Kate Bush and the Importance of Weird Girl Music

WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY ELIZABETH ANTHONY

When I see Kate Bush, I think of the color red. Red boots. Red tights. Red nails. Brash, sensual, and smart. A red mouth contorting around a tale of desire, obsession, and possession.

Bush has had quite an impression on people, from her extensive fan club to other artists, all enthralled by her grasp on the intersection between sound and emotion.

Bjork has praised Kate Bush, calling her a “genius” that she likes “very much.” Both Bjork and Bush, the former points out, wrote and produced their own material.

Tori Amos said Kate did “things that I’ve never heard anyone do,” St. Vincent mused that Kate “could soar so high into the ether and reach so deep into your soul,” and Fiona Apple mentioned that “Kate’s music cheers her up when she’s sad.”

All of these women share a common trait of being alternative female musicians, going against the grain to create something interesting; and all have a connection to Bush.

So what made her music so damn cool?

Bush’s debut album, The Kick Inside (1978), is composed of songs she wrote in her mid to late teens. Some standouts are “James and the Cold Gun,” the tale of a dejected gangster, and her breakout song, “Wuthering Heights,” in which she reaches a supernatural vocal range to channel the agony of Emily Bronte’s character Cathy in the novel of the same title.

Never For Ever (1980), is one of her best, in my opinion. She plunges her listener into the fractal sandstorms of Egypt, invokes a couple of revenge stories (including a conniving Russian wife and a murderous widow), and discusses an English writer’s syphilis. The entire record is a dreamy, windswept world, a diorama of trinkety nostalgic vignettes.

While her earlier albums are incredibly magical, The Dreaming (1982) is indubitably her magnum opus. For her first album with full production credits, she pulls out all the stops to curate an eclectic sonic ecosystem of fevered guerilla warfare, criminal underworlds, shadowy deception, and the relationship between love and fear.

The Dreaming opens with pounding drums and frantic layered protestations about ambition and knowledge on “Sat in Your Lap.” There’s a five minute track about the Vietnam War (“Pull Out the Pin”) scattered with an immersive medley of a fuzzy, mosquito-like ambience, humid guitar echoing in the distance, and the somber vocals of Pink Floyd guitarist, David Gilmour, shaping a sweaty and uncertain jungle filled with hidden soldiers. “There Goes a Tenner” is a track that suspends you in space, hovering over an old-timey Hollywood bank heist, insulated by drawn-out synthesizers.

Each song is a shadowbox: “Suspended in Gaffa” melds Catholic guilt to a jubilant piano melody; the title track illustrates the experience of Indigenous Australians using their traditional instruments; “Night of the Swallow” draws on traditional Celtic ballads to paint a picture of a woeful wife banning her husband from a velvety, crimefilled night; the grinding wails of “Houdini” characterize the woman behind the escape artist and her breathless, tense anxieties as he defies logic. The album ends with a song inspired by The Shining in which Bush once again pushes her voice to the limit to echo desperation and primal fear. Her later albums, including her famous Hounds of Love featuring the battering ram that is “Running Up That Hill” and her agile, mature reflections in “The Sensual World” fill out her portfolio as a well-rounded, unique artist who transforms basic units of sound and voice and instrument into something completely unheard of. It’s no wonder she inspired and impressed so many innovative and powerful female artists.

Bush was encouraged by her label to fit into a certain standard of a sex symbol, yet she harnessed her appearance and public image with complete agency. Wearing long, bright red boots and saturated blue eyeliner to dance around on stage with the precision of a trained ballerina and the dramatics of an actress. Her performances, although they took the backseat as she gained more power over her music and retreated behind the scenes, were a spiritual experience characterized by the glitter and big hair of the day combined with 19th-century silk, headstones, pistols, and red tights. Going to see a Bush show or watching one of her music videos gave you Victorian vaudeville, a nymphomaniac symphony, or a Shakespearean bloodbath, depending on what song she performed.

Kate Bush is a woman who doesn’t shy away from any topic: crime, pregnancy, murder, suicide, and war are all fair game. She merges unique soundscapes, classic literature, world events, and a haunting storytelling voice to create entire universes within the confines of a single track. The unfurling of her many different and often subversive ideas and the meticulous method to their madness are what make her work unique. Only someone with an eye for precision and intense technical skills could write a song about the wife of a Maltese bird smuggler with the sound of Irish bagpipes in the background and make a great song. She develops these stories and executes them in a way no one else would have thought to make her stand out against the monotony that many women were forced into in the 70s.

And indeed, she stood out. Women didn’t typically write their own songs, let alone produce them. “Wuthering Heights,” which she wrote at 15, was the first number one UK single written by a woman, and this song was only the jumping off point of her career. Her steadfastness and confidence in her craft took her straight to the top, and her insistence on keeping “Wuthering Heights” rather than “James and the Cold Gun” as the single was eventually a winning decision.

She set the stage for an entire generation of “weird girls” as alternative became its own, clearly defined genre. She proved that being unusual and being yourself could coexist, even under the glaring limelight. The feminine perspective of many of her stories has helped her to curate a fiercely feminine identity that’s a little rough around the edges but also twinkling with esoteric magic.

Kate Bush is a true artist. Her influences range from Stephen King to Victorian novels to old technicolor musicals to strange short stories that don’t age well. She has both stage presence and an uncanny ability to pull the strings of the show herself. Her dedication is clear, from the studious songwriting of her teenage years to the extreme lengths taken to alter her voice in the making of The Dreaming to her retrospective fastidiousness in “The Sensual World.” She had the ability to transform herself into a thousand different women, each one pushing the limits more and more until the limits evaporated.

“The more I work on an album the more I think it’s almost a process for me to try and heal myself, have a look at myself. Do you know what I mean? Actually a very selfish thing in a way, but I think art is. I do think what artistic people are trying to do is work through their problems through their art – look at themselves, confront all these things.” -Kate Bush