Although Kate Bush has never written an autobiography or has given permission for a biography to be written, there are several books that are dedicated to her life and her work – and even a fictional book. These are the following: Doyle, a respected music journalist does an excellent job of getting behind his subject. He’s even granted a rare interview with Bush, which acts as a preface to the book. It’s the closest we get to see the singer with her guard down, upbeat but slightly paranoid about the release of her Aerial album. With the record industry changing for the worse and with outside pressures seeping in, Bush is keen to dispel the layers of myths built up around her. “I just find it frustrating that people think I’m some sort of weirdo recluse that never comes out into the world,” she says. If there is one to be drawn from How to Be Invisible, it isn’t that Bush is unknowable, but that life is: how much can we ever know about love, ourselves, the things we lose? She is never cowed by the uncertainty. Her songwriting suggests the only way to weather it is with curiosity; applying silliness as courageously as literary seriousness, balancing spiritual insight alongside unabashed carnality, domestic truth alongside fantasy, never concerned by contradictions.

At least privately that might have been true, but as the book is keen to explore, from 1980 onwards her promotional duties had already begun to take their toll. In her favourite place the studio, Bush set in motion the slow suffocation of her pop image and elicited a run of chart-topping albums that had more in common with Eno’s oblique strategies than Noel Edmond’s multi-coloured swap shop (a show she was forced to appear in. “You have nice hair,” she was told by one ten year old.) 50 Visions doesn’t get too bogged down with the aesthetics of these records but in particular describes the stuttering creation of The Dreaming. The book doesn’t shy away from the criticism the album received either, but Doyle softens the blow by suggesting momentum is just around the corner, a blue centre light being ignited as Bush moves steadily and shiva-like towards her bona fida masterpiece. Kate Bush: the subject of murmured legend and one of the most ground-breaking, idiosyncratic musicians of the modern era. Comprising fifty chapters or ‘visions’, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush is a multi-faceted biography of this famously elusive figure, viewing her life and work from fresh and illuminating angles. Featuring details from the author’s one-to-one conversations with Kate, as well as vignettes of her key songs, albums, videos, and concerts; this artful, candid and often brutally funny portrait introduces the reader to the refreshingly real Kate Bush. Daniella, the signed editions were available from Waterstones, Rough Trade and various independent book and record shops all over the UK from 9am on Friday 20th January. It took stealth and cunning to find shops selling many many many fans were unsuccessful.A swish photo book would be one way around it – two have been published this year alone. Doyle’s idea, though, was to create a join-the-dots outline of Bush by looking at 50 scattered slices of her career. Along with her own 2005 comments, 50 Visions recounts her life through the opinions and experiences of others. Interviewees include her brother John, writer Ian Rankin (“You can read her the way you would a poet or a novelist”), Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, who funded her early demos, and – well, why not? – the founders of The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever, a gathering of people who wear Bush-style red dresses and dance to the song.

Ever since a teenage Kate Bush arrived chanting Heathcliff’s in 78, stretching the key of C sharp like an oscillating wave, there’s been a sense of the otherworldly about her. As much a ground zero moment for pop as the Pistols were for the denim brigade, Wuthering Heights, a chart hit not in 4/4 time, sang about an eighteenth-century troubadour should have been an anomaly not a blueprint for a career that has now stretched out over nearly five decades and shows no sign of ending. We will keep Michael’s legacy going and hope that people will continue to enjoy this book for many years to come. It is definitely what Michael would have wanted. Michael was incredibly passionate about Kate Bush’s music and about the artist herself. He was driven to share this passion with fellow fans and also hoped he might draw in new fans through his beautifully written book. Like all of Kate’s own work, this book will be produced like a labour of love to the highest possible standard, both at the design and the print production stages. Michael and Marius alone will conceptualise, write, create, illustrate and handle the pre press stages of the book. In 1978 a then totally unknown teenage girl topped the UK Singles Chart with her debut single Wuthering Heights and in doing so became the first female artist to achieve a UK number one hit with a self-penned song. In 1980, aged 20 she was also the first British female solo artist to to enter the album charts at number one with Never For Ever, her third studio album. Her career currently spans five decades and she has had twenty five UK Top 40 singles in that time. As a singer, songwriter, musician, dancer and record producer she has been a groundbreaking artist in the truest sense of the word, often laying bare her soul in her songwriting and she is someone who has never been afraid to take risks creatively.Trust Kate Bush, never one to explain, to complicate the straightforward lyrics collection. She doesn’t annotate this anthology, unlike Neil Tennant’s recent Faber edition. Instead, subtler direction follows an introduction by author David Mitchell, who wrote the spoken-word parts of Bush’s 2014 Before the Dawn performances. Mitchell intermingles charming fannish detail with close textual analysis that illuminates familiar songs: it is God, he points out, not the devil, who allows the man and woman to exchange their sexual experiences on Running Up That Hill, an act of divinity rather than transgression. Desire runs wild in the final section: Mrs Bartolozzi’s sexual laundry fantasia; the wily, windy Wuthering Heights. This headstrong pursuit has guided Bush. The question is not what we can learn about her, but what we might learn from following her lead. What keeps 50 Visions from being a cheery, dip-in-at-will Bushopedia is the exhausting, overly detailed sections on her music-making process. Certain albums, videos and tours have been selected for deep dives into how they were made, which will be of interest mainly to Bush-heads – probably the only readers who could get lost in arcana such as her struggle to write the 2005 double album Aerial. (There were problems explaining her vision to her band, she was unsure whether the record company would accept a double LP and much more along these lines. There are also notes on how each song was written).