I was slowly blooming when it came to listening to Kate’s music. As a teenager I had moved to Tennessee and tried to go to college, but ended up returning home to my parents with my tail between my legs. The first adult friend I made when I returned was the assistant of a painter named Allison, and he played me in Wuthering Heights on a New Jersey car ride. I had never heard such a complex melody at this high range before – or a song so exploratory in production and adaptation. The music that Kate Bush makes is quite defiant of the genre. Hearing her talk about Emily Brodeur’s novel was something I had never heard before. introducing herself to a story that was not hers. I had never heard music in such a literary way. As a singer, what has directly influenced me is the circular style of her melodies. one goes into the other and they are never repeated in exactly the same way. I do not think it is ever a very strict verse-refrain. The wrong person could do what makes him sound really crazy. Individually, the ideas may not make sense, and it may push it to this other place: her choices are really beautiful and massive and dramatic. It looks a lot like a movie to me.
Brian Molko, Placebo: “I could leave the chores of my daily life”
Brian Molko. My first contact with Kate Bush was the video for Babooshka when I was a teenager. I had never seen anything like it: who is this man from the time he sings an incredibly strange song? I was completely captivated by this beautiful woman who had such a gift and looked so unique. Then I discovered that my older brother had [album] Kick Inside, that’s how they introduced me to The Man With the Child in His Eyes and Wuthering Heights. afterward [in 1985] Hounds of Love came out and completely caught my mind. It was the first time I heard an album that had such a soundtrack: there was a story being told from beginning to end, especially from the more dreamy, more psychedelic side two. My insomnia started when I was very young, so instead of sleeping I would listen to Hounds of Love: “Let me sleep and dream of sheep.” Kate created her own emotional universe. I’m nostalgic for that period in music because I think we are given too much information today, so there is less opportunity for us to create these personal universes through someone else ‘s work. There must be enough ambiguity to make it very personal to each listener. Kate’s music meant that I could let go of my daily chores and family situation and escape my imagination – that ‘s what I’re still looking for in music today. I liked almost all of Running Up That Hill, but there were a few things that bothered me. One was the sound of the trap: really 80’s and quite general. Then, as I got more and more into the lyrics and they touched me more, I thought the rhythm of the song was a bit fast to really land the weight of the lyrics. We’ve been in the habit of rehearsing our favorite songs since the ’80s, so I suggested we do Running Up That Hill, but slow down as fast as we could without being tormented, and obviously we wanted to keep it electronic with sounds. from the early 2000s. I met Kate once at a party: she was a record company and there was a regular queue to talk to. When I got ahead, the first thing he said to me was, “I like your cover of my song.” That was enough. I’m very, very happy that she got Kate ‘s approval.
Rae Morris: “Her music has a scale from the moon and back”
Rae Morris. Photo: Reuben Bastienne-Lewis When I was about 14, my dad sat me down at a desktop computer and played my Cloudbusting video on YouTube. It was the first music video I saw that had a narrative and a famous actor, Donald Sutherland – it was like a movie. I wasn’t making music yet, but it definitely sparked something in my brain like, “Oh, wow, a female creator had the vision for that.” Soon after, I went to HMV, bought some records, and slowly wrote a story about her music. I felt like I was catching up: I always felt a deep jealousy that I was not listening to the radio when Wuthering Heights was first released. Her music has to do with combining small details with spiritual, spooky, wider cinematic elements: a really large, imaginative scale from the moon and back, but also the sound of blood running in your veins. As a teenager I felt that her voice was my inner voice. I also like that she is an ambitious goddess and at the same time a family woman living on a farm. it is a perfect balance to be inaccessible but also warm. As a mother, it was a great inspiration in the sense that you can have a child and record and tour when it suits you. I like that he has never played the game this way – he has rewritten the rules.
