Kate Bush low-key made some of the most riveting music videos of her era. It's the way she just 100% commits on-screen to every and any premise, regardless of how strange it might be.
People were quick to call it 'pretentiousness' back in the day and I suppose it is, at least in the sense that she takes her ideas seriously. She deserves to, because they're often supremely good ideas.
For example, I don't know how to talk about the song "Cloudbusting" without talking about its fascinating music video (co-starring Donald Sutherland!).
Album covers were so much cooler in the Seventies. 
There are many reasons why Kate Bush is so singular as a cult artist, but one that I'm really worried about properly getting across on the podcast is just how inextricably other arts are related to her music, specifically dance. You need to SEE her in action to understand her.
Kate Bush is one of the only people in rock/pop music (which is to say, not Broadway/theater) where you can feel that some songs were *written* for choreographed routines. They ebb and flow around rhythms that sometimes only come together when fused w/avant-garde dance. Strange.
The almost terrifying preciousness of Bush is also a major part of her story. She wrote and recorded this song when she was THIRTEEN YEARS OLD.
THIRTEEN.
THIRTEEN.
The story of how Kate Bush broke into the music business is one of the legit feel-good legends of rock music: she was discovered by Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour when she was only 13, and he basically said to her: "you are immense talent and need to be protected from vultures."
So he produced a recording of some of her songs *and then left it in the vaults for years*. In other words: this souffle needs time to properly rise, let's not rush it. Some of those tracks made her debut LP three years later.
What happens when you have *that* much lead time? That much time, sheltered away, to properly fashion a true public emergence, a statement? Sometimes what you get is overcooked. But then sometimes what you get is "Moving."
It's literally her declaration of purpose. She is MOVING. This is music that implies motion, which may sound like a weird thing to center when talking about an elfin-voiced UK art-rocker with almost zero R&B in her sound, but makes sense the moment you spend five minutes w/Kate.
"Kite" is a miracle of a song. Imagine the whitest, most zany-pretentious theater girl you knew in high school trying out COD-REGGAE. And yet it's a truly inspired fusion because she crafted a melody that literally *sounds like a kite.*
I admire how *well-planned* that song is, again as if it was written with the theatrical effect in mind: her melody line starts out bobbing up and down gently (like a kite getting off the ground) and when the chorus hits it SWOOPS. Huge, giant careening highs to lows. Glorious.
I've said it for years: the supreme joy of THE KICK INSIDE (Bush's debut) is how the first half of the album is stunning, and then you flip it over and all the hit singles are on the second side. She never makes the easy pander play.
Who was the first woman to ever make it to #1 on the UK charts writing and performing her own song? It was Kate Bush. In 1978. Singing a song she wrote as high-schooler about a friggin' Emily Bronte novel:
If you're like me -- and I know I am -- your initial encounter with "Wuthering Heights" (which is quite likely your first exposure to Bush as well) will just be straight-up "WTF?!?" The keeningly shrill voice she opens it with. The bizarre ultra-expressionist dance. But then...
...the clarity w/which she sings the lines (again, almost as if made for a dance routine) carries the point straight home even if you haven't read the book. And it wins you over so subtlely, just easing into that "wuthering, wuthering, wuthering heights" that kicks to the chorus.
By the end, if you listen with open ears, you are immensely moved. Tormented lost souls, ghosts wandering the moors desperately trying to claw their way back home. Unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
She'd never even read the book. Saw a TV movie, then wrote.
She'd never even read the book. Saw a TV movie, then wrote.
"How could you leave me
when I needed to possess you?
I hated you.
I loved you too."
Kate Bush wrote that line, boiling down some of the most complex and intense human emotions adults will ever experience, into a perfect observation when she was 14.
when I needed to possess you?
I hated you.
I loved you too."
Kate Bush wrote that line, boiling down some of the most complex and intense human emotions adults will ever experience, into a perfect observation when she was 14.
One thing is for sure: there will never again be a #1 chart-topper in Britain where the name "Heathcliff" leads the chorus. Thanks, Kate.
This is absolutely true about Bush and her lyrical vision, and is why Peter Gabriel putting her into "Don't Give Up" as the consoling wife for a man who feels utterly useless b/c he's jobless is maybe the most brilliant UK musical stuntcasting of the '80s:
https://twitter.com/SolarJones3000/status/1475271535682273280
"Don't Give Up," and Kate Bush's contribution to it, is something that affects me so personally that it's almost uncomfortable to discuss. A hit single heard by millions that feels devastatingly private. Give Pete major credit (he wrote it), but she's why.
Well it certainly seems like I do, and guess whose account it is?
https://twitter.com/evisokey/status/1475275974988255232
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