The story of Kate Bush

A farmhouse full of music

Catherine Bush was born on the thirtieth of July 1958 in Bexleyheath, Kent, the youngest of three children. Her father Robert was a family doctor and a keen amateur pianist. Her mother Hannah, a nurse, was the daughter of a farmer in County Waterford in Ireland, and she loved traditional Irish dancing. The family lived in a farmhouse more than three hundred and fifty years old at East Wickham, near Welling, with a rose garden, a duck pond turned into a swimming pool, and an old barn. Her older brothers were deep in the local folk scene. John, the eldest, was a poet and photographer, and Paddy made and played instruments. Irish and English folk songs filled the house, and she later said her brothers were the ones who turned her on to music.[1] [2] [3]

Kate taught herself piano at eleven, and she also played an old pump organ in the barn behind the house. Soon she was writing songs, by her own account at least one a day. She went to St Joseph's Convent Grammar School, a Catholic girls' school in Abbey Wood, where a classmate remembered a quiet girl who did not stand out. There was another side to her too. She trained at the Goldsmiths College karate club, where her brother John taught, and her squeaky battle cry earned her the nickname Ee ee. And until she was about eighteen, family and friends called her Cathy, a name that would soon feel like fate.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The family recorded tapes of her songs, dozens of them, and record companies passed. Then a family friend named Ricky Hopper got a tape to Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd. Gilmour was intrigued by what he called a strange voice. He went down to Kent, met her parents, and sat while she played him forty or fifty songs. In 1973, a few weeks after her fifteenth birthday, she recorded a demo at his home studio. Gilmour then paid for a more polished three song tape, produced by his friend Andrew Powell with the Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick. Two of those recordings from June 1975, The Man with the Child in His Eyes and The Saxophone Song, ended up on her first album.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

EMI signed her, but the label had a plan. Bob Mercer, who ran its repertoire division, believed she was too young to cope with either failure or sudden fame, so he kept her on a retainer. We gave her some money to grow up with, he said later. She stayed at school, left after her mock A levels with ten O levels, and spent the advance on dance. She took classes with Lindsay Kemp, the mime artist who had taught David Bowie. In 1977 she also fronted a pub band, the KT Bush Band, with Del Palmer on bass, Brian Bath on guitar and Vic King on drums. They played pubs like the Rose of Lee in Lewisham, mostly covers of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. She admitted she was terrified until she got up there.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Wuthering Heights and The Kick Inside

Late one night, on the fifth of March 1977, with a full moon outside, the eighteen year old sat at her piano and wrote Wuthering Heights in a few hours. The seed had been planted years earlier, when she caught the last minutes of a television adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel, with a hand reaching through a window. She only read the book afterwards, she said, to get the research right, and discovered that she shared her birthday with Emily Brontë. The song is sung by the ghost of Cathy Earnshaw at Heathcliff's window. Kate pitched her voice very high on purpose, because she was playing a spirit and wanted something ethereal.[1] [2] [3]

She recorded The Kick Inside at AIR Studios in London in the summer of 1977, with Andrew Powell producing. EMI would not let her use her pub band and insisted on experienced session players, so Powell brought in musicians from the Alan Parsons Project circle, including drummer Stuart Elliott and guitarist Ian Bairnson. The engineer, Jon Kelly, was on his first major project. He remembered that you could not keep her away from the sessions, and that she clearly wanted to be in the control room, running her own records. Bairnson played the closing guitar solo with a broken arm, and Kelly apologised to him for years for not mixing it louder. The final mix was finished at five or six in the morning, just in time to play to EMI.[1] [2] [3] [4]

EMI wanted a rockier song, James and the Cold Gun, as her first single. Kate refused. Bob Mercer later said she nailed him to the floor, and after it paid off he decided his job was simply to stay out of her way. The release was pushed back from November 1977 to avoid the Christmas rush, though a few copies slipped out to Capital Radio early. Wuthering Heights came out on the twentieth of January 1978. After her first Top of the Pops appearance it climbed fast, and in March it knocked ABBA's Take a Chance on Me off the top. It stayed at number one for four weeks, and she became the first woman to top the UK chart with a song she had written entirely herself.[1] [2] [3]

The Kick Inside, released on the seventeenth of February 1978, reached number three and sold more than a million copies in Britain. According to Guinness World Records, she was the first female artist to write every track on a million selling debut. The Man with the Child in His Eyes, written when she was thirteen, reached number six and won an Ivor Novello award. But EMI promoted the album with a poster of her in a tight pink top, and she was said to be the most photographed woman in Britain that year. Talk shows had her chatting about fitness and vegetarian cooking. Years later she complained that people did not even know she wrote her songs or played piano, and that she had been sold as a female body.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lionheart and the only tour

