For Fans of Kate Bush

The first side of Hounds of Love is Kate Bush at her most immediate: Running Up That Hill, Hounds of Love, The Big Sky, and Cloudbusting are four of the most distinctive pop songs made in the 1980s. The second side, The Ninth Wave, is something else entirely. It is a suite about a drowning woman hovering between life and death, built from Fairlight orchestration, spoken word, and studio experiments that still feel ahead of their time. Most artists would have released these as separate projects. Bush insisted on pairing them, trusting that her audience would follow. They did.

When The Dreaming arrived in 1982, it was too abrasive, too dense, too experimental for the audience that had embraced The Kick Inside. EMI was alarmed. Critics were baffled. The album reached only number three in the UK and charted nowhere else. Forty years later it is recognised as a landmark of art-pop production, an album that invented textures before the tools to describe them existed. The title track alone, a percussive free-fall about Aboriginal land rights narrated by a white Australian dreamer, is proof that pop music can carry ideas that most literary fiction would hesitate to attempt.

Released in 1985, Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was a UK number three. It was never a global hit. Then Stranger Things placed it in a 2022 episode, and the song became a streaming phenomenon four decades after it was recorded, reaching number one in multiple countries and introducing Bush to audiences born after she released it. The song did not change. The world caught up. That is a different kind of vindication than most artists ever receive.

Kate Bush performed live once between 1979 and 2014: a 35-year gap that turned every bootleg and clip into a sacred object. Before the Dawn, her 35-night residency at the Hammersmith Apollo, was not a comeback tour but a theatrical event built around The Ninth Wave and A Sky of Honey, staged with costumes, video, and aerial rigging. The scarcity of her live presence made the experience feel genuinely rare in an era when most artists tour constantly. Before the Dawn was recorded and released as an album in 2016. It is the closest thing to a Kate Bush concert most listeners will ever have.