“Those shrieks and warbles are beauty beyond belief to me,” said John Lydon in 2009, recalling the day he came home with Kate Bush’s debut single, Wuthering Heights, and played it for his mother. She thought it sounded like “a bag of cats”, but Lydon, who had just left the Sex Pistols, heard a fellow renegade. Bush’s singularity makes fans feel like members of the biggest secret society in music, though it’s one they now share with the Gen Z-ers who discovered her last spring, when the 1985 single Running Up That Hill was featured on the Netflix series Stranger Things.
So, how to tackle Bush’s story in the year of her big return? The challenge for rock journalist and fan Tom Doyle is that his subject is a secret society in her own right. Bush’s infrequent interviews rarely reveal her thoughts about anything but music, as Doyle found when he spent four hours with her for a Mojo magazine feature in 2005, from which he quotes extensively. She chatted at length about her creative process – how she sang “through the decimal places of a mathematical constant” to concoct the song Pi, and such – but divulged nothing personal other than irritation that she was viewed by the public as “some kind of weirdo recluse”.