EMI wanted a quick follow up, and in late 1978 she was sent to Super Bear Studios in the hills above the French Riviera, the only album she ever made outside Britain. Lionheart came out on the tenth of November 1978, just nine months after her debut. Most of the songs were older ones, and Andrew Powell produced again, with Kate assisting. It reached number six, her only album to miss the top five, and critics called it a weaker copy of the first. The lead single Hammer Horror stalled at forty four, though Wow reached fourteen. Kate felt it had been rushed. In 1989 she called it a good album considering how quickly they made it, but said she was not really happy with it.[1] [2]

She took hold of the business side too, setting up her own publishing company and a management company called Novercia, with her family on the board. Then she turned down an offer to open for Fleetwood Mac and built her own show. The Tour of Life opened at the Liverpool Empire on the third of April 1979. It mixed songs with dance, mime, poetry and magic, with the magician Simon Drake, her brother John reciting poems, thirteen people on stage and seventeen costume changes a night. She sang from inside a giant egg upholstered in red satin, and shot down her dancers with red ribbons during James and the Cold Gun. Melody Maker called it the most magnificent spectacle ever encountered in rock.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Tragedy struck before the tour had properly begun. After a low key warm up show at Poole Arts Centre in Dorset on the second of April 1979, her twenty one year old lighting engineer, Bill Duffield, was checking the darkened venue when he fell about twenty feet through a gap in the stage structure and was killed. Kate was shattered and thought about cancelling everything. Guitarist Brian Bath remembered that she knew everyone on the crew by name, right down to the cleaner. The tour went on. The first of three extra London nights at the Hammersmith Odeon in May became a benefit for Duffield's family, with Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley joining her. On her next album she dedicated a song to him, Blow Away.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The last night at the Hammersmith Odeon, on the fourteenth of May 1979, turned out to be her final full concert for thirty five years. She later called the tour enormously enjoyable but physically exhausting, and Brian Bath recalled carrying her back after shows. She also said that by the end she felt a terrific need to retreat, because her sexuality was being given to the world in a way she found impersonal. The year before, she had flown to New York to sing on Saturday Night Live, with Paul Shaffer on piano, which remains her only live performance in America. At the end of 1979 the BBC aired a Kate Bush Christmas special, where she and Peter Gabriel duetted on Roy Harper's Another Day.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Taking the controls

For her third album she produced alongside Jon Kelly and let Andrew Powell go, saying he was a fantastic arranger but that she was strong minded and wanted to make her own decisions. While singing backing vocals on Peter Gabriel's third album, including Games Without Frontiers, she discovered the Fairlight CMI, one of the first digital samplers. Never for Ever, released on the eighth of September 1980, used it throughout, and Babooshka ends with the sound of breaking glass, one of the earliest Fairlight samples on a hit. The album entered at number one. She was the first British woman to top the album chart, and the first woman of any nationality to enter it at the top. On a signing tour, fans queued down Oxford Street.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Never for Ever was darker than its hits suggested. Breathing is sung from the point of view of an unborn child sensing nuclear fallout outside the womb, and she called it her little symphony. Army Dreamers is a waltz about a mother grieving a teenage son killed on army manoeuvres. Both reached number sixteen, while Babooshka, about a wife testing her husband's loyalty under a false name, reached number five. The album was full of ghosts and films too, from a haunted governess in The Infant Kiss to the revenge story of The Wedding List. That November she released a Christmas single, December Will Be Magic Again. Music papers voted her best female artist of the year, and she called it her favourite album so far.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In May 1981 she began The Dreaming, the first album she produced entirely alone. Hugh Padgham engineered the early sessions and later said it sounded terrible to him, but twenty year old Nick Launay, fresh from Public Image Ltd, found it thrilling, like the kids were in control. She miked up long sheets of corrugated iron and stacked sounds until engineers could barely hear them all. The mood darkened. She was troubled by the murder of John Lennon, and a sense of paranoia crept into songs about locked doors and a house under siege, one of them inspired by Stephen King's The Shining. The final weeks overlapped with the Falklands War, and she would climb out of a windowless basement studio at strange hours to grim news.[1] [2]

