By Todd Lavoie
Can you believe it? Kate Bush‘s ain’t-nothin-else-like-it debut, The Kick Inside (EMI), turns the big three-oh this month! Yep, that’s 30 gilded candles sitting atop the unapologetically romantic gem’s scrumptiously rococo birthday cake.
Back in February 1978, the inimitable Bush burst into worldwide consciousness in a flurry of French horns, wind chimes, and pirouettes. Sounding like little which came before it and bearing few similarities to its contemporaries, it remains a bit of a shock that the album hit the big time like it did. No complaints: the huge success of The Kick Inside enabled her to continue following her muse with little regard for musical trends or record company expectations. Quite the enviable position to be in – maintaining such success over the years while still indulging an ever-roaming artistic spirit.
Bush was a mere 19 when The Kick Inside emerged, but she already sounded surer of herself than many of us. While I tend to shudder and shrug whenever I think back to my teens, before hitting 20, she’d already assembled a baker’s dozen of impressively mature confessionals and lit-minded reveries, two of which (“The Man with the Child in His Eyes,” “Wuthering Heights”) remain undisputed classics from the era. Did I mention that she wrote some of these songs at the age of 15?!