4. Kate BushHounds Of Love

I was once in a room with Kate Bush, you know. I know! I was too frightened to say anything. It was at an exhibition of the wonderful painter John Byrne’s work. I’m not the kind of person to have regrets in my life, but I wish I’d said hello to her.

I knew ‘Wuthering Heights’ early on, but her music was generally a bit Marmite to people. But when this album came out, I just loved it – there was so much invention in it, sound-wise, and it was really at the cutting edge of what you could do technically. I couldn’t understand how she was writing songs like ‘Hello Earth’, with the astronaut guy and all the bleeps, and ‘Waking The Witch’, with all those hellos, and how she was somehow able to make them out of collaging sounds, and using samples of voices. The editing of those voices and the compression of them – sometimes saying something very literal, sometimes something very theatrical – I didn’t know how she achieved that. And in tracks like ‘And Dream Of Sheep’, she can delve into the subconscious and touch it very deeply. She seems to find her way in there and allow this stuff to rise up. There’s nothing bogus about that album at all. She had the drive to use this real cutting-edge, new technology and new techniques to take us to this deeper place. What a thing.