Mike Scott, the Waterboys: “We had an old soul behind us”
Mike Scott. Photo: Alicia Canter / The Guardian When Kate made her Wuthering Heights debut, I felt like we – the British public – had an old soul behind us. It wasn’t just the echo of the story, with Cathy returning to the Heathcliff window. it was Kate, that voice, that character. It was as if an old strain of English magic had returned to her personality, and so it was. All the promise of this first “return” came true and has been fulfilled.
Jenny Hval: “Reporting from the War Zone of Human Experience”
Jenny Fala. Photo: Jenny Berger Myhre I remember watching her videos – Hounds of Love, Cloudbusting and Running Up That Hill. I was only five then, but they made me feel great. They were so evocative, the relationship between child and father in Cloudbusting always made me cry. I continued to write my dissertation for two Kate Bush albums, The Sensual World and The Dreaming. I also looked at her re-recording of Joyce in The Sensual World, which I think is, poetically, one of the most successful lyric works in pop music. Working so hard on her music made me gain immense respect for her work. I feel like she is completely unique in her ability to research the stories of others and retell them. So many of her songs are directly related to a book, a movie or an image. And instead of the well-known nostalgic pop music narrator “if I could go back”, the emotional density of these stories is always completely intact, through her voice, production twists and wonderful melodic themes. It is as if he is a reporter, reporting from the war zone of human experience.
Hayden Thorpe, Wild Beasts: “Innovative, experimental, harmoniously strange”
Hayden Thorpe. Photo: Broomberg & Chanarin When I started playing in my late teens and early 20s, people said I sounded like a Kate Bush man. At that time I was very offended by people who said I sounded a) like a woman and b) like an artist I had never heard of. From there, however, I decided to listen to her. I started the first day – The Kick Inside, Wuthering Heights – and realized that what it created at the time was a form of expression in itself. It has almost become a subspecies, this form of exaggeration – so unique and so uniquely English. It’s like being from English mythology: Maid Marian, good versus evil, the forest. I think what she may not be praised enough for is the sound mastery of her records: they are pioneering, sometimes experimental and sometimes harmoniously weird, but it always seems to work. Morning Fog, Hounds of Love’s latest song, is a kind of in-micro deal – it takes you on this truly exciting journey and takes you there.
Peaches: “I grew up with her in real time”
peaches. Photo: Daria Marchik When I was about 13, my girlfriend Julia Rosenberg came up with The Kick Inside – it was in 1979, a year after its release. I’m the youngest of the three, and by the time my brother was listening to everything from Yes to the Ramones, my sister was on Earth, Wind & Fire and Genesis and my parents with the musicals and Barbra Streisand. So when I got this Kate Bush album, I was like: this is my music. I was obsessed with this album and then I got into her story: how she waited three years before she showed up to learn how to dance and all that. Then we got a video player and videotaped the movie The Tour of Life – this very dramatic live music show [at Hammersmith Odeon]. It was the only thing I had in the VCR and I liked it so much. Nobody does the shit they did: they imitate walking in the wind, doing these dances and at the end they say goodbye to everyone for two minutes jumping up and down. I grew up with her in real time. When I was 16, The Dreaming came out. The record company kept telling her to find producers and she told you to fuck and she set up her own studio and produced the whole album herself. had such a fiery, independent nature. It’s very strange and not very commercial but so incredible. Then, when Hounds of Love came out, I said: oh my God, this is it! That’s what it does encapsulate in one thing, and in this new pop style that may be related, Americans and Canadians will finally get it. Running Up That Hill’s drumbeat is unquestionable. It is timeless, it is not of any kind. Her acting prowess had such an impact on me: how independent she was and how generous she was with her performance: she really does it with scripts and plays. And she is so devoted, you say: I’m in.
Barry Hyde, the Futureheads: “There’s still a lot of mystery to this”
The Futureheads. Photo: Paul Alexander Knox The first time I saw Kate Bush was in Babooshka’s video: I must have been about five. We had a collection called The Whole Story – a …
