When I first heard Kate Bush’s debut single “Wuthering Heights” I had no idea what she looked like and her screechy, witchy vocal gave me a mental picture of some batty old woman who spent too much time locked up at home with her cats and frightened the local children. But then this poster started appearing around London which just goes to show how wrong you can be. Very happily wrong in this case.

But even though she turned out to be young and smoking hot Kate still had a touch of the dotty old bat about her — the polite English term for this is “eccentric” — with her peculiar songs, outside-the-box individuality and penchant for funny costumes and interpretive dance. In his book “England Is Mine” Michael Bracewell described her as “pop’s equivalent of the mad girl in the attic…covering the territory of Angela Carter’s A Company of Wolves in the guise of a pre-Raphaelite raised on Jackie” (if I wrote a line that good I’d retire.) But what do you expect from someone who spend her childhood dressing up like this?

Judging by these photos Kate had a rather bohemian and free-spirited childhood, growing up on an old farmhouse with a piano-playing father, folk-dancing mother, musicians and poets for brothers and lots of costumes and make-believe — it sounds like something out of Dodie Smith’s “I Capture The Castle.” The sort of atmosphere that would produce a girl precocious enough to write and record something as amazing as this when she was only 16.

Download: The Man With The Child In His Eyes – Kate Bush (mp3)

I had a Kate Bush poster on my bedroom wall but it wasn’t because I was such a huge fan of her records (hint: she was wearing a leotard), though I loved a lot of her singles I had a hard time making it through a whole album and could only take her in small doses. She was like the sexy girl you meet at a college party who dazzles you with her passion for music, poetry, art, and theatre, but after a while her moody drama queen act, Ophelia complex, and habit of reciting Sylvia Plath poems out loud gets really annoying and you yearn for someone a bit less “interesting” — you only stayed with her as long as you did because the sex was amazing.

Still, you’ve got to love someone who mentions Gurdjieff in a pop song and writes one as beautifully elegiac about the old country as “Oh England My Lionheart”.

Download: Them Heavy People (live) – Kate Bush (mp3)
Download: Oh England My Lionheart (live) – Kate Bush (mp3)