Kate Bush is noth­ing if not inno­v­a­tive. She burst onto the scene in 1978, aged nine­teen, with her debut sin­gle Wuther­ing Heights. Whilst the rest of the charts were pop­u­lat­ed either by the new gen­er­a­tion of punk and new wave or the old gen­er­a­tion of dis­co and soft rock, here was Kate singing the­atri­cal­ly about a Vic­to­ri­an nov­el and danc­ing ethe­re­al­ly on Top of the Pops. The nation was strange­ly hooked and it went to num­ber one (and no doubt Emi­ly Brontë’s Wuther­ing Heights expe­ri­enced a boost in sales at the same time).

Kate had been writ­ing songs for years, hav­ing grown up in a music-lov­ing house­hold in Kent, and had record­ed a bunch of them on demo tapes. One of these tapes found its way into the hands of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour who imme­di­ate­ly recog­nised the song-writ­ing tal­ent and oth­er-world­ly vocals. He encour­aged Floyd’s label EMI to sign her up, which they duly did. She was six­teen and still at school so she con­tin­ued her stud­ies, honed her craft, learned inter­pre­tive dance under chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Lind­say Kemp, and in the inter­ests of good research read Wuther­ing Heights (she had writ­ten the song before actu­al­ly read­ing the book, hav­ing caught the back end of a BBC TV adap­ta­tion of it). And the rest, as they say, is his­to­ry — she went on to record nine stu­dio albums all of which reached the UK Top 10, and recent­ly enjoyed some­thing of a renais­sance fol­low­ing the use of her song Run­ning up that Hill in the Net­flix block­buster series Stranger Things.

Cloud­bust­ing remains my favourite Kate Bush song. If the record-buy­ing pub­lic thought that the sub­ject mat­ter of Wuther­ing Heights was some­what quirky, it hadn’t seen noth­ing yet. The song took inspi­ra­tion from the 1973 mem­oirs of Peter Reich (Book of Dreams), writ­ten about his close rela­tion­ship with his father the psy­chi­a­trist and inven­tor Wil­helm Reich, at their farm named “Orgonon”, in Maine. Wil­helm Reich had been exper­i­ment­ing with a cos­mic ener­gy which he termed orgone, and had built devices called orgone accu­mu­la­tors which he claimed could cure can­cers and pro­mote health. Lat­er he would build a rain-mak­ing machine called a cloud­buster and father and son would spend hours on their farm point­ing it at the sky and try­ing to make rain. Like all pro­mot­ers of fringe ideas (ask Niko­la Tes­la), Reich even­tu­al­ly fell foul of the author­i­ties, was impris­oned, and had his inven­tions and ideas sup­pressed.

Kate’s musi­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of the sto­ry is out­stand­ing. It is at once mes­mer­ic with its mantra-like back­ing vocals and hyp­not­ic cel­lo strokes, and a mas­ter­class in sto­ry-telling with its set­ting of the scene from the very first line “I dream of Orgonon”. That line, with that word, had such an intrigu­ing feel to it, long before I dis­cov­ered its true back sto­ry. The video accom­pa­ny­ing the sin­gle, is genius: a mas­ter­stroke cast­ing of Don­ald Suther­land as the father, and Kate her­self with a pix­ie cut to stand in for the son. The “cloud­buster” itself, designed by the same peo­ple who designed the “xenomorph” for Rid­ley Scott’s Alien, is a won­der­ful steam-punk inven­tion. After Reich’s arrest, we see Kate/Peter tak­ing over the reins and achiev­ing suc­cess with his father’s inven­tions – I don’t know how true this is, but at least Kate was grat­i­fied that the real Peter Reich hailed the video and said it cap­tured the sit­u­a­tion and the emo­tion per­fect­ly. Watch and enjoy here…