The Dreaming came out on the thirteenth of September 1982. Its songs were about a robbery gone wrong, the Vietnam War, Harry Houdini's death, and the destruction of Aboriginal land for uranium mining, with Rolf Harris on didgeridoo and the animal impersonator Percy Edwards. Critics were baffled. Neil Tennant, then writing for Smash Hits, called it very weird. It entered at number three but sold only about sixty thousand copies and earned just a silver disc, her lowest selling album. EMI's Brian Southall said it was the closest the company came in his time to handing an album back. Kate called it her she's gone mad album, yet it gave her a first US chart entry, and Björk and Big Boi later named it a favourite.[1] [2] [3]

Hounds of Love

After The Dreaming she needed air. In 1983 she and Del Palmer, her boyfriend, bassist and engineer, moved to a seventeenth century farmhouse near Sevenoaks in Kent. She gardened, danced again, and watched the skies from her piano. Then she built a forty eight track studio in the old barn at East Wickham Farm, her childhood home, where her parents still lived. EMI executives were not invited. The sessions ran on family time. Her mother brought tea and cakes mid morning, her father offered to fetch an Indian or Chinese takeaway at night, and Paddy would wander in with an idea for a mandolin part. The family dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, ended up as the hounds on the album cover.[1] [2]

The first song to arrive, written in a single summer evening in 1983, was Running Up That Hill. She sang a drum pattern to Del Palmer, who programmed it on a LinnDrum, and built the riff on the Fairlight with a sampled cello sound. The idea was a man and a woman making a deal with God to swap places, so each could finally understand the other. She called it A Deal With God, but EMI feared radio stations in religious countries would not play it. Coming off a commercial flop, she gave in, saying later that resisting would have been like cutting her own throat. She regretted it, and in 2022 said the song was still called A Deal With God to her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Side two of the album was a suite called The Ninth Wave, named from Tennyson, about a woman adrift in the sea at night after some unnamed disaster, drifting between nightmares and rescue. Side one held the singles. Cloudbusting came from Peter Reich's memoir about his father Wilhelm Reich, the psychoanalyst who built a rainmaking machine and died in an American prison in 1957. She sent the song to Peter Reich, who wrote back that he loved it. For the video, conceived with Terry Gilliam and directed by Julian Doyle, she tracked down Donald Sutherland and talked him into playing Reich. Visa problems meant he did it for free, with Kate herself playing his young son.[1] [2] [3]

She launched the single on the fifth of August 1985 on Terry Wogan's chat show, performing from behind a lectern to an estimated nine million viewers. Running Up That Hill reached number three, her biggest hit since her debut, and number thirty in America, where it was her only top forty hit for decades. Hounds of Love was released on the sixteenth of September 1985 and went straight to number one, knocking Madonna's Like a Virgin off the top. The NME called her a genius, the rarest solo artist Britain had ever produced. It became her best selling studio album, and it is widely considered her masterpiece. As she put it herself, its success finally shut EMI up.[1] [2] [3]

In 1986 Peter Gabriel asked her to sing on Don't Give Up, a duet about a man broken by unemployment, after Dolly Parton turned it down. Kate was nervous, felt she had messed up, and came back to sing it again. It reached number nine. That November EMI released The Whole Story, a hits collection with a new vocal on Wuthering Heights and a new single, Experiment IV. Its video, starring Hugh Laurie and Dawn French, was rejected by Top of the Pops as too violent. The Whole Story went to number one and became her biggest seller. In 1987 she won the Brit Award for best British female solo artist, and sang Running Up That Hill live with David Gilmour at The Secret Policeman's Third Ball.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Love, loss and The Red Shoes

