Every Kate Bush Album Ranked

When Kate Bush was inducted – rather belatedly some might argue – into The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in November 2023, singer and super-fan St. Vincent posed a question: “How could someone be this genius and pure and completely free?” It’s a question that perhaps only Bush herself is equipped to answer – and one suspects she’d be far too self-effacing to do so. But listening back to her records goes some way at least to explaining her almost preternatural gifts as a singer, songwriter, producer and performer.

For an artist of such towering stature, Bush has produced a surprisingly modest body of recorded work. Since blowing minds with her debut single Wuthering Heights in early 1978, she has released just 10 studio albums – and one of those, 2011’s Director’s Cut, featured re-workings of old material. Yet, as each of those albums rams home, her music is ever ripe for further exploration and rediscovery. Nearly 50 years on from the release of Wuthering Heights, and its still remarkable parent album The Kick Inside, MOJO retraces the full story of Bush’s magnificent music...

10.

Lionheart

(EMI, 1978)

Whirled around by the success of The Kick Inside and immediately pressed back into the studio, Bush struggled – self-critically re-recording vocals time after time. Lionheart came out comparatively slight but nicely funny in its camp showbiz tales (Wow) and assorted languorous immersions (In The Warm Room). But, despite any overthinking, her singing and piano lift every note: a flood of mood, melody and glorious extremity, rock squawk to English rose seductress to basso-contralto Marlene Dietrichery.

Key Track: In The Warm Room

9.

50 Words For Snow

(Fish People, 2011)

Re-energised by Director’s Cut, Bush worked furiously on her first LP of new songs since 2005’s Ariel, taking as its central motif the magic, beauty and danger of snow. But a Christmas album it was not, as lengthy, often sombre mediations spread out like black ice, with frost-bitten Elton John duet Snowed In At Wheeler Street a highlight. 15 years later, we’re still waiting for a follow-up.

Key Track: Snowed In At Wheeler Street

8.

Director’s Cut

(Fish People, 2011)

That Bush’s first album since the remarkable _Arie_l was a reworking of songs previously heard on 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes might have felt like a kick in the teeth for fans were it not for the remarkable transformation she revealed, stripping back the digital production sheen of the originals to reveal their warm organic mass and approaching the work afresh from the perspective of an artist now in her 50s.

Key Track: Flower Of The Mountain

7.

The Red Shoes

(EMI, 1993)

Its inner sleeve image of juicy fruit with seeds spilling out points to what came next (ie motherhood), but The Red Shoes is half future hope, half immediate pain (her mother and other bereavements, her break-up with bassist Del Palmer). Dry eyes are impossible while Moments Of Pleasure mourns the people, and You’re The One mourns the love. But Eat The Music and Rubberband Girl come bouncing back. Bush may have retrospectively voiced her unhappiness at how these songs turned out, returning to them on The Director’s Cut, but it’s easily up there with her greatest work.

Key Track: Moments Of Pleasure

6.

The Sensual World

(EMI, 1989)

While the title track’s Joycean delirium seems to promise two sides of ecstatic eroticism, Bush moves quickly into the mainstream of songs about relationships. Even so, she concentrates on uncertainty; plenty of tension, no clichés – Hitler going “do-do-do-do” at the palais in Heads We’re Dancing is provocateuse perfection. Musically, if she missed something she wanted, the clue may lie in those Irish and Bulgarian folkies she gathered, then underused.

Key Track: This Woman's Work

5.

Aerial

(EMI, 2005)

After a 12-year wait, Bush affirmed her past via old friends, including ever-present drummer Stuart Elliott, former partner Del Palmer, and her current husband, guitarist Dan McIntosh. Then she addresses middle age, glorying in her “sun” Bertie, remembering her mother anew (A Coral Room) and creating Mrs Bartolozzi, who recalls her late husband through the shirts on the washing line. Human detail on disc one marries disc two’s panoramic meditation on landscape and passing time.

Key Track: King Of The Mountain

4.

The Kick Inside

(EMI, 1978)

A debut to stop your heart, to stop the clocks. Who? How? Singing of innocence and experience as if they were one: the strangest rhapsody of period pains, incest, sensual fantasy and romance, the aching wonders of womanhood. While everyone surely knows Wuthering Heights (no, not that one) and the steamy string-driven The Man With The Child In His Eyes, the strange phenomena within The Kick Inside still bedazzles and beguiles.

Key Track: Wuthering Heights

3.

Never For Ever

(EMI, 1980)

Given more time and more control (as co-producer), Bush started to conjoin sensuality with ideas and argument and threw it all in. Squally grotesque Babooshka and Violin, taboo-twisting lullaby The Infant Kiss, and miniature war requiem Army Dreamers tumble towards the orchestrally grand Breathing – a first-person imagining of a mother and unborn baby being poisoned by nuclear fall-out: physical horror felt to the bone, political considerations left to the listener.

Key Track: Babooshka

2.

The Dreaming

(EMI, 1982)

“My ‘She’s gone mad’ album,” Bush once joked. Really, she’d just got inside some emotions that ought to have been beyond her – the Vietcong fighter’s inner scream of “I love life”, the woman howling “Get out of my house” at an intruder (real or not). Inspired by Peter Gabriel to use a sampler/synthesiser and write from rhythm, she made sense within a bedlam of strange sounds and multiple vocal personalities.

Key Track: Get Out Of My House

1.

Hounds Of Love

(EMI, 1985)

On which Bush made that “deal with God” and gathered a whole suite of songs that contemplate death (by drowning under ice, no less). This is no-limits Bush becoming the artist she re-conceived in her late twenties, a conscious “woman in a man’s world” with “a lot more weight and power” to deliver. She sings out, body and soul, no more interludes with the adroit character actress and comedienne, just herself, right there.

Key Track: Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)