“For the first time I was meeting resistance artistically. People were saying, ‘She’s gone mad now.’ I was a complete wreck – I’d wake up in the morning and I couldn’t move”: How Kate Bush answered her critics with Hounds Of Love

Kate Bush.

Kate Bush released Hounds Of Love 40 years ago. Her fifth studio record reinstated her position as one of the most innovative and creative artists of all time, yielding the future chart-topper Running Up That Hill. But she endured a challenging climb to the completion of one of her best-loved albums.

It’s 1983 and Kate Bush is, er, frankly, bushed. Five years previously, the symphonically spooky No.1 hit Wuthering Heights had been the south London singer-songwriter’s hugely successful breakthrough – making her, aged just 19, the first female artist in global chart history to do so with a self-written song. Next came the astonishing The Kick Inside and Lionheart LPs, both released in 1978; her first No.1 album, Never For Ever in 1980; and, in the autumn of 1982, The Dreaming.