The Kate Bush Revival

She is the perfect role model for gentle souls who want to make their mark

Kate Bush at home in 1978. Chris Moorhouse/Getty Images

I passed a group of Zoomers on the street recently and they were playing Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush on a phone. That’s odd, I thought, but I soon found out why. This amazing scene from Stranger Things has brought it back to the charts (which somehow still exist) after 37 years.

This was the soundtrack of my girlhood. Still today when I hear this song I’m transported back to a small cabin on a rainy day near the sea in Kerry. I was a young teenager and I was supposed to be on a holiday. I could have been anywhere though because all I wanted to do was lie on my bed and listen to Hounds of Love. I would listen to the whole album and when it ended I would just start it again. In that stage of life between childhood and adulthood, I was searching for something in it.

Kate Bush has a unique appeal for young people with a gentle outward nature but with a powerful will trapped inside them. She shows them how to direct their will, not into aggressive outward displays of conventional competition, which they are not made for, but into quietly creating something unique.

The choreographer Lindsay Kemp described her as “extremely shy, extremely timid” when she arrived at his dance school, hiding in the back of the room. “I didn’t know she had any aspirations to becoming a singer,” he said, “She never talked about herself.”

She remained polite and good natured but private from the world of publicity and gossip. She opted out of competing for status set by the culture and instead carved out her own timeless creative space that was entirely apart from trends and scenes. Most importantly, and here’s the hard part, she directed all of her will-to-power into the creative act and manifested something of such extraordinary uniqueness that she didn’t need to direct it into her personality.

To young people growing up in the mean spirited social media age, this makes her a really powerful role model of a different way to be. There is another path for those who want to find it. Her creations will be treasured long after the pushy and the sharp elbowed have been forgotten. As a great man once said, it takes strength to be gentle and kind.