Kate Bush

A prodigious rise, that of the young Kate Bush. She's just 19 when, at the start of 1978, she bursts onto the British scene like a hurricane. Composer, pianist, performer, dancer and choreographer, she already possesses an expressive universe hardly comparable to that of any other songwriter of her generation: a voice capable of scaling dizzying registers, an imagination populated by ghosts, gothic fairy tales, sensuality, literature and the occult, a theatrical conception of the song in which music, gesture and character are inseparable.
The first to sense her potential is David Gilmour. The Pink Floyd guitarist hears a rough demo by the fourteen-year-old Kate, is struck dumb, and helps put her in touch with EMI. At the time of her debut, the label wants to launch “James And The Cold Gun”, but Bush digs her heels in: the first single has to be “Wuthering Heights”. She'll be proven right. Inspired by Emily Brontë's “Wuthering Heights”, the song stays at number one in the UK for 4 weeks and pulls “The Kick Inside“ to third place on the album charts — a debut album in which folk, pop, classical touches, glam theatrics and gothic atmospheres blend with astonishing ease. It's already all there: the acrobatic, almost possessed soprano, the romantic melodicism, the fascination with mystery, the ability to transform into the characters of her own songs. “The Man With The Child In His Eyes”, “Strange Phenomena”, “Moving”, “The Saxophone Song” complete the portrait of a very young artist who is already fully recognizable. The follow-up arrives the same year, 1978, with “Lionheart”, less balanced than its predecessor, but lit up by the single “Wow” and the fairy-tale enchantments of “In Search Of Peter Pan” and “Kashka From Baghdad”.

Seeking emancipation

It's precisely the experience of “Lionheart”, however, that leaves Kate Bush unsatisfied. EMI is eager to capitalize on the success of her debut and pushes hard on her image too, while she feels an ever-growing need to directly control every aspect of her music. In 1979 she takes on “The Tour Of Life”, an extremely ambitious show in which she sings, dances, acts, and oversees choreography and costumes. But after that year's Christmas TV special, she drops the promotional circuit and shuts herself away in the studio, hunting for new ideas that could free her from the label's dictates.
“Never For Ever”, released in September 1980 and made together with Jon Kelly, springs directly from that need for emancipation. Bush gets far more deeply involved in production and in shaping the sounds, gaining the kind of freedom she had previously held mostly on the level of writing and performance. She herself would later consider it the first record she could listen to relaxed and truly enjoy from start to finish: at last she'd had the chance to have a say over the entire creative process.

Around that time there's an album making the rounds that has an explosive impact on the English songwriter: The Wall by Pink Floyd. For a few weeks Bush even starts to think there's no longer any point writing songs, because it seems to her that Pink Floyd have already said everything. Fortunately she then changes her mind, but that influence remains clearly visible above all in “Breathing”, born partly after watching a documentary on the dangers of nuclear fallout. Kate would call it the best thing she'd written and produced up to that point, her “little symphony”.

But the perfect manifesto of this new phase is the irresistible single “Babooshka”, with its playful, cruel lyric. A woman fears her husband no longer loves her and decides to test his fidelity by inventing an alter ego: Babooshka, a young and mysterious seductress who starts sending him perfumed letters. The man falls into the trap, but precisely because that stranger reminds him of what his wife used to be like. In searching for proof of betrayal, the protagonist ends up provoking it herself and destroying the very relationship she wanted to save.
Among the sources of inspiration is also “Sovay”, an old traditional English ballad in which a woman resorts to disguise to test her lover. But Bush turns that suggestion into a kind of enchanted nursery rhyme, built on John Giblin's formidable fretless bass. Piano, percussion and synths follow a dynamic structure, with constant shifts of rhythm and register, while Kate's voice keeps shedding its skin: first insinuating and mischievous, then childlike, then increasingly shrill, overwrought, almost hysterical. The coup de theatre comes at the end, with the crash of shattering glasses and crockery. Bush smashed them herself at Abbey Road, only to later show up with chocolates to apologize to the kitchen staff. That sound was sampled through the Fairlight CMI, the revolutionary digital synthesizer that Peter Gabriel had introduced her to, and of which there were, at the time, only three units in the whole UK.
The video for “Babooshka” pushes this theatricality to its extreme as well. Bush plays first the wife and then her fantastical double, a warrior-like, sensual, witchy creature, while the double bass symbolically takes on the role of the man around whom the game of seduction unfolds. Broken movements, wild-eyed stares, dance, mime and a deliberately over-the-top look turn the video into a brief gothic pantomime. “Babooshka” climbs to n.5 on the UK Chart and becomes Kate Bush's biggest hit since “Wuthering Heights”.

