The album Kate Bush was “very pleased” she made herself

Posted On January 28, 2026January 28, 2026

Through his barrage of bullshit, Noel Gallagher manages to occasionally talk sense.

“The customer didn’t want Jimi Hendrix. But they got him. And it changed the world,” he said, discussing the plight of innovators. “The customer didn’t want The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper, but they got it. They didn’t want Sex Pistols, but they got it. Fuck the customer. The customer doesn’t know what he wants.”

What Gallagher is talking about is a problem that plenty of creatives face. A lot of the artists that you know and love have a bizarre brain, which is filled with amazing ideas, but it’s difficult for them to get them off the ground because they seem too far left field. At the end of the day, the music industry is exactly that, an industry, which means that regardless of how innovative someone’s ideas might be, if they’re not going to make money, they won’t find form.

So many of the albums that changed the way we view art and that have had a profound impact on the music we consume originally received a lot of pushback. There’s no market for a piece of music that doesn’t already have a genre attached to it, and when you put together complicated concept albums, who is to say if they contain a narrative that the public is going to be happy connecting with?

These are the kinds of problems that Kate Bush faced. Her talent was unavoidable, as anyone who heard her sing or watched her perform was immediately in awe of every word coming out of her mouth. The problem wasn’t selling what she was capable of; it was selling the ideas that she had. 

People couldn’t quite wrap their heads around the ideas that she was putting forward, which meant it was difficult to work with others. When you’re recording a song, you need everybody in the room to be on the same page, as if they’re not, you wind up having creative ideas rub up against one another and create friction. The end product winds up being a haphazard mess, and barely anyone listens to it.

When Bush’s ideas became more ambitious, she started thinking about producing LPs herself, given that it was proving difficult to find someone who was on the same page as her, which is great in theory, but it can be incredibly difficult writing, recording and producing an album yourself. Bush realised this when she worked on her record The Dreaming, which was the first time she had ever produced a record. The album received mixed reviews, and so when she decided she wanted to produce Hounds of Love, there was a bit of pushback by people who worried it wouldn’t be marketable. Bush trusted her gut, and the result was one of those great albums that she was happiest with.

“Everyone was saying ‘Oh, she really’s gone mad now.’ You know, ‘Hey, listen to this, it’s a really weird record’,” recalled Bush. “But it was very important that it happened to me because it made me think, ‘Right. Do I really want to produce my own stuff?’ You know, ‘Do I really care about being famous?’ And I was very pleased with myself that, no, it didn’t matter as much as making a good album.”

She concluded, “So we started Hounds of Love in our own studio, and I started to find out an awful lot of things that I wouldn’t have realised otherwise. I relaxed tremendously within my own environment, for a start.”

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