Creativity comes from the Freedom to Fail. This is how Peter Gabriel explains the phenomenon of Kate Bush. She entered the musical stage in the late 70s and gave popular music some of its greatest pieces of immortal art. It is for me impossible to find a category for Kates songs. She simply invented a new one: Lyrical, philosophic sounds on a metaphysical, yet crisp-clear base. On the occasion of her 2014 reappearance on stage at the Hammersmith Apollo, BBC made the documentary “The Kate Bush Story”
Novelist Neil Gaiman was excellent on some of Bush’s intricately feminine imagery. Choreographer Lindsay Kemp spoke with undimmed reverence of her innate talent for movement, exemplified by the song “Moving”. Three men who knew her very well from the early days, Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour (who got her signed with EMI), and her sound engineer and ex-partner Del Palmer gave affectionate tributes to her determination and precocity.
I have to confess that while Kate Bush released her most important pieces of music, in the mid 80s, I did not took much attention of her. Shame on me. Maybe I was a bit immature these years. I don’t know what I was listening to – probably a lot of Jazz, typical for physics students. I knew that she was singing this very special tune, with this unreal vibrato in her voice. But I did not considered it special. Now I do. Maybe it is the possibility to see and watch on Youtube this comprehensive piece of art-work by her. Maybe in the 80s the radiostations which broadcasted from the West to East-Germany did not played her often enough.
When Kate released her 5th studio album “Hounds of Love”, she was 27. I would argue that this album with songs like “Running up that Hill” and “Cloudbusting” was the peak of her creativity. After this, her style changed a bit, her songs became more desperate. But I am so happy, that the 27th birthday only marked a change in Kates style, and not a existential tragedy in her life as it happened to so many other great musicians.