The Sensual World, released on the sixteenth of October 1989, was what she called her most honest and personal album. The title song was meant to use Molly Bloom's closing soliloquy from James Joyce's Ulysses, but the Joyce estate refused, so she wrote her own words in its spirit. Her brother Paddy introduced her to Trio Bulgarka, a Bulgarian folk vocal group whose voices wind through three of the songs. This Woman's Work had first appeared in the John Hughes film She's Having a Baby, written from a frightened father's point of view to fit a scene that had already been shot. The album reached number two in Britain and became her biggest seller in America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Three days after the album came out, on the nineteenth of October 1989, her longtime guitarist Alan Murphy died of pneumonia caused by AIDS. He was thirty five. Murphy had played on the Tour of Life and on her albums from Never for Ever on, and had recently joined Level 42. He had kept his illness secret even from his bandmates. His guitar can still be heard on her 1991 cover of Elton John's Rocket Man, made for a tribute album. Kate had been madly in love with Elton as a teenager, and her reggae flavoured version reached number twelve in Britain and number two in Australia. In 2007 readers of The Observer voted it the greatest cover version of all time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The early nineties brought more loss. Her romance with Del Palmer ended, although they kept working together. In 1992 her mother Hannah, to whom she was exceptionally close, died, and people around Kate said it took her the best part of a year to get back to work. She had already written Moments of Pleasure, a ballad remembering people who had died, among them Alan Murphy, the dancer Gary Hurst, the film director Michael Powell and Bill Duffield. Her mother was still alive when Kate played it to her, and she could not stop laughing at hearing one of her own sayings in the song. Kate later said she was very, very tired in those years, but denied she had been close to a breakdown.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Red Shoes arrived on the first of November 1993, inspired by the 1948 Powell and Pressburger film about a dancer who cannot stop dancing. She simply rang musicians she admired and asked. Eric Clapton played on And So Is Love, Jeff Beck on You're the One, and Prince added guitar, keyboards and vocals to Why Should I Love You. It reached number two in Britain and number twenty eight in America. She planned a tour and recorded with a live band feel, but the tour never happened. She also wrote, directed and starred in a short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, with Miranda Richardson and her old teacher Lindsay Kemp. Later she dismissed it with a very rude word.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The long silence and the return

After The Red Shoes, Kate Bush vanished. She meant to take a year off, and twelve passed. The tabloids called her a recluse and compared her to Miss Havisham. In truth she had met a guitarist, Danny McIntosh, in 1992, and in 1998 they had a son, Albert, known as Bertie. She kept the birth private for about eighteen months, until Peter Gabriel let it slip on television. They moved to a house by the river in Berkshire, and she turned the garage into a studio. She chose not to hire a nanny or a housekeeper, saying she wanted to do the washing and the hoovering herself, and to give Bertie as normal a childhood as possible.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The comeback was Aerial, a double album released in November 2005, twelve years after her last. The single King of the Mountain, which wonders whether Elvis might still be alive and weighs the crushing pressure of fame, went to number four, her first top five hit in twenty years. The first disc included a song for Bertie played on Renaissance instruments, a song about Joan of Arc, and A Coral Room, a piano ballad about her late mother that she at first thought too personal to release. The second disc, A Sky of Honey, follows one summer day from dawn to the next sunrise, full of birdsong. Aerial went to number three in Britain and drew some of the best reviews of her career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The public face of the comeback was almost domestic. In her only interview for Aerial, done at home with toys scattered around, she insisted she was not some weirdo recluse and called herself a very strong person. She admitted that when she met the Queen at Buckingham Palace that year she asked for an autograph, because Bertie did not believe she was really meeting her. Then, in 2011, came two albums in one year on her own new label, Fish People. Director's Cut reworked songs from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes on analogue tape, some in lower keys to suit her deeper voice. And this time the Joyce estate said yes, so the title song became Flower of the Mountain, with Molly Bloom's words at last.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Six months later came 50 Words for Snow, seven long songs set against falling snow, built on her jazzy piano and Steve Gadd's drums. Bertie sang the part of a falling snowflake, Elton John duetted with her on Snowed in at Wheeler Street, and Stephen Fry read out her invented words for snow. Critics loved it, and it made her the first woman to have a top five album of new material in five successive decades. She even turned up in person to collect a South Bank award. She had declined to perform at the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, but a new remix of Running Up That Hill was played there and went back to number six. In the 2013 New Year Honours she was made a CBE.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Before the Dawn

On the twenty first of March 2014 she announced, out of nowhere, her first concerts in thirty five years. It would be fifteen nights at the Hammersmith Apollo, the same London theatre where the Tour of Life had ended. Tickets sold out in about fifteen minutes, her website crashed, and seven more nights were added. In 2011 she had said she hoped to play again before she got too ancient. Now she asked fans not to film anything, saying she wanted contact with an audience, not with iPhones, iPads or cameras. On the first night she introduced her teenage son Bertie, one of her backing singers, and said he had given her the courage to come back.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The opening show, on the twenty sixth of August 2014, began simply, with Kate barefoot in black and a band behind her. Then, six songs in, it turned into theatre. The whole of The Ninth Wave was staged, with Kate lost at sea, filmed floating in a flotation tank over three days, a rescue helicopter buzzing over the audience and fish skeleton creatures carrying her away. The novelist David Mitchell wrote dialogue, and the former Royal Shakespeare Company director Adrian Noble shared the directing. After the interval came A Sky of Honey, with a wooden puppet boy and Bertie as a painter, singing a new song, Tawny Moon. She closed with Cloudbusting. Almost eighty thousand people saw the twenty two shows.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The shows sent her catalogue flooding back into the charts. In September 2014 she had eight albums in the UK top forty at once, the first woman ever to do so, behind only Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Adele later said that watching Before the Dawn made her decide not to wait any longer with her own comeback album. The live album followed in November 2016, and in 2018 Kate remastered her whole catalogue for box sets. There was a dark footnote. Rolf Harris, who had played didgeridoo on The Dreaming and sang on Aerial, had been convicted in 2014 of indecently assaulting young girls. For the remasters his vocals were removed, and Bertie sang the parts instead.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

