Kate Bush

I started listening to Kate when I was 16..right after I discovered Tori Amos. My then girlfriend's brother (ack), who's about 10 years older than us, was the one who provived me with my first Kate mix tape. It included Wuthering Heights, various tracks from The Kick Inside, Never for Ever, The Dreaming, and Hounds of Love. I may still have it in a box somewhere. I was only able to find Hounds of Love on CD, so I bought it along with The Sensual World. It was all so bizarre, but so extremely cool at the same time. I remember the guys in the little, indie CD store (the only one in our town at the time) making fun of me when I bought the CDs. One commented that he hoped I didn't blow out my tweeters listening to her. I just looked at him like the apparent piece of furniture he was. They also enjoyed picking on Tori fans, yet they always took my money. ;)
The purchasing of music at that time was an interesting thing..like finding a piece of the Holy Grail. Nothing I liked could be found easily, and it was expensive. I also had no means of listening to it anywhere but at home, as my car at the time didn't even have a tape deck. Hell..at the time, when I started driving it, it didn't have half its paint, a rearview mirror, sounded like a tank because the muffler was old, and it would stall when idling...sometimes. :) SO..off to my room I'd go as quickly as possible. I'd always open it in the car anyway, so I had a collection of cellophane wrappers and that annoying seal-sticker that is, to this day, almost impossible to remove in less than 5 pieces, in my car..all stuck to the plastic bags they came in. My parents bought me a very nice Sony stereo and CD player when I was 14, and I made good use of it. I had between two to four hours sometimes when I got home that I could listen to music freely and loudly without being made fun of or told to turn it down. (I had no headphones.) These were only on days that my sister went elsewhere and both parents were occupied at school/gym/work/whatevertheydid. It was my time to decompress. I needed to decompress constantly.
Kate was a weird phase, and I almost found myself disliking a lot of it. Listening to much of it now, it is kind of laughable at times, but I still love it..cheesy and bizarre or not. It's still good music and it reaches that very difficult-to-reach place inside me where music is concerned. I have a handful of artists/bands that are pieces of the Musical Holy Grail, and she's definitely among them.

So crazy...and she was only 19 when she recorded this song in 1978. I was two. :)