Kate Bush has said she is “completely shocked” at being included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s latest round of inductees.
Added alongside George Michael, Rage Against the Machine, Willie Nelson, Sheryl Crow, the Spinners and Missy Elliott – the first female rapper to be inducted – Bush told Rolling Stone:
It’s something I just never thought would happen. Thank you so much to everyone who voted for me. It means a great deal that you would think of me. It’s such a huge honour. Now, as part of the initiation ceremony, I get to find out about the secret handshake … there is one, right?
Bush had been nominated three times before for inclusion alongside the 365 acts previously included in the Hall, which began in 1983 and had a physical museum that opened in Cleveland in 1995. Artists become eligible to join 25 years after the release of their first record and a panel of more than 1,000 industry figures vote on the inductees.
The Hall of Fame is seen by admirers as a defining canon of western pop and rock, and by critics as a badly incomplete, capricious and uneven set of choices that has deprioritised women and people of colour. Writing in the Guardian in March, Courtney Love criticised the Hall of Fame as an “annual reminder of just how extraordinary a woman must be to make it into the ol’ boys club”.
As usual, this year’s inductees were drawn from a wider pool of shortlisted artists, which included Soundgarden, the White Stripes, Cyndi Lauper, Joy Division/New Order, A Tribe Called Quest, Iron Maiden and Warren Zevon.
Rage Against the Machine have been waiting even longer than Bush to be inducted: this year was their fifth time as a finalist. They thanked the Hall of Fame for recognising “the music and the mission” and called their inclusion part of a “surprising trajectory” for “a band who is as well known for our albums as we are for our fierce opposition to the US war machine, white supremacy, and exploitation”.
Nelson, who turned 90 last weekend, was inducted on his first nomination, as were Michael, Elliott and Crow; Michael was automatically inducted as the finalist to earn the most votes from a public poll.
Outside the main inductees are a number of other award recipients. Chaka Khan, Al Kooper and Bernie Taupin receive the musical excellence award, while DJ Kool Herc and Link Wray earn the musical influence award. Don Cornelius, the host of long-running music revue Soul Train who died in 2012, is given the Ahmet Ertegun award for excellence by non-performing music industry figures.
Hall of Fame president and chief executive Joel Peresman told Rolling Stone that he hoped Bush would perform at the induction ceremony on 3 November: “We open that door. It’s up to her.” If she did perform, it would be her first live performance since her 2014 London concert residency, Before the Dawn, which was in turn her first live performance in 35 years.
She earned a new and impassioned fanbase in 2022, after her song Running Up That Hill was used as a crucial plot point in the hit Netflix series Stranger Things. The song re-entered the charts, eventually reaching No 1 in the UK and No 3 in the US.