Propelled by that dazzling 45, “Never For Ever” does even more: it goes straight in at number one in the UK, becoming the first album by a British female solo artist to top the charts, and the first non-compilation album by a female solo singer to achieve the feat. But this commercial crowning certainly doesn't coincide with a more conventional sound. On the contrary, the more control Kate gains over her own work, the more unpredictable, visionary and unclassifiable her pop becomes. Because “Never For Ever” is far more than the “Babooshka” album. It's the work in which the various components of the Bush universe fuse together with total naturalness: pop melodicism and electronic experimentation, British folk and Eastern instruments, piano and Fairlight, children's rhymes and horror-tinged suggestions, lightness and tragedy.
The evolution from the first two albums also plays out in a studio that no longer simply records an already-finished song, but becomes itself a compositional tool. Layered voices, samples, noises, synthesizers and acoustic instruments are arranged in space with increasing freedom. Even the singing loses its traditional function. Bush whispers, screams, moans, recites, shifts from childlike inflections to sudden witchy fits, builds choirs out of her own voice and changes register depending on the character she's playing. Her imagination knows no limits, to the point that she has herself portrayed even as a bat in the artwork designed by her brother John Carder Bush.

It's precisely this constant metamorphosis that gives cohesion to a record which, on paper, might seem scattered. “Delius (Song Of Summer)”, inspired by Ken Russell's television film about the final years of composer Frederick Delius, takes on suspended, impressionistic shades. “All We Ever Look For” puts the Fairlight to work on a texture that also includes Hare Krishna chants and birdsong, while brother Paddy's koto brings in Eastern colours for a reflection on family expectations and the eternal pursuit of something that keeps slipping away. “Egypt”, meanwhile, conjures an imaginary Orient, in which the naivety of the gaze is redeemed by the visionary force of the performance.
On the darker, more theatrical side, “The Wedding List”, inspired by François Truffaut's “The Bride Wore Black”, turns a widow's revenge into a frantic macabre comedy. “Violin” pushes toward a feverish, jagged rock, cut through by Kevin Burke's violin and a deliberately over-the-top performance. “The Infant Kiss”, born from watching “The Innocents”, an adaptation of Henry James's “The Turn of the Screw”, moves instead into far more disturbing territory, colliding childhood innocence, adult desire and supernatural possession.

Then the record changes skin once more. The very brief vocal interlude “Night Scented Stock” leads into the pacifist anthem “Army Dreamers”, a light, almost childlike waltz in which a mother mourns her son, killed during military service, imagining what he might have become had he been given other chances. Bush avoids all rhetoric, entrusting the power of the message to the contrast between the melody's grace, the almost maternal tenderness of the performance, and the tragedy told in the lyrics.
Closing the album is “Breathing”, the work's most overtly progressive and ambitious moment. Bush imagines a fetus perceiving the world through its mother's body, one who, along with oxygen and cigarette smoke, risks breathing in the consequences of a nuclear explosion. Spoken fragments, orchestral tension, electronic vibrations, crescendos and vocal layering stretch the ballad form until it becomes a small apocalyptic suite.

“Never For Ever” thus marks the moment when the prodigious songwriter behind “Wuthering Heights” begins turning into the all-encompassing artist of the years to come. It still retains the melodic charm of “The Kick Inside”, but hugely expands its vocabulary: pop becomes a laboratory, the Fairlight opens up possibilities barely glimpsed before, the arrangements take on a dramaturgical function, and production finally becomes central to the composition itself.
The next step will be even more radical. With “The Dreaming” Kate Bush will take on production duties herself and push electronic, rhythmic and vocal experimentation to its extreme; with “Hounds Of Love” she will then manage to channel that research back into a form capable of combining sonic experimentation with extraordinary melodic immediacy. More hits will follow, more risks, long silences and unexpected comebacks, right up to the surprising second life of “Running Up That Hill” decades after its release, helped along by its inclusion in the “Stranger Things” soundtrack.
But in 1980 all of this still lies ahead of her. “Never For Ever” proves once and for all that the breakthrough of “Wuthering Heights” had not been the unrepeatable flash of an extraordinary teenager. At 22, Kate Bush had already reached number 1, but above all she had gained something even more important for the rest of her career: full control of her own music and the freedom to be simply herself — unique and incomparable.

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30/09/2026