In July 2018, forty years after her first hit, she wrote a short poem for Emily Brontë, carved into a stone on the moors between the Brontë birthplace at Thornton and the parsonage at Haworth, beside tributes by Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay and Jeanette Winterson. She called it a chance to say thank you. That December she published How to Be Invisible, a book of her lyrics. In early 2019 she posted a statement about a 2016 interview in which she had praised Theresa May, saying she was not a Conservative supporter and had only meant to defend women in power. In 2020 she became a Fellow of the Ivors Academy, and in 2021 she joined Paul McCartney in calling for fairer pay from streaming.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Running up that hill, again

In May 2022 the fourth season of Netflix's Stranger Things made Running Up That Hill the lifeline of a grieving teenager, Max, played by Sadie Sink. In a key scene the song pulls her back from the monster Vecna. Music supervisor Nora Felder chose it, and Winona Ryder said she had been dropping hints for years by wearing Kate Bush T shirts on set. Kate rarely licenses her music, but she was already a fan and had watched from the first series. Within days, streams in America jumped by nearly ten thousand percent, and it became the most streamed song in the world. Kate said the whole world had gone mad, and admitted she had not listened to the song in a very long time.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

At first a chart rule that penalises older songs held it at number two in Britain, behind Harry Styles, even though it was the most popular track of the week. The rule was relaxed, and on the seventeenth of June 2022 it went to number one. It broke three records at once. It was the longest gap between number ones, forty four years after Wuthering Heights. It was the longest any single had taken to reach the top, thirty seven years. And at sixty three she became the oldest woman ever to top the UK chart. In America it reached number three, her first top ten hit there. It was Britain's song of the summer, and by June 2023 it had passed a billion streams on Spotify.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The resurgence brought honours she had long been denied. After nominations in 2018, 2021 and 2022, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Brooklyn on the third of November 2023. She did not attend. Big Boi of OutKast, a lifelong fan who first heard her through his uncle and listened to Running Up That Hill riding his bike to school, gave the speech, and St. Vincent sang the song. This Woman's Work found new audiences too, through films like A Man Called Otto and The Mother. In 2024 she was an ambassador for Record Store Day, and the Grammys nominated the packaging of her Hounds of Love reissues, her first nominations since 1996.[1] [2] [3] [4]

These years also took people close to her. Her bassist John Giblin, who had played with her since Babooshka and on the Before the Dawn stage, died in 2023 at seventy one, and she wrote that he was one of her dearest friends for over forty years. Ian Bairnson, whose solo closes Wuthering Heights, died that April after a long neurological illness. Rolf Harris died in May 2023. Then on the fifth of January 2024 Del Palmer died, aged seventy one. He had been her partner in the early years and engineered her albums for decades. She wrote that he once covered an entire mixing desk in cartoons, that it took him days, and that she would miss him terribly.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In October 2024 she released Little Shrew, a short animated film set to Snowflake, raising money for War Child. She said it grew from the shock of the war in Ukraine, and that people would feel more for a small creature than for a child. In the same rare interview she said she was very keen to start a new album and had lots of ideas, although when asked about playing live again she joked that she was not there yet. In February 2025 she joined more than a thousand musicians on a silent album protesting plans to let AI companies train on copyrighted music. As of 2026, 50 Words for Snow is still her most recent album of new songs, and her fans are still waiting.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Kate Bush

