Kate the Great.

I was going to report on another conversation I had with somebody in Ashbourne today, but it involved her experience of finding the body of a man who’d blown his brains out with a shotgun in his garden one morning. The problem was that I couldn’t get my mind off a certain track – to turn it into something darkly comic. That seemed in unacceptably bad taste even by my standards, so I deleted it and decided on something more wholesome instead.

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It might be said that in musical terms, Kate Bush was my first love, the best love, and the one I always return to sooner or later. I’m on another Kate Kick at the moment. I listen to stuff she recorded in the 70s and 80s and it still sounds fresh as the morning dew. I suppose that’s because she never followed trends or fitted in with any prescribed style. She did her own thing at every turn.

The thing about KB’s music is that it goes beyond the mere matter of meaningful lyrics, engaging melodies, driving rhythms and imaginative arrangements in their own right. It’s classic cocktail stuff in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And that whole produces a mood, an atmosphere, a sense of something deep that gets deeper the more you listen to it. At least, that’s the effect it has on me.

The following is one of her 80s classics. Personally, I dislike the video that accompanies it, but that’s just a matter or personal sensibility. I daresay there are lots of video alternatives on YouTube, but I can’t be bothered to look. I can always close my eyes and feel the atmosphere.

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And talking of freshness, shortly after I woke up this morning I had a vision of an early summer morning. The sun was shining and there was dew on the grass, and I felt the freshness of youth for the first time in a long time. It lasted about two seconds, but it was nice to be reminded.