Like much of Britain in 1978, I was transfixed, maybe skewered, by that voice, the big eyes, the dancing – serious, in a leotard – one palm, then the other, pushing flatly at an invisible window, trying to get in, “Cathyyyyyyy”.
But I was 10 and in thrall to Abba. Kate Bush toured the UK the following year (and never again, ever), beginning in Liverpool, not far away, while I was at home having my tea. It wasn’t until my teens – by which time Bush had released three LPs, all of which had passed me by – that the epiphany struck. I was at a friend’s house; on the record player the singer-songwriter’s debut album, The Kick Inside: the swooping, swooning reverie of an 18-year-old from Kent, borne into the room on a tide of whale song. A few bars into Moving and I was hooked for life.
I love all kinds of music, but the complete works of Kate Bush are part of me; every twist and turn of each unwaveringly herself note; the melting melodies, the donkey noises; each beat and tic, down to the last rifle click (and accompanying blink) on Army Dreamers; the nasal outbreath on All the Love.
Meanwhile, Bush knowledge just sticks, unbidden, like iron filings to a magnet; the pub where she first gigged; the milk and chocolate consumed to phlegm up her vocals on Houdini; her shy advice to Delia Smith re cooking brown rice (“you just boil it in water with salt”). I have Kate Bush to thank for switching me on to, among other things, English folk song, Bulgarian voices and my own Irish musical roots. She could probably get me out of a coma.
The fan conventions I heard about through reading “the oldest established Kate Bush fanzine”. This was around the time she went quiet, after her 1985 masterpiece Hounds of Love (I have a signed copy, won by sending the answer, “Babooshka”, on a postcard to Richard Skinner at Radio 1). HomeGround, named after a track on second album Lionheart, was produced in monochrome, on shiny pages that seethed with love for Kate. It was illustrated with uncanny pencil sketches of our elusive heroine by HomeGround’s two resident artists; in the absence of any news whatsoever, readers were treated to long features headlined “Five years ago…”; “Ten years ago…”.
I flinched at some of the more intense fan contributions; the annual reports of “Katemas” (30 July, Bush’s birthday, the same date as Emily Brontë’s), when less inhibited devotees would gather to celebrate on Glastonbury Tor or at Top Withens, site of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Nevertheless, I kept up my subscription.
The first convention I went to was at the Hammersmith Palais, November 1990, a year after the release of lush sixth album The Sensual World. Having travelled down to London the day before from deepest Cumbria, where I then lived, I joined the back of a queue of geeky guys and gothic girls hunched against a cold Saturday morning waiting for the doors to open. With me was a friend who, like me, was riven with curiosity yet keen to appear nonchalant.
A surreal, quite long few hours followed. Wall-to-wall Kate Bush music; a quiz (who played didgeridoo on The Dreaming? Rolf Harris, easy; who directed the Cloudbusting video? No idea). People straight off the plane from Japan and America swapped picture discs in dark corners. Then Kate Bush her actual self appeared from somewhere – it’s all a bit of a blur – perched on a sofa wearing soft grey loungewear and saying “You must be mad!” before sweetly answering questions and singing a little thank you song written on a piece of paper she fished from her sock.
In 1993, uneasy album No 7 The Red Shoes was released, along with a 50-minute musical film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, co-starring Miranda Richardson. It premiered at the London film festival in a double bill with Nick Park’s new Wallace & Gromit stunner The Wrong Trousers, which I guiltily enjoyed more. Bush, in the audience with her partner, her father and seemingly half the official Kate Bush fan club, exited to rapturous applause.
There was one more sighting. In 1994 (my second and last convention), Bush, by now 35, rose up through a trapdoor in the floor of the Hippodrome, Leicester Square to a deafening roar, picked some raffle tickets out of a cardboard box, waved and was gone. I can’t say I blamed her.
In the long silence that followed I adapted; immersed myself in Joni Mitchell, Sandy Denny (thanks, Never for Ever); went to Tori Amos gigs. The only Kate Bush album I listen to regularly these days is her “mad”, brilliant fourth album The Dreaming. Deep down, though, I am hard-wired. I can still sing Infant Kiss in French (found years ago in a hypermarket). I always remember her birthday. And when Bush’s new single, King of the Mountain – from her long-awaited, imminent eighth album, Aerial – received its first airplay two weeks ago, it felt like a visitation.
Aerial by Kate Bush is released by EMI on 7 November
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