10 years with Kate Bush: Rare photographs of the singer at the height of her career

The announcement of a new release (most recently 2011’s 50 Words for Snow) or, be still my beating heart, a live performance (the quite unexpected Before the Dawn shows in 2014) still generates huge excitement among acolytes of the Blessed Kate.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Bush has never been one for regularly reissuing her back catalogue nor for rummaging through the archives for previously unreleased outtakes or sneezing fits to satisfy the demand for new product. New Pink Floyd box set for £375, anyone?

Even the film that was supposedly made of Before the Dawn has still not seen the light. That means that anyone who has got something original to say or show about her is guaranteed attention.

Glenys Groves, one of the two backing singers on Bush’s 1979 Tour of Life, devoted a chapter to that experience in her recently published memoir Ballads, Songs and Snatches, thus earning a plug on the KB fan sites.

More substantially, Guido Harari, the photographer who worked with Bush in the 80s and early 90s, is now publishing The Kate Inside, a collection of 300 images, 200 of which have not been seen before.

It’s a luxuriously bound volume that’ll set you back 120 euros or 520 euros if you insist on getting one of the ‘Deluxe Edition’ copies which are, presumably, hand-delivered by the subject herself.

To be fair, the pictures are pretty stunning, ranging from immaculately staged images of Bexleyheath’s finest songstress in all manner of exotic costumes and maquillage, to more candid, behind-the-scenes snaps such as the one in which she reclines in curlers, eyes shut, while her mentor Lindsay Kemp, the man she described as ‘the most original artist ever’ mugs extravagantly behind her.

Harari’s association with Bush covered the most interesting decade in her career.

He took promotional images for Hounds of Love in 1985, the album that remains Bush’s best-seller and which spawned hits such as Running up that Hill and Cloudbusting.

Eight years after this commercial and artistic high, he also documented the making of the rather less successful The Line, the Cross and the Curve, a 45 minute filmic folly based on songs from The Red Shoes which Bush herself reportedly later dismissed as ‘a load of bollocks’. Still, the art design, costumes and make-up are ravishing.

That was effectively Bush’s last release until Aerial in 2005. The myth that Bush is some sort of recluse formed in that period when she devoted more time to raising her son, Bertie, than to musical and promotional activities.

But she didn’t hold back earlier in her career and appeared, seemingly happily, on Michael Aspel, Terry Wogan and Leo Sayer’s shows to promote singles.

As early as 1979 Nationwide were given enough access to warrant titling a whole edition Kate Bush on Tour, following rehearsals and the official first night in Liverpool of the successful Tour of Life.

The awfully polite doctor’s daughter could not have been more open and obliging on camera to the man from the Beeb. She even manages not to hit him when he asks if she might “give up, get married, settle down and be an ordinary mother”.

Of course, in a way, she did do that – for a while at least. Fortunately for us, she never gave up.

A free exhibition will coincide with the publication The Kate Inside, which will run in London from September 13 – 30 at Art Bermondsey Project Space.