Kate Bush

One of the most successful and popular solo female performers to come out of England during the second half of the 20th century, Kate Bush was also one of the most unusual, with her keening vocals and unusually literate and complex body of songs. Bush's music was an ambitious and idiosyncratic melange of folk rock, art rock, prog, and pop, often performed with the bold brio of a West End stage production, and her lyrics were artful meditations full of drama, fantasy, danger, and a sense of wonder at the human and natural worlds. Bush became an immediate star in the U.K. in 1978 with the release of her debut single, "Wuthering Heights" and the subsequent album The Kick Inside, when she was just 19 years old. While the crystal-clear high notes and lush melodrama of "Wuthering Heights" became her first calling card, it was with the albums The Dreaming (1982) and Hounds of Love (1985), both of which Bush produced herself, that she developed a more mature and personal approach that embraced a unique approach to instrumentation and the use of the recording studio; those two albums also marked Bush's first real breakthrough in North America. Always working at her own deliberate pace, the reclusive Bush retired from music after 1993's The Red Shoes, not returning to the public eye until the release of 2005's Aerial, though her work in the 21st century confirmed that her time away from the studio had in no way blurred her creative vision or compromised her abilities.

As a girl, Catherine Bush studied piano and violin while attending the St. Joseph's Convent Grammar School in Abbey Wood in South London. She also amused herself playing an organ in the barn behind her parents' house. By the time she was a teenager, Bush was writing songs of her own