Heathcliff, it’s me again: More new music from Kate Bush is coming

News of more songs from Bush is quite an event because she is the musical equivalent of Daniel Day-Lewis: uniquely talented but brutally stingy with her output.

British singer Kate Bush has revealed she is close to starting work on a new album – her first in thirteen years. Picture: AP

Kate Bush fans have a claim to be some of the most patient in the world. The singer-songwriter has toured once in 45 years, has not released an album since 2011, and even photographs of her in public are vanishingly rare.

Those wanting more were given reasons to be cheerful this week after Bush, 66, told an interviewer that she was “very keen” to start working on new music and had “lots of ideas” she wanted to pursue. “I’m really looking forward to getting back into that creative space,” she told a London radio journalist. “It’s been a long time.”

The singer’s latest record, 50 Words For Snow, was released 13 years ago. Fans have had to put up with live and compilation albums since then.

Bush was speaking to promote a short film, Little Shrew, which she has written and directed to raise money for children affected by war. The black-and-white, four-minute animation is set to her 2011 track Snowflake.

https://t.co/m2024szG3A@WarChildUK@BBCRadio4

— Kate Bush (@KateBushMusic) October 25, 2024

Bush is loved for her poetic, experimental hits of the late 1970s and ’80s but she won a generation of new fans when her 1985 song Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) was featured in Netflix’s Stranger Things in 2022. Asked whether she was working on new material, Bush said: “Not at the moment, but I’ve been caught up doing a lot of archive work over the last few years, redesigning our website, putting a lyric book together. And I’m very keen to start working on a new album when I’ve got this finished.”

Asked if it was something she had been hoping to do for a while, Bush said: “Yes it is, really. Particularly (in) the last year, I’ve felt really ready to start doing something new.” But when she was asked about the prospect of live shows, she joked: “I’m not there yet.”

Bush at the start of her career in the late 1970s. Picture: News Corp

Bush said Little Shrew was initially made in response to the war in Ukraine. “I think it was such a shock for all of us,” she said. “It’s been such a long period of peace we’d all been living through. And I just felt I wanted to make a little animation that would feature, originally, a little girl. It was really the idea of children caught up in war. I wanted to draw attention to how horrific it is … and so I came up with this idea for a storyboard and felt that, actually, people would be more empathetic towards a creature rather than a human.”

Reflecting on the impact of conflict on children, Bush said: “I think war is horrific for everyone, particularly civilians, because they’re so vulnerable in these situations. But for a child, it’s unimaginable how frightening it must be for them.”

She added: “These are dark times that we’re living in and I think, to a certain extent, everyone is just worn out.

“We went through the pandemic. That was a huge shock, and I think we felt that, once that was over, that we would be able to get on with some kind of normal life. But in fact it just seems to be going from one situation to another, and more wars seem to be breaking out all the time.”

A new message from the Bush telegraph is always an event because she is the musical equivalent of Daniel Day-Lewis: uniquely talented but brutally stingy with her output. Her interviews are so rare that you forget her speaking voice is considerably less otherworldly than her singing one. You expect a woodland sprite and get a pensioner from Bexleyheath, southeast London, which is technically what she is. Yet mundanity coexists with fantasy for an artist who has sung about motherhood, domesticity, even washing machines.

Should we be surprised that Bush has returned with a film? Not really. Cinema has always been a touchstone, from The Red Shoes to Hammer horror. Little Shrew (Snowflake) is beautiful and touching, based around exquisite black and white illustrations by Jim Kay, whose artwork for the children’s book A Monster Calls inspired Bush. Again, though, the transcendent blends with the parochial: there is a whiff of a John Lewis Christmas advert in her tale of a shrew traumatised by war (the brilliant two-minute advertisements for the high end chain store John Lewis are a British Christmas tradition).

Of more interest to Bush’s army of fans, particularly the influx of young recruits after the revival of Running Up That Hill, is the new album. “It’s got to be different,” (from 50 Words For Snow) she said, and the closest she has come to a Christmas album was certainly that. Will the next one be inspired by war, like her film? Will it again feature her son, Albert, now 25, whose appearance last time was divisive?

Live shows seem less likely. Her saying “I’m not there yet” is probably an understatement given that it took her almost 40 years to feel ready to play her last concerts in 2014. Still, the prospect of new music is quite enough for now.

THE TIMES