CATHERINE BUSH, WRITING SONGS SINCE 11 YEARS OLD

Today, The Grandma has been listening to Kate Bush, the English singer and songwriter, who was born on a day like today in 1958.

Catherine Bush (born 30 July 1958) is an English singer, songwriter, record producer and dancer. 

Bush began writing songs at age 11. She was signed to EMI Records after Pink Floyd's David Gilmour helped produce a demo tape. 

In 1978, at the age of 19, she topped the UK Singles Chart for four weeks with her debut single Wuthering Heights, becoming the first female artist to achieve a UK number one with a solely self-written song. Her debut album, The Kick Inside, was released that same year.

Bush slowly gained artistic independence in album production and has produced all her studio albums by herself since The Dreaming (1982).

Bush has released 25 UK Top 40 singles, including the Top 10 hits The Man with the Child in His Eyes, Babooshka, Running Up That Hill, Don't Give Up (a duet with Peter Gabriel), and King of the Mountain. All nine of her studio albums reached the UK Top 10, with all but one reaching the top five, including the number one albums Never for Ever (1980), Hounds of Love (1985) and the greatest hits compilation The Whole Story (1986). She took a hiatus between her seventh and eighth albums, The Red Shoes (1993) and Aerial (2005). 

In 2011, Bush released the albums Director's Cut and 50 Words for Snow. She drew attention again in 2014 with her concert residency Before the Dawn, her first shows since 1979's The Tour of Life.

Bush was the first British solo female artist to top the UK Albums Chart and the first female artist to enter it at number one. Her eclectic musical style, unconventional lyrics, performances and literary themes have influenced a diverse range of artists. 

In 2022, Running Up That Hill received renewed attention after it appeared in the Netflix series Stranger Things, becoming Bush's second UK number one and reaching the top of several other charts. It peaked at number three on the US Billboard Hot 100, and its parent album, Hounds of Love, became Bush's first album to reach the top of a Billboard albums chart.

Bush has received 14 Brit Awards nominations, winning for Best British Female Artist in 1987, and has been nominated for three Grammy Awards.

In 2002, Bush was recognised with an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to music. She became a Fellow of The Ivors Academy in the UK in 2020. Bush was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023.

More information: Kate Bush

Bush was born on 30 July 1958 at a maternity hospital in Bexleyheath, Kent, to an English doctor, general practitioner Robert Bush (1920-2008), and Hannah Patricia (née Daly) (1918-1992), an Irish staff nurse, daughter of a farmer in County Waterford.

Bush's musical aesthetic is eclectic, and is known to employ varied influences and meld disparate styles, often within a single song or over the course of an album. Simon Reynolds of The Guardian called Bush the queen of art-pop, and she has also been described as art rock, baroque pop, post-progressive, progressive pop, avant-pop and experimental pop. She has been grouped with other arty 1970s and '80s British pop rock artists such as Roxy Music and Peter Gabriel.

Even in her earliest works, with piano the primary instrument, she wove together diverse influences, drawing on classical music, glam rock, and a wide range of ethnic and folk sources. This has continued throughout her career. By the time of Never for Ever, Bush had begun to make prominent use of the Fairlight CMI synthesiser, which allowed her to sample and manipulate sounds, expanding her sonic palette.

Bush has a soprano vocal range. Her vocals contain elements of British, Anglo-Irish and most prominently (southern) English accents and, in its use of musical instruments from various periods and cultures, her music has differed from American pop norms. Reviewers have used the term surreal to describe her music. Her songs explore melodramatic emotional and musical surrealism that defies easy categorisation. It has been observed that even her more joyous pieces are often tinged with traces of melancholy and vice versa.

More information: Instagram-Kate Bush

I don't aim for perfection.
But I do want to try and come up 

with something interesting.

Kate Bush