It hardly needs saying that Kate Bush’s landmark art rock fantasia Never for Ever remains a milestone in a legendary career. After breaking out at 18 with the sensational “Wuthering Heights” and following it with a whopper of a debut album, The Kick Inside, mere months later and a follow-up, the steady though less stunning Lionheart, the following year, the songstress penned and released what is clearly her first masterpiece in 1980, and with it cemented herself as a titanic talent.
Upon its release in the UK, Never for Ever became the first studio album by a British female solo artist to reach the top of the UK Albums Chart — and for good reason. It opens with the glimmering earworm “Babooshka,” an unforgettable story song that only Bush could write, closes with the gorgeous and ironically breathtaking single “Breathing,” and dishes out its fair share of fan-favorite tracks in between. On “Violin,” she sets her singular falsetto against a chorus of screaming guitars. On “Army Dreamers,” Bush sets the story of a mother lamenting her military son’s death to the rhythm of a waltz.
Amidst the swooning vocals and woozy, maximalist instrumentations of the album’s biggest hits rests a pair of tracks that unveil a new side of Bush. They are “The Wedding List” and “The Infant Kiss,” and each, in its own way, sees her working from screen to song. The former, light on its feet and lyrically playful, chronicles the revenge arc of a scorned bride. This is taken from François Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (1968), reworked by Bush as a series of wordplays that bury its darker meaning under an undeniable sonic lightness. “The Infant Kiss,” a chilly and spare lullaby, puts haunting words to the indescribable feelings of a governess torn between the love of an adult man and a child who reside in the same body — the loose plot of Jack Clayton’s 1961 horror masterpiece The Innocents.
At the age of 18, a then unknown Catherine Bush happened upon a film. That film was Wuthering Heights, the 1967 BBC adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, and it sparked a realization: she and Brontë, born 140 years earlier, shared the same birthday, July 30th. Now fascinated, Bush read the book, and within the span of a few hours one March night as a full moon sat in the sky, she penned the song that would propel her to a level of stardom only few can claim to have reached.
The song’s sensational success is well documented. It dethroned ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me” from the top of the UK’s official singles chart, where it sat for a month. It spawned two separate music videos: one in which Bush channels the ghostly presence of Kathy in a white dress against a black backdrop and a second where she performs amidst a stand of pine trees in her more iconic red dress. In 2016, the same year that Pitchfork named it the fifth best song of the 1970s, a global flash mob event dubbed “The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever” brought fans together to don Bush’s iconic red and perform the music video’s choreography. In 2018, Bush penned an epitaph for Brontë upon invitation from the Bradford Literature Festival: the poem “Emily.”
Less remarked upon is the tradition, inaugurated with “Wuthering Heights” and continued by “The Wedding List” and “The Infant Kiss,” of Kate Bush songs that work from screen to songbook. Moreover, there is no more revealing or vital component of Bush’s work than the inextricable bond between song and moving image; her soundscapes are so dazzling and rich as to allow the ears to possess the eyes and visualize their baroque spectacles as strange ghouls and specters. Individual songs, too, possess a measure of performance that is decidedly cinematic — the way she warps her voice into a figure of exasperation on “Houdini” and other tracks from The Dreaming, or the way that she animates “The Red Shoes,” another film-inspired track, with a sense of fairytale disbelief. As her fame and talent swelled to ever more gargantuan levels, she began to transcend the label of musician, choreographing her own performances and directing, or co-directing, her own music videos.
In a 1989 interview with Q Magazine, Bush called herself “the shyest megalomaniac you’re ever likely to meet.” Someone more reasonable might call her one of the greatest artists to ever live.
More than any others, five tracks illustrate the literal idea of Kate Bush’s cinema: the aforementioned “Wuthering Heights,” “The Wedding List,” and “The Infant Kiss,” as well as “Get Out of My House” (the closing track of The Dreaming, inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining) and “The Red Shoes” (the title track of The Red Shoes, inspired by the homonymous Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger film).
