Kate Bush – always quite hippy, dippy, ‘out there’

In 2019, Kate Bush felt the need to issue a statement on her website clarifying that she was not a Tory supporter. Nearly three years earlier, in an interview with a Canadian magazine, the singer-songwriter had appeared to express her admiration for Theresa May, stating: ‘I actually really like her and think she’s wonderful… It’s the best thing that’s happened to us in a long time.’ This rare foray into British politics from a performer whose reticence about her private life has bordered on the Trappist went down about as well as David (‘Scotland Stay with Us’) Bowie’s contribution to the Scottish Independence Referendum debate.

But Twitter (as was) be damned. Surely the most brilliantly Bush-like thing about the story was the length of time it took her to clear up the matter of her political preferences. For whatever else we know about Kate Bush it is that since the late 1980s she has moved at entirely her own pace, with whole decades on occasion passing between albums. Who, after all, could have predicted her return to live performance in 2014, following an absence of some 35 years? Or that, no less mercurially, she would opt to mount her gloriously theatrical Before the Dawn concert residency at the Hammersmith Apollo – the same venue where she’d concluded her first and only rock tour in 1979? Taylor Swift may have Eras, but Bush is more of an aeons artist, operating in glacial deep time.

To date, some 13 years have elapsed since her last studio album, 50 Words for Snow. Yet in 2022 she became, aged 63, the oldest female solo artist to top the UK charts when her 1985 single ‘Running Up That Hill’ went to no.1.