Even before Pink Floyd's David Gilmour stumped up the money for her to record demo tracks in a professional recording studio, the teenage Kate Bush was a truly original talent, her songs sounding like nothing, or no-one, who came before her. Though her own listening tastes leaned towards Irish folk music, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Steely Dan, in interviews given in 1978, following the release of her stunning debut single Wuthering Heights, Bush also expressed admiration for some of her more noisy, aggressive contemporaries, specifically punk rock bands such as the Sex Pistols, The Stranglers and The Boomtown Rats.
In a June 1978 interview with UK music paper Melody Maker, Bush admitted, "Rock 'n' roll and punk, you know, they're both really male music, and I'm not sure that I understand them yet, but I'm really trying."
Bush stressed to journalist Harry Doherty that she didn't want her own music to be seen as sweet and feminine.
"Most male music - not all of it, but the good stuff -really lays it on you," she said. "It's like an interrogation. It really puts you against the wall, and that's what I'd like to do. I'd like my music to intrude. It's got to. I think that anything you do that you believe in, you should club people over the head with it!"
"I like the guts that men have in performing and singing - like the punks," she continued. "Like the way Johnny Rotten would use his voice was so original, and you get very few females even having the guts to do that, because they unfortunately tend to get stereotyped if they make it."
