Kate Bush is a force of nature. It’s hard to even fathom that she exists among us; those who hear ‘Wuthering Heights’ are taken aback by the strength and breadth of her songwriting, her artistic merit when seeing her in the video, and mind you, the song was released when she was twenty years old. She fought the EMI General Manager to have the song released as a single.

Now, that’s some information about one song. Bush did not only orchestrate her music and dance (she took dance and choreography extremely seriously), but made sure that everything worked according to her standards. Later, as she learned the legendary Fairlight CMI synthesiser, she composed, programmed, and put together most of her music herself. She produced her own music. She designed PR, she set the artistic scene for her performances, and then disappeared from the limelight.

She is still here, constantly creating music. It’s happening as I write these words in 2024.

This is an updated book, the third revival since originally being started in 2010, and it now includes Bush’s most current publicly known work, which is really only her resurgence from prominently being featured in a TV series.

Kate Bush is so much more than that song, that glorious song.

She is the unguarded young woman who once walked down a south London street and saw a lady waving at her from some distance away, through the window of a first floor building. Smiling and waving back as she continued down the street, Bush finally reached the house and realised that the woman was, in fact, cleaning her windows.

One of the good things about the book is that it is carried by an English writer, one who wrote in a very English sort of way; there is some faff in the book, but everything that’s described, especially Bush’s success and failures, are splashed out matter-of-factly, not in a Hollywoodesque and drab, predictable way. Au contraire, would there ever be a way to describe the so-far life of Kate Bush as predictable?

She is certainly the only musician who, having persuaded Prince to play on one of her songs, would then decide that what the track really needed was a contribution from Lenny Henry.

And it’s hard to imagine any other artist returning to the stage after 35 years with a show that featured the line “HP and Mayo – the badger’s nadgers.”

Most of her schoolmates and friends weren’t really privy to know that she made music. At age 15, she started shopping songs around, looking for takers. David Gilmour, guitarist for Pink Floyd, championed her then and still does.

She was young, eccentric, outspoken, and highly successful, both artistically and commercially; she took many brickbats for merely existing, to paraphrase producer Steve Lillywhite. She refused to open for Fleetwood Mac throughout the USA because she’d just designed her own live performances, which included jugglers, special art, musicians, and choreography. She rarely accepted compromise.

The release of her third album, Never for Ever, made her the first female British solo artist to have a number one album in the British charts.

The cover art, meanwhile, was a remarkably frank piece of creative expressionism, a stunning coloured pencil drawing by Nick Price depicting Bush with her hands folded behind her head as a stream of alternately angelic creatures (rainbow butterflies, swans) and demonic beasts (strange fantasy creations with bats’ heads and snakes’ bodies) pour out from under her raised skirt. “She was quite particular about what she wanted,” says Price. “The idea of all these light and dark characters coming out from under her skirt, that was the run of it, the light and dark balancing each other out. In fact, the image was taken from a photograph that John had taken of her in that position. I remember when she mentioned that it was all coming out from under her skirt I asked her to repeat that: ‘From under your skirt?’ She just said, ‘Yeeeeah!’ There was a [sexual] aspect to it, but I’m not quite sure what it meant.” She told Kelly that that was where all her songs came from.

Thomson tells a lot of Bush’s experimental vein, in how she looked not only for songs but for the sound she wanted.

To create the spacey metallic background sound on ‘The Dreaming’ she plugged a guitar and a piano into a harmoniser which was set an octave higher and connected to a reverb plate fed back into the harmoniser, resulting in the note going up and up and up in octaves until it went so high you couldn’t hear it. This effect was used on several songs. “It was an approach of: plug things in, play a few notes, see what it does, work out how you can manipulate the instrument you’re playing to work with those effects, and you end up with something unusual and different,” says Launay. For the drums they miked up 12-foot long strips of corrugated iron to make them sound like cannons firing from across a valley.

Sinead O’Connor always had a radiant sense of humour which shows in this quote:

The simple, highly effective video featured Bush and Gabriel in a long, loving clinch – both emotional and erotic, this was an embrace full of pain, comfort and reassurance – which fuelled further speculation that the two were, in time-honoured tabloid parlance, ‘more than friends’. The same suggestion had often been made about Bush and Gilmour. Gabriel had a deserved reputation as something of a swordsman, but “there was certainly [nothing between her] and Peter at that time,” says Lanois. Sinead O’Connor, one of his past romantic partners and never one for playing the diplomatic card, later said, “I’ve got to admire Kate Bush because Peter Gabriel tried to shag her and she wasn’t having any. She’s the only woman on earth who ever resisted him, including me.”

The book tells of her private ways. She now lives in a massive mansion with her husband of long, their animals, and a music studio. Still, Bush does make appearances and she still makes music.

“I find it very difficult to express myself in interviews,” she said. “Often people have so many preconceptions that I spend most of the interview trying to defend myself from the image that was created by the media eight years ago. That is understandable to a certain extent – that’s when I did most of my interviews, and I think the image was created by what the press felt the public wanted, how they interpreted me as I was then, and how I projected myself at that time. I was very young, idealistic and enthusiastic about so much then, but I felt they exaggerated these qualities. And I was – and am even more so now – a private person.”

The book does paint a very strong picture of Bush as a person of passion, of poetry, and down-to-Earth decisions and powers to do exactly what she wants. My only main gripe with this book is that Thomson has focused a lot on her latest spate of concerts, so much that the section eclipses much of the rest of the book; this made me very conscious of the fact that the book was written without contact with Bush, and possibly most of her closest people. As such, this book is a view from afar.

Yet, the book provides a loving and cherishing look at Kate Bush from the eyes of a fan who can write music books. The author has got soul and heaps of admiration for Bush. I’m not sure this is or will be known as the ‘ultimate’ book about its subject; hopefully, Bush will one day detail her own story. Until that eventually happens, we’ll listen to her music and immerse ourselves in…this book, a stranger’s insightful and immersed glimpse into her world. I believe her masterpiece album Hounds of Love says far more about her in ways that the written word can’t reach, and so, we may already have all we need to know Kate Bush.