If you’re not expecting it, her voice can be a bit of a shock (scroll down to the video):

 

However else you feel about the song, “Wuthering Heights,” it made its singer/songwriter, Kate Bush, the first female solo artist to top the UK charts with a self-composed song.  Written by Kate when she was eighteen, the single flew to the Number One spot in 1978 and stayed there for four weeks. It also hit #1 in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Italy, and was a smash right across the world except in the US where we were grooving to music coming out of the movie, Saturday Night Fever. Bush also became the first female artist to have eight albums on the charts simultaneously in the UK.

If you’re not familiar with Kate Bush, plenty of others are: Prince, Peter Gabriel, and Elton John all collaborated on songs with her, and she inspired younger talent including Tori Amos, Björk, Joanna Newsom, St. Vincent, Perfume Genius, and Mitski. She was important enough in her own right to have turned down an offer to support Fleetwood Mac on their huge 1978 US Rumours tour.

Her contributions weren’t all defined by musical notes. Bush was the first artist to use a headset microphone onstage, something that Madonna would later adopt.  She also pioneered the use of the Fairlight synthesizer, and produced her own albums.

Admittedly, “Wuthering Heights,” was possibly the strangest hit single in history. The singer, Johnny Rotten, said in a 2014 BBC documentary about the song that a lot of his friends at the time “couldn’t bear Bush’s high-pitched, passionate warbling on Wuthering Heights and other early songs. “They just thought it was too much.” One comment was that Bush was the high priestess of too much. “But that was really what drew me in,” added Rotten.

Bush had a long career and made more conventional music that was, perhaps, easier to listen to:

Bush’s fifth studio album was Hounds of Love which is considered by many music critics to be her best album, and it’s regularly voted one of the greatest albums of all time.  The lead single, ‘Running Up That Hill,’ widely regarded as one of her greatest hits, helped sell more than 1.1 million copies of the album which achieved double platinum status.

The album cover features Bush posing with her friend’s two Weimaraners, “Bonnie” and “Clyde.” In an interview, Bush said it took all day to get the dogs to settle down, but when the final picture was taken, one of the dogs had actually fallen asleep on her. The dogs also featured in the artwork notes in which Bush credits them by writing, ‘Woof to Bonnie and Clyde’.

You can read about the photo shoot in the photographer’s own words here.