Kate Bush Is Our Goth Big Sister

Photo: Ian Harrison

I can still remember the first time I saw the divine Kate Bush,after all this time. I was only little, she was performing on Top Of the Pops, and she both fascinated and terrified me, singing Wuthering Heights. I thought she was possibly a witch. Now I know she is. Her wide eyes and extraordinary vocals, the uninhibited theatrically of it all…Le swoon! And Lindsay Kemp said she’d been so shy. But there she was, inventing goth all by herself, fully formed, seemingly appearing from out of nowhere.

Photo: John Carder Bush

I don’t subscribe to the “Nico was the first goth” view, even though I like her. I just don’t think blonds in suits can be goth. Even when she stopped bleaching her hair and hung out with John Cooper Clarke, strung – out on heroin. She seemed to lack that requisite dip into the dressing up box that we goths love.

I got up early and walked all the way over to a thrift shop to get a big, red lips shaped make-up tin the other day. Siouxsie would do that. Pam Hogg would definitely do that. And Kate would leave her big farmhouse to do that, I’m sure. Anything for something unique and vintage.

Kate is still such an icon. She’s the link between glamour in its sense of enchantment (the original meaning in Scottish folklore etymology ) and the enigmatic glamour of the film star or performer. She casts spells and we’re seduced, lost forever, slaves to her magick.

Who else but Kate would start her career, still in her teens by referencing gothic novels in white flowing Pre-Raphaelite gowns? Then go on to reference Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, Hammer Horror, The Red Shoes, and then the divine Molly Bloom on The Sensual World.

Yes,yes. .. Indeed, it’s the fact that on the news the other day, people in Dublin have been getting into trouble for groping the statue of Molly Bloom. That is why Kate Bush is on my mind just now. She references the James Joyce heroine’s breathless monologue so beautifully, with eloquence and elegance. Originality, an exceptional voice and vision, sexual energy and goddess, witchy power will endure. Kate just did it first in music, long before Siouxsie, Bjork, Tori, Polly, bloody Florence and Wet Leg. She was goth before anyone else, and I love her.