DISCOVER Kate Bush country
Walk one of the wonders of the musical world – or face questions from your heirs.
IMAGINE ALL THE people who attended the first ever production of Hamlet, and spent much of the performance wondering what to have for dinner. Or the residents of the seventh arrondissement in Paris for whom the erection of Mr Eiffel’s ‘Iron Lady’ was just an eye-rolling bit of show-offery connected with that summer’s fair. Of course it’s almost impossible to appreciate the significance of things as they happen in real time, but I think there might be descendants of ours who in a hundred years can’t believe that great-great-great grandpa was contemporaneous with Kate flippin’ Bush.
Sixty-six this summer and still a marvel of the musical world, both the youngest and oldest female creator of a self-penned number one, between those bookends she’s authored a display of originality, strangeness and sweet sonic succour that may never be matched. That and become an emblem of English eccentricity, creativity and capacity for vaulting leaps in character which could apply equally to the countryside as to Kate. Capable of touching so many, yet uninterested in celebrity; down-to-earth yet communing with the strangest muses; world famous yet content to exist in rural obscurity, she’s a flattering mirror for us Brits to hold up to ourselves, and a worthy object of a walking pilgrimage. Here’s where to pick up the trail of the inimitable Kate Bush.
1 Haworth Moor, Yorkshire
Kate first came across the brooding tale of love on the West Yorkshire moors that would inspire her debut single, watching a 1967 TV adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. “I’d just caught the very end of it, and it was like really freaky, cause there’s this hand coming through the window and whispering voices and I’ve always been into that sort of thing and it just hung around in my head. Then I read the book and that was it, I had to write a song about it” she said, encouraged by the discovery she and Emily shared a birthday (30 July). The song would go to number one – the first ever by a female artist singing her own song – and propel her to fame (she would reprise the feat with Running Up That Hill, thanks to Stranger Things, becoming the oldest female with a self-written number one). You can experience the desolate locations of Cathy and Heathcliff’s Victorian ripsnorter by walking past the ruins of Top Withens (different in layout to the novel, but the setting which inspired), and the waterfalls that were one of the Brontë sisters’ favourite places and which have since taken their name.
