The mystery of Kate Bush: she disappeared without a trace and decades later she earned millions of dollars for Stranger Things.
By the age of 16 she had already composed around 400 songs. Marveled by her strange voice and music, David Gilmour helped her record her first album. In the 90s and at the height of her success, when she had turned 35, she retired from public life and entered the enigma. The Netflix series made a 1986 song of hers reach number one in the charts. A living myth, he turns 65 today.
“The world has gone mad,” Kate Bush said last year; pretty much what the world had said about her in the 1990s, when she disappeared completely, at 35, after a glorious decade. The British singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who turns 65 today, was referring in 2022 to the latest rarity in her rare career: having reached the No. 1 spot on the most-played songs in Britain with a track released 37 years earlier. “Running Up That Hill” had not reached the international top in 1986, when it appeared as part of the album “Hounds of Love”; it arrived in 2022, following its resurrection as the leitmotif of the fourth season of the youth series “Stranger Things.”
Without moving from his house, without stopping watching series or entertaining himself with gardening, Bush conquered the elusive millennial and centennial world, multiplied the euros in his bank account – he earned, according to estimates, about 2.3 million dollars – and regained that old massive fame, which didn’t seem to please him so much.
Yes, you remember well. And those who don’t, know this. Bush is the author of “Wuthering Heights”, that unclassifiable song that caused a furor among sophisticated music lovers and among those who, without having a clue, danced to it as one more “slow” in times of disco music. Just like “Running Up…”, it reached the top of all the charts, but from 1979, the year it appeared on the debut album “The Kick Inside”. Kate, 19 years old, became the first woman in the history of pop music to sell a million copies of an album composed exclusively of her own songs. It was fifteen years before she vanished from public life without a trace, leaving her fans in confusion and mystery.
Last year, already reappeared, she said: “Stranger Things is such a good series that I thought the song could get some attention. But I never imagined something like this would happen. It’s exciting, but also overwhelming. For all these people who weren’t even born when I wrote it to hear it for the first time and discover it is something special. I never listen to my old songs again.”
Precocious and out of the norm
Catherine Buss was born on July 30, 1958 in the county of Kent, England. The daughter of a music-loving doctor and a nurse who was also a dancer, with two brothers devoted to folk music and literature, she learned to play the piano and violin at the age of 11; by 13 she was composing songs; by 15 she had made home recordings of many of the songs that would soon become her first hits. A talented and overstimulated girl: it is estimated that she composed around 400 songs before the age of 16 (that does sound overwhelming, much more so than being rediscovered fifty years later by young people of the 21st century). She sent some of them to the major labels, but cri cri cri, she got no response.
At this point it must be recognized that, beyond the fact that she was a minor, Kate’s songs did not seem like ideal merchandise for the record industry. Why? For the same reasons that would arouse the admiration of listeners with both black and pink palates. Her squeaky voice, a mixture of bird and girl possessed by angels and demons; her melodies that still sound eclectic, mystifying; her grandiloquent, expressionistic style; her lyrics, more conceptual than romantically goofy.
“Wuthering Heights” is a good example: Bush takes and resignifies, with poetic and narrative eagerness, the tormented voice of Catherine Earnshaw, a character from “Wuthering Heights”, a novel that Emily Brontë – born, like her, on July 30 – had published in 1848. Many other songs of hers were to be based on powerful female stories and in constant dialogue with literature: from Joyce’s Ulysses to Andersen’s tales, passing through Henry James and Oscar Wilde.
Oh, and let’s not forget: Kate would stand up to anyone. The alpha males at the record labels saw that when they wanted to take the “chick tunes” shortcut and lead Bush by the nose into that niche. No, sir. She wouldn’t let them, never made it easy for them.
Gilmour’s doors
Despite everything, the doors of the girl’s success had to be opened by a consagrado man, David Gilmour, guitarist Pink Floyd, who listened to her on a recording, got marveled and decided to do something with that. “Listening to it I was intrigued by her strange voice. I went to her house in Kent and met her parents. She played for me, God mine, and I spent about 40 or 50 recorded songs,” declared the enemy of Roger Waters in the band “The dark side of the moon. Quick-witted and reflexive, he called Andrew Powell, who was then working with “The Alan Parsons Project”, and Geoff Emerick, who had been a collaborator with the Beatles, a total dream team, to contribute to the cornerstone of Kate’s career: the recording of three demos.
Terry Slater, the EMI manager who a year later would sign the Sex Pistols, was the first businessman to accept the value of that different music, although he had trouble convincing his colleagues at the label, partly because the teenager’s lyrics spoke of incest, poisoning, supernatural phenomena and explicit sex, and did not seem very appropriate for a minor who was studying at a religious school, St. Joseph Convent School.
