How Kate Bush Prioritized Motherhood Over Music: The Rarely-Seen Icon’s Life out of the Spotlight 

It’s more than a decade since Kate Bush last performed live — and yet the enigmatic star is still a cultural icon, with her music attracting a whole new audience over the past few years through huge TV shows like Stranger Things and A Handmaid’s Tale. This resurgence, alongside her obvious influence on cool, contemporary pop artists like Chappell Roan, Lady Gaga, Lorde and Florence And The Machine, means that she’s just as relevant as ever — and yet still, we know little about her everyday life.

Bush is now 66 and leads a quiet existence in the English countryside but, despite her low profile, she’s by no means reclusive. In fact, while Bush mostly enjoys spending her days pottering around, creating and spending time with her family — husband Dan McIntosh and Gen Z musician son Albert, known as Bertie — she still pops up from time to time to talk about the topics that really matter to her.

Bush’s music success kicked off in the late 1970s, with a string of hits in the years that followed, like “The Man With The Child In His Eyes” (from her explosive debut album, 1978’s Wuthering Heights), “Babooshka” (1980) and “Don’t Give Up” (a 1986 duet with Peter Gabriel.) Bush was an enormous star — especially in her native U.K — and had a colossal influence on music, fashion and culture. And yet, while many of her 1980s pop contemporaries adored fame and everything that came with it — think Madonna, Whitney, George Michael —she was all about the music, and less about the global fabulosity.

These days her best-known song is probably “Running Up That Hill”, after its 2022 appearance in Netflix’s Stranger Things sent it viral almost 40 years on from its original release. It knocked Harry Styles off the top of the British charts and reached number three on the US Billboard Hot 100, while its parent album, Hounds of Love, became Bush’s first album to top the Billboard charts —  despite it first dropping in 1985!

“The whole world’s gone mad!” Bush said, speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour about her sudden renaissance. “It’s just extraordinary. It’s such a great series, I thought that the track would get some attention. But I just never imagined that it would be anything like this. It’s so exciting, it’s quite shocking really, isn’t it?”

Bush’s devoted fans would never find her success shocking — they adore her as much now as they did 40 years ago, with her slightly mysterious profile simply adding to her kooky charm. In fact, that supposed mystique actually masks what sounds like a very normal life. And she’s so grateful to be in this position, especially considering she’s taken several very long breaks between music releases. “I have to say I find it totally astounding that my albums do as well as they do,” she told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2011. “It’s quite extraordinary and it’s actually very touching for me for the albums to be received with such warmth.”

In 1992, with her music career still soaring, Bush married McIntosh, a guitarist she had worked with, and Bertie came along a few years later, in 1998 — a fact she managed to keep completely private until her friend and collaborator Peter Gabriel let it slip in an interview years later.

Despite her joy at starting a family, this period was tough for Bush in other ways — she lost her mother, as well as several close friends in the music industry, including Level 42 guitarist Alan Murphy, who died in 1989 (Bush later paid tribute to him on her 1993 song “Moments of Pleasure”.) Looking back, she realized she had been suffering from burnout. “Basically the batteries were run out,” she told Q magazine in 2014. “A part of me didn’t want to work. I’d got to the point where it was something I didn’t feel good about. I spent a lot of time sleeping and I also used to enjoy watching bad TV, like really bad quiz programmes or sitcoms. I found them fascinating. There had been a period, a very big period, where I hadn’t grieved properly. Then work became my way of coping.”

Ultimately, it was becoming a mother that reignited the spark. “People say magic doesn’t exist, but I look at Bertie and know it does,” she said in the same Q interview. “I’m very proud of him and I get so much joy out of being with him. It’s totally incomparable with anything else. What I found very difficult since having him is finding time to talk to people because he comes first. He doesn’t care whether an album comes out – so that comes second. I don’t want to miss a minute of him. It’s so much fun, by far the best thing I’ve ever done.” It’s a bold and moving claim by someone behind so many incredible pieces of music.

In her 2011 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, she talked more about her long breaks between projects — and while she’s often accidentally assumed an image of a tortured artist, agonizing over her art for years, it’s more that she sometimes just needs to focus on other stuff. “It was a very long gap between Red Shoes [1993] and Aerial [2005] but that was because there were lots of things happening in my life that were important,” she said. “I wanted to spend time not being in the studio. I moved a couple of times, became a mother, all things that were really important. I’d spent such a long time making albums, I just wanted to not do it for a while.” She added: “I kind of adopted a philosophy a long time ago that I wanted my work to speak for me. I don’t really think of myself as a personality or a celebrity. I’m someone who creates something and it’s that that I want to put out into the world.”

And this is why that “reclusive” image isn’t really accurate for Bush — she just likes to be normal.  “A lot of the time it doesn’t bother me,” she told Mojo in 2005. “I do think I go out of my way to be a very normal person and I just find it frustrating that people think that I’m some kind of weirdo reclusive that never comes out into the world. Y’know, I’m a very strong person and I think that’s why actually I find it really infuriating when I read, ‘She had a nervous breakdown’ or ‘She’s not very mentally stable, just a weak, frail little creature’.”

