Kate Bush biography
Continuing in her storytelling tradition, Bush looked far outside her own personal experience for sources of inspiration. She drew on old crime films for "There Goes a Tenner", a documentary about the war in Vietnam for "Pull Out the Pin", and the plight of Indigenous Australians for "The Dreaming". "Houdini" is about the magician's death, and "Get Out Of My House" was inspired by Stephen King's novel The Shining.
Hounds of Love was released in 1985. Because of the high cost of hiring studio space for her previous album, she built a private studio near her home, where she could work at her own pace. Hounds of Love ultimately topped the charts in the UK, knocking Madonna's Like a Virgin from the number one position.
The album takes advantage of the vinyl format with two very different sides. The first side, Hounds of Love, contains five "accessible" pop songs, including the four singles "Running Up that Hill", "Cloudbusting", "Hounds of Love", and "The Big Sky". In August 1985, NME featured Bush in a "Where Are They Now" article. "Running Up that Hill" reached number 3 in the UK charts and also re-introduced Bush to American listeners, climbing to number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1985. The second side of the album, The Ninth Wave, takes its name from Tennyson's poem, "Idylls of the King", about the legendary King Arthur's reign, and is one continuous piece of music. The album earned Bush nominations for Best Female Solo Artist, Best Album, Best Single, and Best Producer at the 1986 BRIT Awards. In the same year, Bush and Peter Gabriel had a UK top ten hit with "Don't Give Up" (Dolly Parton, Gabriel's original choice, turned his offer down), and EMI released her "greatest hits" album, The Whole Story. Bush provided a new lead vocal and refreshed backing track on "Wuthering Heights," and recorded a new single, "Experiment IV," for inclusion on the compilation. At the 1987 BRIT Awards, Bush won the award for Best Female Solo Artist.
The Sensual World and The Red Shoes
The increasingly personal tone of her writing continued on 1989's
The Sensual World, with songs about unexpressed and unrequited love ("Love and Anger" and "Never Be Mine", respectively), and the pressures on modern relationships ("Between a Man and a Woman"). One of the quirkiest tracks on the album, touched by Bush's black humour, is "Heads We're Dancing", about a woman who dances all night with a charming stranger only to discover in the morning that he is Adolf Hitler.
The Sensual World went on to become her biggest-selling album in the US, receiving an RIAA Gold certification four years after its release for 500,000 copies sold. In the United Kingdom album charts, it reached the number two position.
In 1990, the boxed-set This Woman's Work was released and included all of her albums with their original cover art, as well as two discs of all single B sides recorded from 1978-1990. In 1991, Bush released a cover of Elton John's "Rocket Man", which reached number 12 in the UK singles chart, and went as high as number two in Australia, and in 2007, was voted the greatest cover ever by readers of The Observer newspaper. She recorded "Candle in the Wind", as the single's b-side.
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