly, it was the first Bush album to feature synthesisers and drum machines, and in particular the Fairlight CMI, a sampling instrument she had encountered earlier that year while providing backing vocals on Peter Gabriel's third album. The Fairlight let her sample real-world sounds and manipulate them into music, and it became central to her work for years.

  The Dreaming, released in September 1982, was the first album she produced entirely alone. She later described it to Q magazine as her "'She's gone mad' album." Critics found its dense soundscapes and near-exhaustive use of the Fairlight difficult to navigate, and the album received a mixed reception. It entered the UK chart at number three but remains her lowest-selling album, earning only a silver disc. It was, however, her first album to enter the US Billboard 200, reaching number 157. The lead single "Sat in Your Lap" peaked at number 11 in the UK, while the title track, featuring Rolf Harris and Percy Edwards, stalled at number 48.

  In building Hounds of Love, released in 1985, she constructed her own private recording studio near her home to avoid the high cost of hired studio space. The result was her most celebrated record. Hounds of Love knocked Madonna's Like a Virgin from the number-one position in the UK. The first side offered five accessible pop songs including "Running Up That Hill", "Cloudbusting", "Hounds of Love" and "The Big Sky". Bush has stated that she originally wanted to call "Running Up That Hill" by the name "A Deal With God", but the record company resisted the title; she said "for me, this is still called A Deal With God". The second side, The Ninth Wave, took its name from Tennyson's poem "Idylls of the King" and presented seven interconnected songs as a single continuous piece.

• 6. Storytelling and Silence

  ›

  Bush has consistently described herself as a storyteller rather than a confessional songwriter, and she has dismissed readings of her work as autobiographical. The range of her source material is striking: "Wuthering Heights" drew on Brontë; "Cloudbusting" was inspired by Peter Reich's memoir about his father Wilhelm Reich; "Houdini" concerns the death of the magician; "Get Out of My House" came from Stephen King's novel The Shining; "The Dreaming" addressed the plight of Indigenous Australians; and a documentary about the Vietnam War fed into "Pull Out the Pin."

  Her instinct for dark humour runs through many tracks. "Heads We're Dancing" from The Sensual World, which Bush described as her most honest, personal album, is about a woman who dances all night with a charming stranger and discovers in the morning that he is Adolf Hitler. "The Wedding List" drew on François Truffaut's 1967 film of Cornell Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black, about the aftermath of a groom's murder. The comedy influences she has cited include Woody Allen, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers and The Young Ones.

  After the release of The Red Shoes in November 1993, Bush dropped almost entirely from public view. She had intended to take one year off. Twelve years passed. During that period she bore a son, Albert, known as Bertie, in 1998, fathered by guitarist Dan McIntosh, whom she had met in 1992. The press compared her to Miss Havisham from Dickens's Great Expectations. She was awarded an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music in 2002, and performed "Comfortably Numb" at David Gilmour's concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London that same year.

  Aerial, her eighth album, arrived in November 2005 on double CD and vinyl. Its first disc included "Bertie", a Renaissance-style ode to her son, and a track titled "π" in which Bush sings 117 digits of the number pi. Its second disc described twenty-four hours passing by in a single continuous piece. In 2011 she released two albums within months of each other: Director's Cut, comprising eleven reworked tracks from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes recorded using analogue equipment, and 50 Words for Snow, a seven-track album built around her piano and drummer Steve Gadd's rhythms, featuring Stephen Fry reciting invented words for snow and Elton John in the duet "Snowed in at Wheeler Street." At Metacritic, 50 Words for Snow received an average score of 88 from 26 reviews.

• 7. Running Up That Hill, Again

  ›

  In May 2022, "Running Up That Hill" was woven into the plot of the fourth season of the Netflix series Stranger Things. Winona Ryder, who played Joyce Byers on the show, later said she had pushed for the song to be included: "I've been obsessed with her since I was a little girl. I've also for the last seven years been dropping hints on set wearing my Kate Bush T-shirts." The song became the most streamed track on Spotify simultaneously in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and globally.

  On the 17th of June 2022, "Running Up That Hill" reached number one in the UK, making it Bush's second UK number one. The gap between her two chart-toppers was forty-four years, surpassing Tom Jones's previous record of a forty-two-year gap between number ones. Bush also replaced Cher as the oldest female solo artist to top the UK singles chart, at sixty-three years and eleven months. The song additionally broke the record for the longest time taken to reach number one, beating the previous record holder, "Last Christmas" by Wham!, by a year.

  The Chart Supervisory Committee had to grant the record an exemption from the "accelerated chart ratio" rule, which penalises older songs that are heavily streamed, in recognition of the song's ongoing commercial resurgence. On the 11th of June 2022, the song re-entered the US Billboard Hot 100 at number eight, surpassing its 1985 peak of number 30. It climbed to number three on the 25th of July, becoming Bush's first US top-ten hit. Hounds of Love reached number twelve on the Billboard 200 and topped Billboard's Top Alternative Albums chart, her first US number-one album.

  Bush's response was characteristic. She released a statement calling the resurgence "really exciting" and praising Stranger Things. She did not mount a tour, release a new album, or stage a press campaign. The records arrived quietly, then spoke.

• 8. Legacy and Lasting Influence

  ›

  Big Boi of OutKast inducted Bush into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023. In his speech he said: "What I love about Kate's music is that I never know what sound I'm gonna hear next. She ignores anything that seems like a formula and instead just does whatever she wants to do, like me. She challenges me as a listener and expands my ears and my mind. No matter how many times I look to albums like The Dreaming or 50 Words for Snow, they sound fresh and surprise me every time."

  The list of artists who have named Bush as an influence is long and spans several generations: Björk, Alanis Morissette, Florence Welch, Fiona Apple, Imogen Heap, Grimes, Halsey, Chappell Roan, Solange Knowles, Caroline Polachek and many others have cited her. Elton John said that the lyric from "Don't Give Up" helped him become sober, and that Bush "played a big part in my rebirth." Tricky of Massive Attack wrote that her music "has always sounded like dreamland to me", adding: "I don't believe in God, but if I did, her music would be my bible." John Lydon declared her work "beauty beyond belief."

  Her dancing has proven equally durable. For the recurring event called The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever, thousands of people gather worldwide to recreate her choreography from the outdoor version of the "Wuthering Heights" video, dressed in red dresses and moving through public spaces. Prix Benois de la Danse winner Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui credits her dancing as a formative influence on his own career.

  In October 2024, Bush released the animated short film Little Shrew in support of the charity War Child, set to a radio edit of "Snowflake" from 50 Words for Snow. In an interview around the film's release, she said she was "very keen to start working on a new album" and added: "I've got lots of ideas and I'm really looking forward to getting back into that creative space." In February 2025, she was among more than a thousand musicians who backed an album of silence protesting the use of unlicensed copyrighted work to train AI. The album, Is This What We Want?, debuted at number 38 on the UK Albums Downloads Chart, and Bush's name on the list carried weight that few others could match.