Kate Bush and Del Palmer. Del played bass in the KT Bush Band in 1977 and on her albums from Lionheart on, then taught himself engineering and recorded her records for decades. They were a couple from the late seventies to the early nineties, and he is the man about to be kissed on the cover of The Dreaming. After they split they kept working together. When he died in January 2024, she wrote that he had been a big part of her life and work, and that she would miss him terribly.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kate Bush and Danny McIntosh. She met the guitarist Danny McIntosh in 1992, and he played on The Red Shoes. Their son Albert was born in 1998. McIntosh has stayed almost entirely out of the public eye, though a 2005 interviewer watched him bring in tea, pizza and cake, only to be playfully told off by Kate. Elton John has referred to him as her husband, and she spoke in 2014 of her husband and son coming first.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Kate Bush and David Gilmour. Gilmour heard her tape as a teenager, visited her family in Kent and paid for professional demos, then steered her to EMI. He was executive producer on two tracks of The Kick Inside, sang on The Dreaming and played guitar on The Sensual World. They performed Running Up That Hill together in 1987, and in 2002 she joined him to sing Comfortably Numb. In 2024 he said he had tried to persuade her to play live again.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. She sang backing vocals on his Games Without Frontiers and No Self Control in 1980, and at his sessions she discovered the Fairlight sampler. He joined her at the benefit concert for Bill Duffield and on her 1979 Christmas special. Their 1986 duet Don't Give Up became a top ten hit, and it was Gabriel who let slip the birth of her son on television.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Kate Bush and Lindsay Kemp. The dancer and mime artist who had mentored David Bowie became her teacher after she read about his classes in a Time Out advert, paid for with her EMI advance. She called him one of her heroes and wrote Moving as a tribute. He taught her that movement should show emotion from inside, which shaped the Wuthering Heights videos. Kemp later appeared in her film The Line, the Cross and the Curve, and she paid tribute when he died in 2018.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Kate Bush and Paddy Bush. Her brother Paddy, six years older, played on her albums up to 2005, adding mandolin, balalaika, bamboo whips and whatever odd instrument a song needed. He played in the KT Bush Band and on the Tour of Life, introduced her to Trio Bulgarka and to Madagascan music, and appeared in her videos. Her brothers also shielded her from the record company early on, and they held shares in her companies, with their father as chairman.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Kate Bush and Bob Mercer. The EMI executive signed her as a teenager and paid her to grow up before releasing a note. He fought her over her first single and lost, and afterwards decided his job was to keep out of her way. EMI called her the company's daughter. The label's patience was tested by The Dreaming, but Hounds of Love restored the balance, and she said its success shut EMI up for good.[1] [2] [3]

Kate Bush and Elton John. As a teenager she was madly in love with Elton, and her 1991 cover of Rocket Man was voted the best cover ever by Observer readers. He credited her part in Don't Give Up with helping him get sober, saying she played a big part in his rebirth. In 2011 he duetted with her on Snowed in at Wheeler Street and called her a female Freddie Mercury. At his civil partnership celebration, he said, every musician wanted to meet her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kate Bush and Rolf Harris. The Australian entertainer played didgeridoo on The Dreaming in 1982 and returned on Aerial in 2005, singing on two songs of A Sky of Honey. In 2014 he was convicted of twelve counts of indecent assault against four girls and young women and jailed for five years and nine months. One conviction was later quashed. When Kate remastered her albums in 2018, his vocals were replaced by her son Bertie. Harris died in 2023.[1] [2] [3]

Kate Bush and Big Boi. The OutKast rapper calls her his favourite artist, ahead even of Bob Marley. His uncle Russell introduced him to her music, and he spent years trying to collaborate, eventually meeting her and her family. In 2021 he announced they had recorded a song together, and in 2023 he gave the speech inducting her into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, calling her a songwriter, producer and performer without equal.[1] [2]

Kate Bush and Roy Harper. The folk singer was one of her formative influences. She sang on his song You in 1980, he sang backing vocals on Breathing, and she thanked him on Never for Ever for holding onto the poet in his music. She and Peter Gabriel covered his Another Day on her Christmas special. Harper called her the kindest woman he had ever met, and a friend for life.[1] [2] [3]

Kate Bush and Albert McIntosh. Her son Albert, called Bertie, born in 1998, reshaped her life and work. She wrote an ode to him on Aerial, and he sang on Director's Cut and 50 Words for Snow, where he voiced a falling snowflake. At sixteen he gave her the courage to return to the stage, acting and singing in Before the Dawn, where he was credited as creative advisor. In 2018 his voice replaced Rolf Harris on the Aerial remaster.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rare facts about Kate Bush

