Is music just a young person’s game? Glance at the streaming charts on any given day, and you might think this is axiomatically the case. Many of the biggest singer-songwriters around at the moment – Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo – are still in their early or mid-twenties. Taylor Swift is treated like a seasoned veteran, a figure whose storied career merits subdividing into 11 distinct eras, at the grand old age of, um… 34. Where does this leave all the actual veterans?
On Friday, Kate Bush, the elastic-voiced singer-songwriter behind “Wuthering Heights”, revealed that she is plotting a return to music, after more than a decade away from the spotlight. Bush’s last live performances were in 2014 (a residency at the Hammersmith Apollo), and her last new record was three years before that (2011’s 50 Words for Snow).
At her peak, Bush was an artist of rare brilliance, making rock music that was pensive and prickly and strange. Hers was a voice that seemed to leap across octaves from a standing start, crystalising into a singular, iridescent falsetto. There was no one else like her, and there still isn’t. So it’s a good job she’s back: in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, Bush said she was pursuing “lots of ideas” for new music. “I’m really looking forward to getting back into that creative space, it’s been a long time,” she noted.
In her hiatus, Bush has nonetheless orbited the zeitgeist, thanks chiefly to season four of Netflix’s sci-fi sensation Stranger Things, which soundtracked a key scene to her “Running Up That Hill”, propelling the song to No 1 nearly four decades after its release.
This unlikely resurgence introduced Bush’s music to a new wave of younger fans who might well expect more in this vein when the pioneering English musician finally stages her comeback. But they’re unlikely to get it. At 66 years old, Bush is half a lifetime away from the young maverick who broke new ground for female singer-songwriters in the 1970s and 1980s. The thing is, this only makes the prospect of more music all the more tantalising.
There is often a sense, when it comes to singer-songwriters in the twilight years of their career, that decline is something of an inevitability. In some ways, it is: even many of the unimpeachable greats – Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell – have fallen prey to it. But when your early work is something as seismic as Highway 61 Revisited, or Blue, this is no slight.
Growing older may remove some tools from a musician’s arsenal – energy and vocal range being the most universal and keenly felt changes. But it adds just as many: experience, depth, perspective. Many songwriters do some of their finest and most potent compositions in the late stages of their career.
There’s something wonderful about tracks such as Randy Newman’s “Wandering Boy”, or Bruce Springsteen’s “Ghosts” – rich, poignant songs that these men would not have written in their younger heydays, despite being great songwriters. With 2016’s Blackstar, David Bowie released one of his finest and most profound records at the very end of his life; Gil Scott-Heron did similar with 2010’s I’m New Here. Greatness, this is to say, need not diminish with age.
Bush is a particularly interesting case, because there has always been a divide between the popular understanding of what her music is – languid rock bangers, most prominently the No 1-charting “Wuthering Heights” – and the challenging, experimental reality. Hounds of Love, the 1985 album from which “Running Up That Hill” is drawn, straddles both worlds. Half of it is a set of infectious radio-ready singles, while half is an elaborate and conceptual work weaving seven songs into one piece of music. Her later works continued to iterate and experiment: 50 Words For Snow comprised seven long and intricate songs, the longest of which lasts nearly 14 minutes.
It is, therefore, impossible to really guess what new music from Bush would sound like – but you can bet it won’t sound much like the thumping and accessible “Running Up That Hill”. Her next album might not make its way onto Stranger Things 5, but that’s probably a good thing. What matters is that Bush has something new to say, and a new way to say it. She makes music that nobody else can – so how sweet it is that she’s not done yet.