Certainly there is no shortage of music inspired by cinema — from Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” to Cobra Starship’s “Bring It (Snakes on a Plane)” — but the singular triumph of Bush’s work is that it never fails to capture the soul of the film as she experienced it and wrap it up in a sound so singular you’d never guess its inspiration even as you feel it in your bones. Never in “Wuthering Heights” does Bush so bluntly remind the listener that Cathy has been a ghost all along — and yet the baroque stylings of her sound in tandem with the otherworldly crooning of her voice all but make it explicit. Likewise, only once on the entire album The Red Shoes does she allude to either Powell or Pressburger (on the touching ballad “Moments of Pleasure,” she sings “Hey there, Michael / Do you really love me?” of Powell, who had passed away three years prior), and yet its title track feels possessed by the same frenetic beauty that animates the otherworldly dance number at the heart of the 1948 film.
The same certainly holds true of “The Infant Kiss,” in which she makes us feel as if whatever malevolence — be it spectral, theological or psychological — has taken hold of the governess (Deborah Kerr) in Clayton’s chilly gothic masterpiece The Innocents has ensnared us in its tendrils too. The ghostly soundscapes of the track’s production — far sparer than the rest of the album — seem to reconstruct the cavernous halls of the mansion in the film, where ghosts might lurk just out of sight. Her voice, full and bright as ever — but just slightly wispier and more fearful — becomes the chill in the attic, the wind that blows doors closed. Though she only alludes to the film by narrative similarities — “Ooh he scares me / There’s a man behind those eyes,” “Words of caress on their lips / That speak of adult love” — the song haunts all the same.
Other such songs are less direct; both “Get Out of My House” and “The Wedding List” warp their inspirations into something unrecognizable. On the former, she invokes the hostile images of The Shining for a story of heartbroken isolation whose overall timbre conforms more to her own style’s gothic eccentricities than Kubrick’s haunting precision. She sings of the blood-filled elevator — “I hear the lift descending / I hear it hit the landing” — but envisions herself as the hotel’s ghastly inhabitants with baggage all her own — “I am the concierge chez-moi, honey / Won’t letcha in for love, nor money!”
On the latter, too, she leans more into a realm of interpretive freedom. Where Truffaut’s film, in which Jeanne Moreau plays a woman out for revenge after her groom is gunned down on their wedding day, is often stoic and reserved despite its frequent passages of violence, Bush’s “The Wedding List” appreciates its inherent fun. Against an uptempo medley of guitars and piano, she sings with disarming jubilance about a vow of violence. That the titular wedding list is for hits, not guests, feels like a sinister revelation.
They run through a dark wood, silhouetted by a ghastly blue light, enshrouded in fog. They run through a cavernous hall, aglow in moonlight that leaks in through towering windows. They meander through a packed room and a crowded dancehall, eyes peeled for something following them. A man mouths to the camera:
“It’s in the trees; it’s coming.”
Those words, sampled from Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957), open “The Hounds of Love,” the title track from Bush’s 1985 masterpiece. They inflect it with fear — though Bush poses, smiling and dressed in lavender, with dogs on the album’s cover, the hounds of the song tear through the underbrush and gnash their teeth at the song’s forlorn protagonist.
They likewise set the scene for its music video, directed by Bush. It adapts Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. The song itself is about a woman’s fear of love, its sample comes from a movie about satanic cults, and its music video adapts a classic Hitchcock thriller — only in the mind of Kate Bush could those things coexist so fruitfully.
It’s there that the moody, noirish images of Tourneur, soaked in inky blacks and spare flourishes of light, commingle with the frantic “wrong man” capers of Hitchcock to accentuate every guttural plea for help she makes in the song. It’s there, too, that the song’s thundering drums begin to sound like the hounds’ footfalls or the noise of the music video’s couple scrambling through the night. For Bush, it seems, the power of the moving image is the same as the power of the song. They dance together, lift each other up; her music is shaped by a distinctly cinematic quality and her cinema feels like music.
Bush’s film taste is a revolving door of the best movies world cinema has to offer: Psycho, Kagemusha, Seven Samurai, The Red Shoes, Nosferatu the Vampyre, even The Empire Strikes Back. Often, there is a preference for the strange and gothic: The Innocents and Night of the Demon, of course, but also Don’t Look Now, Witchfinder General, and Brazil – films that had no specific inspiration on her work (although she did record vocals for an unused rendering of Brazil’s title track), but whose uncanniness feels of a piece with her work.
Don’t Look Now, Nicolas Roeg’s haunting psychodrama about a grief-stricken couple who find themselves entranced by a strange figure in the dark alleys of Venice, feels as if it could have inspired any number of Kate Bush songs. And it did, more literally, inspire her to cast Donald Sutherland (who stars alongside Julie Christie in that film) as her costar in the seven-minute music video for “Cloudbusting.”