Actually, she’s more likely to be found vacuuming than crying. “I’ve felt really privileged to be living such a normal life,” she said. “It’s so a part of who I am. It’s so important to me to do the washing, do the Hoovering. Friends of mine in the business don’t know how dishwashers work. For me, that’s frightening. I want to be in a position where I can function as a human being. Even more so now where you’ve got this sort of truly silly preoccupation with celebrities. Just because somebody’s been in an ad on TV, so what? Who gives a toss?”

In 2014, after 35 years away from the stage, Bush stunned the world by announcing a run of 22 live shows at London’s Hammersmith Apollo, titled Before the Dawn. The tickets sold out in just 15 minutes. The show wasn’t a greatest hits tour, but a bold theatrical production that incorporated narrative, dance, and film — and Bertie, then just 16 years old, was heavily involved, joining his mom on stage as a backing vocalist and helping design the show.

“He gave me the courage to push the button,” she wrote in 2014 to promote the production. “Thank you, Bertie. It’s been a fantastic adventure so far. And it’s only just begun.” She explained: “In order for him to be part of this, which was always part of the deal, he has had to work really hard in order to keep up his school commitments as well as his commitments to the show.” Bertie himself added in the show programme notes: “I feel so privileged to be able to work on this project, and have tried to earn my place. My mother is the most talented person I could ask to work with.”

The performances were a rare re-emergence, and Bush made no further appearances after the run ended. She even asked the audience not to take photos or videos, encouraging them to be present in the moment. And she admitted afterwards that performing for her fans after such a long time away was pretty scary.  “Yes, I was very nervous,” she told The Independent in 2016. “I wasn’t sure if I would be any good, that was my concern. I knew that I would enjoy putting the show together – in a lot of ways, I approached it as if I was making a really long video, because a lot of my visual work is quite theatrical, so this theatrical work would be quite filmic, it would be a natural progression. But I was very nervous about going onstage and performing. But the response was just beyond anything I could have wished for, every night, the audiences were so excited and so responsive.”

Despite how much she loved doing the shows, as soon as the run concluded, she returned quietly to her private life, instead of trying to profit further from her success. Ultimately, it’s this integrity that makes Bush so fascinating and impressive. In an age of overexposure, she’s casually elusive. Her life out of the spotlight has not been one of retreat, but one of intention — choosing creativity and family over fame and glitz.

Occasionally Bush lets new people in — including Big Boi, a lifelong fan. The Outkast rapper revealed that he had dinner with Bush in 2017 after spending a week in England trying to track her down — and, in true fan boi style, he even got her to sign one of her albums for him, which he later shared via X.

“I fell in love with her songwriting and how her songs would tell stories,” he told Complex in 2020. “It was deep. From there she became one of my two favorite artists.” He added that meeting her was “the coolest experience ever” and said: “We talked mainly about our children… She wasn’t really recording at the time because she wanted to focus on her kid. That’s another thing that really brought us together — centering our family. We had a nice little dinner and we just sat there and chatted for like an hour or two.”

After a few more years out of the spotlight, now there’s a hint that Bush might make another little comeback. As ever, she only releases things into the world when they mean something to her — like the short film, Little Shrew, that she wrote and directed in 2024 to raise money for War Child during Russia’s war with Ukraine. Much to the excitement of her fanbase, old and new, she said it had inspired her to get back into the studio. “I’m very keen to start working on a new album when I’ve got this finished,” she said on BBC Radio Four in 2024. “I’ve got lots of ideas and I’m really looking forward to getting back into that creative space, it’s been a long time. Particularly the last year I’ve felt really ready to start doing something new.”

As Bush told The Independent in 2016, it’s mostly just about staying in charge — of her schedule, and of what she creates, without record companies breathing down her neck. “The big thing for me, and it has been from quite early on, is to retain creative control over what I’m doing,” she said. “If you have creative control, it’s personal. I really like the idea of work being allowed to continually evolve. I’m not sure you’re ever really happy with something you create, you try and do your best, and there’s always certain constraints, whether it’s energy or whatever, but you can only do your best at the time. I just think it’s really great to have situations where you can open it up again if you want to.”

In interviews, Bush might sound pretty earnest but, behind closed doors, she can be very silly and fun — especially when it comes to the things she does for her beloved Bertie, like the time she asked Queen Elizabeth II for an autograph at a formal event. “I made a complete arsehole of myself,” she told Mojo. “I’m ashamed to say that when I told Bertie that I was going to meet the Queen, he said, ‘Mummy, no, you’re not, you’ve got it wrong’ and I said, ‘But I am!’ So rather stupidly I thought I’d get her to sign my programme. She was very sweet. The thing is I would do anything for Bertie and making an arsehole of myself in front of a whole roomful of people and the Queen, I mean … But I don’t have a very good track record with royalty. My dress fell off in front of Prince Charles, so I’m just living up to my reputation.”

Basically, the real Bush is an ordinary mom with some extraordinary talents — but those come second to family life. When Interview magazine asked her in 2011 what her purpose in life was, her inspiring words summed it up. “To have been there for my son and my family and my friends,” she said. “I also try to be kind and try to have a good time.”