Lucy Mangan 

The Kate Bush Story: Running Up That Hill review – ‘the most beautiful mystery’

A wonderful portrait of this prodigious talent that also gave proper weight to her evolution and her less commercial, still astonishing work, writes Lucy Mangan
  
  

Kate Bush in concert, 1986
Fathomless talent … Kate Bush in concert, 1986. Photograph: Fotex/REX Photograph: Fotex/REX

When Kate Bush got her £3,000 record deal from EMI at 16, she used some of it to pay for dance classes with the legendary choreographer Lindsay Kemp. In last night's The Kate Bush Story: Running Up That Hill (BBC 4), a documentary about the singer-songwriter broadcast on the near-eve of her first tour in 35 years, he remembered how he had to coax her forward from the back row – . "She was as timid as hell … but once she started dancing, she was a wild thing" – and a few months later found an LP pushed under his door.

It was Bush's first album, The Kick Inside, released in 1978, with the song Moving dedicated to Kemp. "I didn't know she had any aspirations to be a singer," he says. "She never talked about herself." Fellow contributor Elton John called her "the most beautiful mystery", and recalled how at his A-lister-stuffed civil partnership ceremony she was the only person anyone wanted to speak to.

Guests, contributors and soon even formerly ignorant viewers like me were in awe of the talent displayed and then intelligently discussed and dissected by John, Kemp and other respected experts, such as David Gilmour, Peter Gabriel, John Lydon, Tori Amos and Del Palmer, Bush's bandmate and partner from the 1970s to 1990s. Neil Gaiman was on hand to hymn her fearlessly literary inspirations and lyrics, from – of course – Wuthering Heights (from which she derived her first single, in March 1978) to Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Ulysses in the title track of her 1989 album, The Sensual World.

Bush herself appeared only in old interview footage – so young, so fragile, so shy, but full of the sureness and certainty that only talent brings – but what emerged was a wonderful, detailed portrait of that talent. Although it gave her precocity its full due (she had written The Man With the Child in His Eyes by the time Gilmour came to listen to her when she was 14), it also gave proper weight to her evolution and her later, less commercial, still astonishing work. Why it chose to close on a stupid jarring joke by Steve Coogan, I do not know. But the rest of it succeeded in making Bush and her work less of a mystery but no less beautiful for that.

• This article was amended on 26 August 2014 to correct the spelling of Del Palmer's name, from Del Parker as an earlier version said.

 

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