And in January 1980 she entered Studio Two at Abbey Road to begin the six-month recording sessions that would complete her third album, Never For Ever, which she had begun creating demos for (of Blow Away, Egypt, Violin and The Wedding List) the previous summer at AIR Studios. She won Top Female Artist in the Music Week Annual Awards at the Dorchester Hotel, Top Female Singer at the British Rock and Pop Awards (later the BPI Awards) at the Café Royal, while at the Capital Radio Awards ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel she was presented with the award for Best Female Vocalist.īut for Bush the work was its own reward. She was voted Best Female Artist in the Record Mirror poll, Best Female Singer in the NME and Best Female Singer in Sounds. She began the first few months of the first year of the decade being given a multitude of accolades. Whereas her two previous Seventies albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart, presented her as still something of a novelty-cum-curio, albeit a waywardly talented one, the new decade saw Bush finally being taken seriously as a supremely self-contained singer, songwriter, musician and producer.

Kate Bush, who once described herself as “the shyest megalomaniac you’re ever likely to meet”, may only have released two albums in the first half of the Eighties, but their influence was enormous and pervasive. Not Kate Bush, whose next projects revealed an artist growing steadily more self-reliant and increasingly intent on steering her ship towards deeper and more challenging waters… By Paul Lester an d M ark Beaumont The early 80s… After two decent-selling albums and four charting singles, some artists might have taken their hands off the wheel.

Kate bush hounds of love photoshoot