The singer's much-anticipated series of concerts are a sell-out, her
return to the stage heralded by critics everywhere. Yet her particular
brand of carefully crafted fantasy was not always so widely acclaimed
Kate Bush in 1978, the year the public first got to hear her.
The string of hits from Wuthering Heights to Cloudbusting is almost unrivalled for sustained brilliance and escalating oddness – only the Beatles, from start to finish, and Bowie, from Space Oddity to Fashion, surpass it.
Just take a look at the high points, year by year …
1978: Wuthering Heights. Gothic romance distilled into four-and-a-half minutes of gaseous rhapsody, this was released as her first single at Bush's insistence in the face of opposition from seasoned and cautious EMI executives; wilfulness vindicated by the month it spent at the top of the charts.
1979: Them Heavy People (the radio cut from the On Stage EP), which namedropped the Russian mystic Gurdjieff and Sufi whirling dervishes, a celebration of being intellectually-emotionally expanded: "it's nearly killing me … what a lovely feeling".
1980: Breathing, a chillingly claustrophobic sound-picture of slow death through radiation sickness after the bomb drops: "Chips of plutonium/are twinkling in every lung." Swiftly followed by Army Dreamers: perhaps the best, certainly the most subtle of anti-war songs, inventing and rendering obsolete Let England Shake a couple of decades ahead of schedule.
1981: Sat in Your Lap. Avant-pop stampede of pounding percussion and deranged shrieks, a sister-song to Public Image Ltd's Flowers of Romance, but lyrically about the quest for knowledge: "I want to be a scholar!"
1982: The Dreaming, Bush's first real flop, but artistically a triumph: inspired by Australian indigenous culture and music, it's a Fairlight fairytale that used smashed-marble for percussion sounds and prophesised a completely alternate future for sampling-based pop than what would actually transpire.
1985: Running Up That Hill, an ecstastic protest against the limits of identity and empathy, pre-empting Prince's similarly inspired If I Was Your Girlfriend by a couple of years. Then Cloudbusting, a song/video about psychologist-turned-mystic Wilhelm Reich's attempts to build a rain-making machine, as seen through the faithful eyes of small son Peter.
As words and as music, none of these scream "hit single". Yet all but one of them were. It's therefore hardly surprising that Bush's name gets reeled out, with varying degrees of appropriateness, as the ancestor for any new female artist trying to merge glamour, conceptualism, innovation and autonomy: recent examples include Grimes, Julia Holter and FKA Twigs. Yet, strange as it seems now, Bush was not always impregnably cool. In fact, despite her massive record sales and mainstream fame, she was not afforded much respect by critics or hip listeners in the late 1970s.
This was partly a matter of timing. After a year of being developed by EMI, (who funded her while she "grew up", expanding her horizons and honing her craft) Bush emerged into a British music scene transformed by punk. Both her sound and her look seemed conventionally feminine when juxtaposed with ferociously confrontational performers such as Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene, who shredded expectations of how the female voice should sound and who shattered taboos with their lyrical content and appearance.
Bush's fantastical lyrics, influenced by children's literature, esoteric mystical knowledge, daydreams and the lore and legends of old Albion, seemed irrelevant, and deficient in street-cred at a time of tower-block social realism and agit-prop. Her odd combo of artiness and artlessness, and the way she came across in interviews – at once guileless and guarded – made her a target for music-press mockery. Her music was often dismissed as a middlebrow soft option, easy listening with literary affectations.
Despite being as young or younger than, say, the Slits, Bush seemed Old Wave: she belonged with the generation of musicians who had emerged during the 1960s ("boring old farts", as the punk press called them). Some of these BOFs were indeed her mentors, friends, and collaborators: David Gilmour, Peter Gabriel and Roy Harper. Growing up, her sensibility was shaped by her older brothers, in particular the musical tastes and spiritual interests of Jay, 13 years her senior and a true 60s cat.
Punk often sneered at "art" as airy-fairy, bourgeois self-indulgence, but its ranks were full of art-school graduates and this artiness blossomed with the sound, design and stage presentation of bands such as Wire and Talking Heads. Yet Bush's music seemed the wrong kind of "arty": ornate rather than angular, overly decorative and decorous. It was the sort of musically accomplished, well-arranged, album-oriented art-pop that EMI had been comfortable with since the Beatles and had pursued with Pink Floyd, Cockney Rebel and Queen. They signed Bush expressly as the first major British female exponent of this genteel genre.
And that's where Bush was situated on her first two albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart: somewhere at the crossroads of singer-songwriter pop, the lighter side of prog, and the highbrow end of glam. Like Bowie, she studied mime with Lindsay Kemp, took classes in dance, and made a series of striking, inventive videos.
EMI's Bob Mercer hailed Bush as "a completely audio-visual artist" and spoke of the company's intention to break her in America through television rather than radio (this, several years before MTV even existed). Her one and only tour was a theatrical mega-production in the rigidly choreographed tradition of Diamond Dogs, all dancers and costume changes and no-expense-spared staging. Reviewing one of the 1979 concerts for NME, Charles Shaar Murray typified the general rock press attitude towards Bush at that point, scornfully describing the show as a throw-back to "all the unpleasant aspects of David Bowie in the Mainman era.... [Bowie manager/Mainman boss] Tony DeFries would've loved you seven years ago, Kate, and seven years ago maybe I would've too. But these days I'm past the stage of admiring people desperate to dazzle and bemuse, and I wish you were past the stage of trying those tricks yourself." Spectacle, in the immediate years after punk, was considered a narcissistic star trip, fundamentally non-egalitarian.
Abandoning the live arena altogether, Bush plunged deeper into the studio, exploring its capacities for illusion-spinning: a theatricality of the mind's eye, conjured through sound. Her music got more challenging, harder to ignore or deny, as she gradually assumed total control. On 1980's Never For Ever, Bush co-produces but is clearly calling the shots: the result is like the missing link between Laura Ashley and Laurie Anderson. Two years later, the production and arrangement entirely in Bush's hands, came her wholly unfettered mistress-piece: The Dreaming.
Bush revelled in the empowerment, declaring that "the freedom you feel when you're actually in control of your own music is fantastic" but giving the emotion a distinctly female inflection: "as soon as you get your hands on the production, it becomes your baby. That's really exciting for me, because you do everything for your own child."
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