Bush wrote “Cloudbusting,” the fifth track on The Hounds of Love, after reading the memoir of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who in the 1950s constructed a “cloudbuster” to bring rain in times of drought. The video, something of an inverse to the songs previously mentioned in that it puts images to a song translated from page to song, embellishes upon the track’s narrative by stretching its historical inspiration towards pure fantasy. Bush, short-haired and in proper farmboy attire, plays the young son to Sutherland’s mad scientist father, and the two cavort across hilltops as they aim their fantastical device skyward and the clouds swirl in response.
The video is something of a small masterpiece. Bush conceived of it alongside Terry Gilliam, who had just released Brazil, and it was directed by Julian Doyle, one of Gilliam’s frequent collaborators. Its images are pure and cinematic in a way that makes them as instantly memorable as the song itself. It’s also the perfect visual emblem for The Hounds of Love, the album with which the totality of Bush’s vision becomes so much more than just music.
To one only informed by Bush’s adaptations of cinema to song, it might appear that her fascination with the movies dwindled as her spark grew ever brighter — she wrote only one more song inspired directly by a movie, “The Red Shoes,” after her fourth album in 1982. But the reality of her artistry is quite the contrary; her cinema simply grew to encompass all of her art:the individual tracks, the albums they comprised, the performances of the albums, and the lavish music videos and stage adaptations that accompanied them.
The second side of The Hounds of Love, an equal parts thrilling and moving concept album about a woman’s experience while lost at sea, is the perfect illustration of this. As if perfectly foreshadowed by the cinematic flirtations of the music videos for “Cloudbusting” and “The Hounds of Love,” and even the stirring depths of early tracks’ production, the album’s second side (dubbed “The Ninth Wave”) stitches together a slew of stylistically robust and masterfully produced individual tracks into something cohesive and toweringly cinematic.
“The Ninth Wave” opens with “And Dream of Sheep,” where Bush finds herself alone amidst the waves, the light of her life vest a beacon for passing ships (“Little light shining / Little light guides them to me”). It closes six tracks later with “The Morning Fog,” a resplendently sweet (or tragic, depending on who you ask) album-closer that paints with vivid simplicity a picture of the woman stumbling ashore, tearful to still be alive.
Other tracks are less clear-cut, and it’s there that the suite’s more cinematic qualities surface: in “Waking the Witch,” Bush envisions herself as a woman taken to trial for witchcraft and tossed into the water — whether she sinks or swims, her dire fate is already cemented. On that song and “Jig of Life,” especially, the production shifts into something more experimental, where form becomes synonymous with content before exploding into something jagged and fractal. The voices of loved ones plead the lone woman to wake up, but her eyelids become heavy and she slips into a dreamlike fantasia of lush unreality. In “Watching You Without Me” and “Hello Earth,” the breakneck urgency of her plight slips into a quieter sound that better reflects her solitude, as at first she imagines herself as a ghost watching her loved ones but unable to call out to them for help and then eventually drifts off toward oblivion. It’s on “Hello Earth,” perhaps the single greatest song in all of Bush’s oeuvre, that the album reaches its emotional climax — at the moment when her death seems imminent, she feels her soul drift off to view the world from above, and the album steers gracefully into a realm of cosmic melancholy only her angelic voice could pull off.
It’s hard, at that moment, not to imagine her as the Star Child of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, drifting through the heavens in some unknowable state of being, but her final thoughts are achingly simple. She imagines the simplicity with which she could cover the whole of the earth with just one hand. She imagines driving at night with her loved one asleep in the passenger seat as she watches a shooting star cut through the night sky. She imagines now that she is the shooting star, falling past the earth into a vast nothingness. “Why did I go? / Why did I go?” she sings – and it’s unclear whether she regrets the voyage that led her to this place, or simply laments that she can’t hold on any longer.
Were one to distill Bush’s entire career into a pair of works, they would be The Red Shoes and “The Ninth Wave,” a perfect pair of musical, and even cinematic, triumphs that represent, better than anything else she ever achieved, her tremendous gift for transcending the limitations of any one medium.
At first considered a great artistic failure, The Red Shoes (Bush’s 1993 album, the last she released before a 22-year hiatus) marks the most literal convergence of her music and her cinema. The tracks themselves, buoyant and exciting and far poppier than anything else she had attempted (which partially explains the struggle of fans to embrace them), are less sonically adventurous than what she was releasing at the apex of her musical career just two albums prior. But The Red Shoes, as inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen story as the Powell and Pressburger masterpiece Bush often cited as her favorite film, is a purely cinematic wonder of fairytale magic and baroque pop perfection.