• As a teenage karate student, Kate earned the nickname Ee ee because of her squeaky battle cry. She trained at the Goldsmiths College karate club, where her brother John was an instructor. Her high pitched kiai, the shout that goes with a strike, gave her the nickname.[1]
• Until she was about eighteen she was known as Cathy, the same name as the heroine of her first hit. Catherine Bush adopted the name Kate fairly late. Growing up she was Cathy, which made singing as Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights feel almost like destiny.[1]
• Her earliest officially released recording, Passing Through Air, was made at David Gilmour's studio weeks after her fifteenth birthday. The 1973 demo surfaced in 1980 on the B side of Army Dreamers, making it the oldest Kate Bush recording ever officially released.[1] [2]
• Kate shares her birthday, the thirtieth of July, with Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights. She discovered the coincidence after reading the novel to research her song. Brontë was born in 1818 and Kate in 1958, exactly one hundred and forty years later.[1] [2]
• Ian Bairnson played the guitar solo that closes Wuthering Heights with a broken arm. Bairnson, a Shetland born guitarist from Pilot and the Alan Parsons Project, played it in the control room at AIR Studios. Engineer Jon Kelly spent years apologising for not mixing it louder.[1] [2] [3]
• Wuthering Heights was on the radio two months before its release, after a few copies reached Capital Radio by mistake. EMI moved the single from November 1977 to January 1978 to avoid the Christmas rush, but the stray copies meant it was already getting airplay in November.[1]
• The famous red dress video was filmed on the morning of the twenty sixth of October 1977 on Salisbury Plain. The spot was Baden's Clump near Tidworth in Wiltshire, standing in for the Yorkshire moors. That video now inspires The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever, when fans in red dresses recreate her dance around the world.[1] [2]
• Her song Moving went to number one in Japan, where she also appeared in adverts for Seiko. In Japan, Them Heavy People was released as a single called Rolling the Ball, with a Seiko logo on its insert. It is her only release carrying any kind of product endorsement.[1] [2]
• She turned down the chance to sing the Bond theme for Moonraker in 1979. The offer came just before the Tour of Life. She declined, and Shirley Bassey sang the theme instead, her third Bond song.[1]
• She turned down an offer to support Fleetwood Mac on tour, preferring to build her own show. Rather than open for someone else, she spent months designing the Tour of Life, involved in choreography, sets, costumes and hiring, and working closely with the magician Simon Drake.[1] [2]
• Her only live performance in the United States was on Saturday Night Live in December 1978. She sang The Man with the Child in His Eyes with Paul Shaffer at the piano, and later Them Heavy People. She did not make another promotional trip to America until 1985.[1] [2] [3]
• She wrote Babooshka without knowing that babushka is Russian for grandmother. The song, about a wife testing her husband's loyalty under a false name, was partly inspired by the English folk ballad Sovay. It ends with breaking glass, one of the earliest Fairlight samples on a hit.[1]
• In Israel, Army Dreamers became a Memorial Day staple in a Hebrew version called Shem Ba'even, A Name on a Stone. Singer Mazzi Cohen recorded the Hebrew cover in 1988. Its themes of loss and military service made it a fixture of Yom HaZikaron, Israel's day of remembrance for fallen soldiers.[1]
• Army Dreamers was one of sixty eight songs the BBC considered unsuitable for airplay during the first Gulf War. The waltz is about a mother grieving her son, killed on military manoeuvres. In her video, a child grows into a soldier and vanishes before she can reach him.[1]
• The Never for Ever cover, a pencil drawing of creatures pouring out from under her skirt, was voted best album cover of 1980. The artwork was by Nick Price, who had designed her 1979 tour programme. Record Mirror readers gave it the award, and Kate said it showed good and bad things emerging from within.[1]
• The man about to be kissed on the cover of The Dreaming is her then partner Del Palmer, playing Houdini. Kate plays Houdini's wife Bess, passing him a key with her mouth. The sepia photo leaves only the gold key and her eye makeup in colour.[1] [2]
• The title track of The Dreaming was first given a title that used a racial slur, and promotional copies were recalled. The song protests the destruction of Aboriginal Australians' land for uranium mining. The original title unwittingly used a slur for Aboriginal people, and early promotional singles were withdrawn.[1]
• On The Dreaming, engineer Paul Hardiman helped her invent a character called My Dad, with a ginger wig and polystyrene cups. The cups, bottoms removed and fitted over the wig, helped them focus on sound during bouts of ear fatigue. Hardiman insisted he was not making it up.[1]
