I intend to keep on writing for the first part of the year, so yet again I slip away from the eyeball of the media to my home.” The problem is that if I don’t make an album this year, there will be at least another two-year gap, and the way business and politics are, it would be a negative situation. It doesn’t have the same air of doom and gloom that ‘81 and ‘82 seemed to hold. Since then, all that had been heard from the singer was a bulletin in her fanclub newsletter in 1983: “This year has been very positive so far. While The Dreaming had been truly ahead of its time, utilising new technology such as the Fairlight synthesiser, it had produced only one UK Top 20 single (Sat In Your Lap) and had alienated even Bush’s most fervent admirers.
However, as her work had grown ever more experimental, so her commercial success had dwindled. The ethereal ingénue who’d transfixed the nation with the almost operatic Wuthering Heights at the height of punk and disco in 1978 had previously been prolific, releasing four albums in five years, as well as completing an extensive European tour – 1979’s The Tour Of Life. In fact, nothing could’ve been further from the truth and, in September of that year, she unleashed what would become her defining opus, Hounds Of Love, on the world. It had been three years since her last album, The Dreaming, and there were rumours that she’d gone mad, developed an addiction to junk food that had seen her weight balloon to 20 stone, or retired from the music industry completely. In July 1985, as the world basked in the enormity of Live Aid, NME – no doubt dismayed at the state of a British music scene dominated by Dire Straits, Queen and Phil Collins – ran an article asking where Bush had disappeared to. Given her current status as one of the most original and dynamic artists Britain has ever produced, it’s hard to imagine that there was a time in the mid-Eighties when Kate Bush was perceived to be languishing in the proverbial pop wasteland.