Catherine Bush was born on July 30, 1958, to a doctor and his nurse/dancer wife, in the town of East Wickham in Kent, England, 50 miles from Stonehenge. The woods around East Wickham, at dusk and in the early morning, take on a misty eeriness that carries the scent of something creaking and pagan and scary. And the farmhouses there, like the one Kate Bush grew up in, are old, 17th century old, and large and drafty and suggestive. It's not hard to imagine that people have died in rooms like those from tuberculosis and consumption and childbirth, that torrid love letters were urgently delivered and ghosts rattled the windows at night. And if you are a bookish teenage girl, and you have the kind of imagination that fills in the gaps that life leaves open for you, you will, in a place like East Wickham, have a little Kate Bush in you.

Kate Bush was a small person in a small town: meek, delicate and, in the recollections of her classmates, annoyingly passive, as reported by Fred Vermorel in his "Secret History of Kate Bush: And the Strange Art of Pop."

"She was so nice it was ridiculous," said one.

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Another said: "I was jealous of her. So petite and so pretty. A perfect little goody-goody."

Vermorel quotes Bush saying, "School was a very cruel environment and I was a loner. But I learnt to get hurt and I learnt to cope with it." One way she coped was by coming home from school and making up songs at the piano. Loner songs. She went inward early on and never came out again.

When Bush was 16, she produced a demo tape with the help of her two musician brothers, Paddy and John Carder, who managed to get the tape, through friends, to Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. Gilmour liked it and passed it on to EMI, which promptly came back to Bush with a remarkable deal: The record company wanted her but didn't think she was ready yet. So they gave Bush money and three years to "grow up with." Bankrolled, she dropped out of school and played local shows as the KT Bush Band, with her brothers as backup. She took mime classes and dance, both of which would always be a part of her work; then in 1977 she gave EMI a gigantic hit.

There are probably few things more galling for an established musician than reviewers who hover lovingly around work you did 25 years ago, ignoring or glossing over anything more recent. This has always been Kate Bush's problem. "The Kick Inside," her first album, went to the top of the British charts almost immediately, largely based on the success of "Wuthering Heights," her first No. 1 single and the most commercially successful of her career.

"Wuthering Heights" sounded like nothing else. It seemed to come out of some raging tornado inside her; it growled and screeched and pitched, as Bush/Cathy begs her lover Heathcliff to come join her in death.

Ooh, it gets dark! It gets lonely
On the other side from you ...
How could you leave me
when I needed to possess you
I hated you
I loved you too.

Bush has always teetered dangerously at the edge of sentimentality and cliché, and her early songs (what one reviewer called her "soft-focus Victorian melodramas") could have gone all wrong had her bizarre phrasing not somehow let us know how serious she was.

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