• She once had Dónal Lunny play a single whistle note for three hours until it bent just right. It was for the end of And Dream of Sheep, recorded in Dublin in 1984. Collaborators say she was chasing a feeling nobody else could see, not correcting mistakes.[1]
• The dogs on the cover of Hounds of Love were the family's own, Bonnie and Clyde. They lived at East Wickham Farm, where she recorded the album in a barn studio while her parents kept the sessions supplied with tea, cake and takeaways.[1]
• The voice that opens the song Hounds of Love is sampled from the 1957 horror film Night of the Demon. The line is spoken by actor Maurice Denham in a seance scene. Horror films fed many of her songs, including Hammer Horror and The Infant Kiss.[1] [2] [3]
• Donald Sutherland made the Cloudbusting video for free, because there was no time to get him a work visa. Kate learned which hotel he was staying in from Julie Christie's hairdresser and went to ask him in person. In Britain the video was even shown in some cinemas before the main feature.[1]
• Dolly Parton was Peter Gabriel's first choice for Don't Give Up, but she turned it down. Gabriel wrote the song with American roots music in mind. When Parton declined, his friend Kate stepped in, and he said she nailed it on her second attempt.[1]
• Top of the Pops refused to show her Experiment IV video, calling it too violent. Directed by Kate, it features Hugh Laurie, Dawn French and Del Palmer at a secret military base developing a sound that can kill. Channel 4's The Tube aired it in full.[1]
• This Woman's Work was written to fit a film scene that had already been shot, from a frightened father's point of view. John Hughes had used This Mortal Coil's Song to the Siren as a temporary track in She's Having a Baby but could not get the rights, so Kate wrote a song for the hospital montage.[1]
• The James Joyce estate refused her Molly Bloom's words in 1989, then said yes twenty two years later. The Sensual World was rewritten with her own lyrics. On Director's Cut in 2011 the song finally used Joyce's text, and was retitled Flower of the Mountain.[1] [2]
• On Aerial she sings pi to its seventy eighth decimal place, then skips ahead and carries on from the hundred and first. The song is titled with the Greek letter itself. A sequence from it was later used in a 2015 episode of The Simpsons about a maths contest.[1]
• The cover of Aerial looks like mountains reflected at sunset, but it is the sound wave of a blackbird singing. The waveform was superimposed over a glowing photograph, fitting an album full of birdsong, sky and sea. Like The Red Shoes, it carries no photo of Kate.[1]
• The public learned of her son's birth about eighteen months late, when Peter Gabriel mentioned it on television. Kate had quietly kept the news of Bertie's birth in 1998 to herself, and saw no reason to announce it.[1] [2]
• When she met the Queen in 2005, she asked for her autograph, because her son did not believe she was meeting her. She said she made a complete fool of herself. She added that she had form with royalty, since her dress once fell off in front of Prince Charles at a Prince's Trust event.[1] [2]
• Lake Tahoe and Misty, from 50 Words for Snow, are her only songs longer than ten minutes. Misty is about a snowman lover who melts away after a night of passion, while Lake Tahoe tells of a Victorian ghost calling for her dog, named Snowflake.[1]
• A French producer paralysed by motor neurone disease made a whole album from her samples, using only an eye tracking device. Pone released Kate and Me in 2019, which the Guardian called the first album ever produced entirely through eye tracking. He calls her the greatest artist of the past forty years.[1] [2]
• She went to see Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge stage show, which sent up her songs, and told him it was nice to hear them again. Coogan had sung a medley of her material as Partridge, and did it again for Comic Relief in 1999. She caught the final performance of his run.[1] [2]
• Eat the Music was meant to lead The Red Shoes, but UK copies were recalled at the last minute. EMI chose Rubberband Girl instead. The song finally got a UK release on ten inch vinyl for Record Store Day in 2024, and she explained its title nods to Shakespeare's music be the food of love.[1] [2]
• In 1990 she produced a track for another artist, Alan Stivell's Kimiad, the only time she has ever done that. She also turned down Erasure, who wanted her to produce one of their albums. According to Vince Clarke, she felt it was not her area.[1]
• Rolling Stone's first ever review of a Kate Bush album called Hounds of Love a record that both dazzles and bores. Critic Rob Tannenbaum felt she overdecorated her songs. In 2020 the same magazine placed Hounds of Love at number sixty eight among the greatest albums of all time.[1]
• Johnny Rotten once wrote a song for her, about the exploitation of parrots, which she turned down. John Lydon of the Sex Pistols was a devoted fan who called her work beauty beyond belief. His song for her was called Bird in Hand.[1]
• An asteroid was named after Kate Bush in 1998. The minor planet honour came the year her son was born, long before she was made a CBE in 2013 or entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.