“I think I’ve been quirky and stubborn and original enough not to be stuck in a trend,” Kate Bush once said. Indeed, there are many more ingredients in the recipe for success, but Bush has quite literally mastered the art of being original and daring enough to transcend the books.
And this is something she achieved early, with her debut, The Kick Inside, at just 19 years old. Obviously, there would always be the inevitability of stagnation after such a gleaming start, but Bush also often felt like a lone figure navigating the structure and expectations of a male-dominated industry, leading the way by listening to the only thing she trusted: her heart. “I mean, not that long ago, women weren’t allowed to be creative, to have a career,” she told Louder.
Perhaps that’s why, even with the album that threatened to derail the whole thing, Lionheart, she vowed to never let pressure disrupt her flow ever again, believing that she knew best and didn’t have to take heat from anybody else to make it work. Being what seemed like one of the only players in an arena filled to the brim with people who walked a completely different walk, Bush felt distinctly powerful in her own identity, not letting the sounds or smells of others guide her away from her journey off the beaten path.
As she grew into a bigger name and became what we now call a true “innovator”, she earned the right to be self-referential in her craft, though not in a way that came across as cheap or like an artist desperately scrambling to reinvent the appeal they once pulled off. This is something we see everywhere in the music industry today and something most artists will struggle with at some point in their career: the challenge of keeping things fresh and not imitating their former selves. But Bush decided the power was in the subtlety and the ability to subsequently build worlds around those she’d already created.
In doing so, she enhanced the richness of her own music, leaving meticulously placed layers that caught the unsuspecting listener’s ears and made them wonder what it all meant, if anything at all. The best examples of this occur in songs when she appears to be referencing parts of her previous tracks, like song titles, lyrics, or ideas that she’s mentioned elsewhere in her discography or other parts of her career that feel like fleeting messages only meant to be deciphered by those truly listening.
Like the line in ‘You Want Alchemy’ that references ‘Cloudbusting’: “What a lovely afternoon / On a cloudbusting kind of day. / We took our own ‘Mystery Tour’ / And got completely lost somewhere up in the hills”. This feels especially poignant when you think about the complex emotionality of the concept behind the song and how it saw Bush exploring parts of human connection you can’t quite always understand, and how cloudbusting, as an act and a notion, can be both a source of nostalgia and immense pain.
She also did this in ‘Constellation of the Heart’, referencing ‘The Big Sky’ in the line: “We take all the telescopes. And we turn them inside out. And we point them away from the big sky”. And she also seemed to reuse the phrase “diamond sky” in both ‘Kite’ and ‘Nocturn’. And then she referenced ‘Wuthering Heights’ in ‘Wow’, murmuring “Emily” at the start. And that’s without even mentioning the times she seems to parallel specific sonic ideas or repurpose certain storytelling tropes, creating a whirlwind of mirrored Bush tropes she claimed uniquely as her own.
Aside from the obvious tropes this plays into, like her world-building and ability to execute nuanced ideas that expand as her artistry evolves, it also points to another, more telling aspect of her craft that proves her position as a leader in musical innovation: her self-belief. As Bush implied, it takes a lot to be original, especially coming from a time when other female influences were so sparse. But to be so confident as to create characters and ideas and then bring them back full circle is truly remarkable.
