Rejoice, for Kate Bush has risen again. Heart-popping excitement (my own, and maybe yours too) greeted the musician’s surprise appearance last week on Radio 4’s Today programme, speaking to presenter Emma Barnett.
Bush, 66, was talking about her new four-minute animation, Little Shrew. Inspired by the horrors of war, and the Ukraine-Russia conflict in particular, playing through it is the track Snowflake from her 2011 album 50 Words for Snow featuring her son Bertie’s vocals. The animation is heartfelt, exquisitely done (Bush would like donations to be made to the War Child charity). Bush also spoke about how she had “lots of ideas” for a new album.
With that, the interview was over, leaving me almost fitting in the kitchen. A new album? Barnett audibly gasped when Bush said it, though, with all due respect, she needs to get over herself – acting as if she’s Kate Bush’s best friend. Fact is, I am Kate Bush’s best friend, even though I’ve never met her. In my soul, where it matters, Kate Bush and I are best friends. Which admittedly looks strange written down, verging on troubling, but fellow Bush-heads might know what I mean.
What is it about Bush and her fans, and her female fans in particular? One radio interview and we’re transported into Kate-mode, which, for me, means going about my normal day (walking the dog; prodding at the supermarket self-checkout screen), booming her music on headphones, feeling thrilling, otherworldly, impetuous. Other female musicians can be exciting: Beyoncé dropping country music albums (yes!); Taylor Swift conquering the known pop universe (why not?). Bush, however, only has to murmur about “new ideas” and some of us feel all the molecules in our bodies rearranging themselves.
Do men understand the effect Bush has on so many women: how “other” she makes us feel? I’m sometimes surprised myself by my Kate-worship. It’s as if she’s snuck through the net as British pop culture’s only forgivable prog-hippy. And yet love her unreservedly I do. Obviously, it’s a lot to do with the music. Bush isn’t just another musician, she’s an entire genre. And, with perma-reclusive Bush truly the JD Salinger of music (just as the last album was in 2011, the most recent live shows were in 2014), everything she touches has rarity value.
But it’s also because she’s our Kate: the cultural trigger for the secret part of every outwardly sensible woman who wants to jack everything in (yes, all of it) and devote her life to floaty dancing in leotards and diaphanous skirts. Or fancies slipping into a hot Victorian nightie and running barefoot across a windswept moor towards a Heathcliff-esque lover, however brooding and dodgy he might be.
It was the same when I listened to Bush as a teenager. This was no ordinary fandom. I felt “called” to be a wild-haired Kate-alike (sadly, the effect was more Saxon roadie). I embraced the “floaty dancer” within (alas, I was about as ethereal as a house brick). This is what Bush’s music has always given female fans, young and old: a Great Escape from the crushing daily grind.
In 2022, the Netflix show Stranger Things used the 1985 track, Running Up That Hill, putting Bush back at the top of the charts, and winning her a huge Gen Z audience. On the whole, hardcore Bush fans were pleased (younger audiences were entitled to their Kate fix), but maybe also a tad territorial. Did these whippersnappers even know of Bush’s wider oeuvre: The Red Shoes? Aerial? The Kick Inside? Did they love our queen enough? It was, in effect, a generational bridling. Telling? I’d say so. People didn’t get this possessive when Gen Z embraced Rick Astley.
Female musicians also revere her. When Bush was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year, early in the process, a voter said they hadn’t heard much of her work, and Hole’s Courtney Love tweeted: “Bro! The rest of us have been LIVING KATE BUSH since 1977! … Too much power in the hands of IDIOTS,” later expanding about Bush, and music industry sexism.
All very understandable. By the ever-punishing metrics of the modern music industry, Bush represents a vanishing utopia of female musicianship: the artist left alone to stay true to herself to make the music she wants to make at the pace she wants to make it. Call Bush “precious” to female musicians and they’d probably laugh bitterly in your face: for them, “precious” would be the impossible dream.
With the recent death of One Direction’s Liam Payne, there’s been a lot said about the pressures of the music business, particularly regarding the young. One is reminded that Bush was also young when she started out: 19 at the time of her first hit, Wuthering Heights (the first number one to be penned by a female); even younger, a veritable child star, when she started writing material.
Yet here she is, still running up that hill, decades later. Though, as yet, seemingly with no interest in capitalising on her new Gen Z fanbase, to perchance dust down the leotards and take a whirl around the heritage circuit. Even though if she did, the fuss might make the response to the Oasis reunion resemble a lacklustre raffle at a village fete.
As for the Babooshka-massive, if Bush is thinking of a resurgence, it means we get one too. You might see us trudging around the frozen food aisle, but that’s just on the outside. On the inside, we’re wafting about on moors. Kate Bush is, has always been, every woman’s secret teenage soul, and most men will never ever understand.
• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist
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• This article was amended on 27 October 2024 because an earlier version misnamed the song Snowflake as Snowdrop.