This time, the cinema of Kate Bush is entirely literal — she directed her first and only feature film, The Line, The Cross & the Curve (1993), as a tie-in to the album. Its title is taken from the chorus of the title track — “With no words, with no song / You can dance the dream, with your body on / And this curve is your smile / And this cross is your heart / And this line is your path” — and it places Bush in the role of the shoes’ recipient, cursed to dance forever and ever. Like her music style, Bush’s direction is dazzling and assured. She proves herself as proficient an imagemaker as a musician, capable of visualizing the hypnotic idiosyncrasy of her musical production with lush, colorful visions of fantasy.
The Line, The Cross & The Curve opens with Bush concluding a dance rehearsal, workshopping choreography to the album’s upbeat opening track, “Rubber Band Girl.” Her dancers leave and a storm picks up outside. A strange woman enters the room through a mirror. Her hands are wrapped in bandages, in what seems to be a visual echo of Vicky’s bloodied stockings at the end of the Powell and Pressburger film, and she offers Bush a pair of red shoes that whisk her away to a strange land. Before his death, Bush had spoken with Powell about collaborating on the film.
Preceding and overshadowing the album and film’s release was a great deal of personal sadness for Bush. In the span of less than a decade, she suffered the losses of numerous loved ones — both family members and close collaborators — whom she memorializes on the aching piano ballad “Moments of Pleasure.” But there is a greater sense in the album as a whole, and the film that accompanies it, that this is the work of someone who can’t keep going much longer. Its brightest moments mask a lingering sadness, and its quieter ballads offer melancholic introspection — on “So is Love,” Bush puts it quite simply: “We used to say, ‘Ah, hell, we’re young’ / But now we see that life is sad / And so is love.”
That the film’s story is that of a woman who chooses an eternal curse rather than give up the ability to make art is revealing. That Bush brings it to life with such love and color, cobbling together a gleaming array of images and references to her own idiosyncratic catalogue of stylings and favorite films (The Innocents especially seems to be quoted frequently in the film’s repeated images of a ghostly man’s smiling reflection) is a testament to the richness and beauty of her art.
Though it was always Bush’s dream to translate “The Ninth Wave” to celluloid — she conceived of it as a film from the very beginning — she never did. The Red Shoes marked the end of a chapter in her career, after which point she didn’t release another album for 22 years, generally favored a calmer sound to the dizzying baroque intensity of her first seven records, and directed only four more music videos, for “Deeper Understanding, “Misty,” “Lake Tahoe,” and “And Dream of Sheep.” “And Dream of Sheep” marks the closest Bush ever came to directing “The Ninth Wave” as a film: the track opens the suite and its video was released as promotion for a 2014 residency performance.
Unlike the snowman with whom the protagonist shares a night of passion in the song and video for “Misty,” a track from Bush’s 2011 album 50 Words for Snow, Bush could never so easily melt away into nothing — rather, she fulfilled her “Ninth Wave” dreams with Before the Dawn, a 2014 live show and ostensible career closer that united 10 albums and four decades of music in three acts. The show’s structure was simple and summative: its first act reintroduced audiences to the fantasia of Bush with an innovative restaging of a slew of greatest hits, and the second and third featured performances of “The Ninth Wave” and “A Sky of Honey,” the second of two suites in her 2005 album Aerial.
Stripped of the cinema’s capacities for visual trickery and fantastical imagery, Bush’s late career live performances evince a greater immediacy. Gone is the barrier of glass between viewer and performer, the image as mediator no longer necessary. Her voice is lower now, sweeter. She performs with her son, whom she sings of on Aerial: “Here’s a song and a song for him / Sweet Kisses / Three Wishes.” But her grandeur is as enrapturing as ever — engulfed in the fog that spills onstage during “The Ninth Wave,” she seems once again the spitting image of Cathy, alone on those wily, windy moors.
The beauty of Kate Bush is that, over those four decades, she remains as resilient as the cinema itself — endlessly prevailing, always capable of reinvention. She’s the bride dressed in black, out for revenge; the haunted house screaming to be left alone; the young son of a modern-day magician; the woman stranded at sea.
