I'm a massive Kate Bush fan anyway but I've come away with a totally new appreciation of her as an artist and as a woman after finishing this book. Bush to do interviews, something she was not keen on, as many music journailst prefer the the print the legend idea of writing about musicians. Utter hell at times,” Bush says in a chapter entitled ‘a sea of sky and honey’ peels back the layers of her studio work, revealing not so much a creative process as an endurance contest. Of course, if you’ve been lucky enough to sit down and interview Kate in person, then you have a distinct advantage and that’s exactly what the author of Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush – journalist Tom Doyle – got the opportunity to do in 2005, commissioned by UK’s Mojo magazine, a publication Kate had agreed to talk to, to promote her Aerial album.

In 2005 Kate Bush announced a new album, almost twelve years after her last one, The Red Shoes, which sadly did not do as well as expected. Running Up That Hill is a vibrant and comprehensive re-examination of the artist and her many creative landmarks.She's also an amazingly creative talent with the innate ability to mesmerise you at one moment then repel you at the next. She thought it sounded like “a bag of cats”, but Lydon, who had just left the Sex Pistols, heard a fellow renegade. He covers her childhood, the release of each album, the inspiration for some of the songs, the reactions of celebrities like David Bowie, Ian Rankin and Cher, and even his own experience interviewing his subject. Written with obvious admiration for Kate, this book makes for a highly engaging read and is definitely a must-read for all Kate fans, old and new.

A Times Book of the Year An Uncut Magazine Book of the Year A Waterstones Music Book of the Year A Virgin Radio Book of the Year A Louder Book of the Year 'Probably the best Bush book to date. There’s something quite apt about Bush’s voice summoning the hands of pilled-up hedonists at warehouse parties and a kind of payback too. I just find it frustrating that people think I’m some sort of weirdo recluse that never comes out into the world,” she says. We go through her musical early life, to playing at the pubs, to precocious adolescent songwriting, learning the piano and other instruments and the development of her most beautiful voice.I'm sure gathering this was not easy, as Kate Bush is known to be reticence, but Doyle does a very excellent job. This latest release 50 Visions of Kate Bush by Tom Doyle might well be the punchiest one yet, beginning with her childhood in Welling Kent, where Bush would sit at a Mustel pump organ for hours working out chord structures and setting in motion the foundations for her future career in Dadaist pop.

As a journalist and interviewer, his work has appeared in Mojo, Billboard, Q, Sound On Sound, The Guardian and The Times. The way this biography is woven together from past interviews, chats with her nearest and dearest and the author’s interviews and run-ins with the illusive chanteuse is fantastic.From Emily Bronte to Acid House to internet zeitgeist, the truth is Kate Bush has travelled to places other artists can only dream of and perhaps, just perhaps, she isn’t done shape-shifting yet. What was really great is Tom Boyle tracks her down in her home (she is notoriously private) and interviews her.