Kate Bush

Kate Bush grew up in an old farmhouse in Kent, near London, and wrote her first songs at 11. Her family sent record labels a tape of more than 50 of them and got nowhere. Then David Gilmour of Pink Floyd paid for a better demo when she was 16, and EMI signed her.

EMI wanted a rockier track as her first single. She insisted on Wuthering Heights, based on Emily Brontë’s novel. In 1978, aged 19, she spent four weeks at number one in the UK, the first woman to get there with a song she had written entirely herself. She had studied dance with Lindsay Kemp, who once taught David Bowie, and mime with Adam Darius, and you can see it in the videos.

To keep control of her work she set up her own publishing and management companies, and from The Dreaming (1982) on she produced all her albums. After one tour in 1979 she did not play live again until 2014, with 22 nights at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. In 2022 Stranger Things sent Running Up That Hill, first released in 1985, to number one in the UK.

Watch the Wuthering Heights video, then play Hounds of Love. Side one is the singles; side two, The Ninth Wave, is a suite best heard in one sitting.