12. Kate Bush
I’m conscious my list is a dude ranch, which though not true of what I grew up listening to (I loved Madonna before listening to half these records), reflects the way that men were my first point of identification growing up, as well as making up the bulk of my literary influences. Sinéad O’Connor was an exception, whose rendition of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ still floors me, but I think it was a more a lesson in how love endures beyond the end of relationships, something I had yet to learn, than a story I could follow. Perhaps predictably Kate Bush was the first woman that defined my emerging literary sensibility, before literature itself had even been able to, and left me wondering what it would be like to be someone else. I think it is no accident that Kate goes beyond intense and general empathy towards a particular sympathy for the male viewpoint, in a way that much contemporary thinking would say there is no need to, but that connected to a twelve-year boy afraid of rejection (in a way that Siouxsie Sioux, who I also loved but feared, did not).
It was not lost on me that ‘Hounds Of Love’ is sung by an adult, referencing experiences Kate incurred as a child, to embolden her adult self, an order of events that intrigued me, but not so much as the line “take your shoes off, and throw them in the lake”, which by itself could be the basis of a novel. This was a story that remained unfinished, relating to what was going to happen next, with neither the singer or listener knowing how this journey would end, and so completely relatable to the faltering first steps of pubescence.
As I listened to it, I hoped that if I waited patiently, maturity would fill out the missing parts; but it never has, the song instead sending me back into the past and the forgotten lessons of childhood.
