Kate Bush, punk's most polite champion
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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."
Bush admitted that she feared punk artists would see her as "square" ("not so much square, but... sort of oblong") and was absolutely delighted when Doherty informed her that artists such as The Boomtown Rats - who she'd described as "amazing" and "really beautiful" - had told him personally that they liked and admired her music.
"I really admire those bands, and I really admired the Sex Pistols tremendously," Bush admitted. "I admired them so much just for the freshness and the guts... They're definitely hitting people that need stimulation. They're hitting tired, bored people that want to pull their hair out and paint their face green. They're giving people the stimulation to do what they want, and I think I'm maybe just making people think about it, if I'm doing anything."
When Doherty asked, "Do you see that as the main difference between your role and others?", Bush replied, "Yeah. I'm probably, if anything, stimulating the emotional end, the intellect, and they're stimulating the guts, the body. They're getting the guts jumping around."
"That's a much more direct way to hit people," she concluded. "A punch is more effective than a look."
As a post-script, John Lydon - the former Mr Johnny Rotten - was a huge Kate Bush fan, calling her music “beauty beyond belief”. Lydon actually once wrote a song for Bush, which, sadly, never got recorded.
"I don't think she understood it," Lydon told Uncut magazine in 2007. "It was called Bird In Hand. It was about the illegal exportation of parrots from South America... But I think she thought it was a reference to her, which it certainly wasn't! But she's a wonderful, wonderful woman, stunningly innovative and creative. One of our finest."
