Kate Bush: Loyal To The Kick Inside

Things like that don’t come along very often. When has the next Kate Bush come along after Kate Bush? There hasn’t been one.

-Elton John

When I was a teenager I was living with a crew of ex-street punks who had left the mean streets for the beauty of Denman Island in the Pacific Northwest. Most of them were recovering addicts or abuse survivors, and they banded together to survive and support each other. Among other things they shared was an interest in things of the spirit, particularly a polyglot mix of Eastern mysticism, Celtic spirituality, and neo-shamanism in the form of recycled ideas and practices from Canada’s Indigenous peoples. We had a limited number of cassette tapes between us (yes, cassette tapes). Among those we had were some Kate Bush. My two closest friends and older mentors in the group, Graham and Verndawg both loved Kate Bush. They were the ones who introduced me to her singular genius.

Graham and I would sip tea in his little hut on the side of Graham Lake (the name a funny coincidence) and listen to her mind-blowing 1982 album The Dreaming over and over again. The sacred feminine was celebrated in our little band, and Bush seemed to embody it in spades- unworldly yet sensual, both dancer and singer, an elfin madonna, her music a hallucinatory blend of poetry and eerie, playful soundscapes driven by a uniquely…