After a strip and affection between EMI, Gilmour and Bush, the company offered her a contract firm to launch its first disc when out of age. Kate took advantage of those two years to make arrangements for their songs – lowered about 120, many of them with Gilmour- and study dance and mimo with Lindsay Kemp, as well as Bowie had done so shortly before with Adam Darius.
“David was really responsible for me getting my recording contract with EMI,” Bush once gratefully declared. The song with which the guitarist had convinced the label’s representatives was “The Man With a Child in His Eyes”. Gilmour would also produce her first album. The friendship between both remained intact with the passage of time and also the artistic collaborations, in songs like “Pull Out the Pin”, “Love and Anger” and “Rocket’s Tail”.
Success and Disappearance
Kate’s 1979 debut, “The Kick Inside,” was extraordinary. Outside of pre-digested music, the album’s songs combined the sound of romantic ballads, why not, with psychedelic rock, folk and some reggae. Bush’s image jumped to TV shows, magazine covers and commercials. In the videoclip of “Wuthering Heights” she appeared characterized as a specter dancing madly in a foggy landscape; the ghostly communication between Cathy and Heathcliff that “Wuthering Heights” in serial version had suggested to her, because she had not yet read the book.
Restless, obsessive, nonconformist (“I will always be hard on myself”, she used to say), Bush did not limit herself to pivot around that hit or others. That same year decided to make a tour, The Tour of Life, and create your company, Kate Bush Music, to maintain autonomy. Prepared choreographed for his shows, in which he made his debut the wireless microphone, which allowed him to move without difficulty by the stage. Her search for new sounds made her confront her musicians and discover new paths, such as the one opened to her by synthesizers, especially the Fairlight CMI, which she met through Peter Gabriel, with whom she would record “Don’t Give Up”.
In the 80s, four of her albums climbed to the top of the charts: “Never for Ever” (1980), “Hounds of Love” (1985), “The Whole Story” (1986) and “The Sensual World” (1989), perhaps the least experimental of them all. As is: 26 songs she kept her, during that decade, in the international ranking of the forty most heard topics.
In 1993 she released “The Red Shoes”, whose songs -one of them recorded with Prince- were part of the audiovisual project “The Line, The Cross and The Curve”, a musical medium-length film starring Bush. Afterwards, the singer decided to take a break. Nobody, perhaps not even she, imagined that it would last twelve years. She would only come back in 2005 with “Aerial”; and in 2011 she would sound again with “50 Words of Snow”, a minimalist album with subtle jazz and electronic arrangements, in which she and the actor Stephen Fry recited fifty ways to mention snow.
The enigma artist
During her long public absence, Bush did not give interviews or appear at social events, nor did she reveal her musical plans, if she had any. Only her old statements remained, resignified by her silence: “It is not important for me to be understood by others. I am the shyest megalomaniac there is”. From what little is known, or rather speculated, during her retirement she devoted herself mainly to raising her only son, Albert, whom she had had with musician Danny McIntosh in 1998.
The scavenger press spread the word that she had psychiatric problems and she did not respond. “Kate is a mystery, the most wonderful mystery,” said Elton John after her marriage to David Furnish; at the mega-party of 500 celebrities one of the most sought after was Bush.
The mythological dimension increased. Some remembered that that 1979 tour, The Tour of Life, had been the singer’s only one. In one of those shows, the lighting director, Bill Duffield, just 21 years old, had fallen from a five-meter platform and, after a week of hospitalization, had died. The accident affected Kate, who planned a concert in tribute to Duffield, with Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley as guests. The concert ended with an emotional version of the Beatles’ “Let It Be”. Since then, Bush had not returned to the stage.
Unplanned comeback
In March 2014, he announced – to the collective astonishment – that he would make the second tour of his career, after 35 years. Actually, more than a tour, it was a series of 22 concerts at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, which were performed to a full house and pure devotion. As befits a true artist, Bush did not patronize the organizers, the fans or, much less, the critics. She did what she wanted. The shows, which combined music, theater, dance, literature, magic and poetry, were based mainly on the albums “Hound of Love” and “Aerial”, especially their long suites, which served as the basis for a narrative show. No demagoguery, no singing “Wuthering Heights” as a closing song or singing that one we all know.
In recent years, the pandemic returned Bush to ostracism, in this case collective ostracism. Until, as we said, last year “Stranger Things” – released in 2016 and set in the 80s – rescued his music, as it had done with that of Talking Heads, Kiss, The Clash, Duran Duran and many other bands of the era.
Fame came back into Bush’s life, though he neither needed it nor wanted it. By this time she had already been praised by Björk, Prince, Alanis Morissette, Elton John, Marianne Faithfull, John Lydon and many other illustrious colleagues. Had she died, Kate Bush would be today one of the great myths of pop music; happily she didn’t die, so she is, but quietly at home.