Madonna is on tour and no-one know when or if Kate Bush will again.  It is perhaps one of pop’s lesser known facts that Kate and Madonna are the same age, born a matter of days if many miles apart.  What’s also curious here are the ways in which their careers coincide and diverge.  Madonna is, in commercial terms, far more successful and has no parallel in the realms of popular music in female form.  Her commercial success is only matched or bettered by the likes of Elvis Presley and the Beatles.  Bush meantime has barely broken the U.S. market at all and relies heavily on a small but near religious following in the UK and other parts of Europe.

If statistics are taken out of the equation though things get more intriguing – both have defined themselves in terms of their ability to control their own destiny, a point that marks them out as important whatever they do given the historic tendency to render women in music as little more than the glamorous icing on the cake.  Both self pen their work, collaborate with others but in different ways, make hefty use of visual media and performance, and don’t like being told what to do very much.  More to the point, they are also loosely contemporaries though Bush being a child prodigy had a head start (including starting the now ubiquitous dance as you sing thing inventing a mic on a coat hanger to do so in 1979).  For the most part they also earned their stripes in the 1980s when Bush’s acclaimed Hounds of Love album battled Madonna’s Like A Virgin for the number one spot (and, for the record, won).

From hereon, however, things begin to differ.  Bush does not break sales records but she does set precedents – the first female artist to have a self-penned number one single (Wuthering Heights), a self-penned number one album (Never For Ever in 1980), and – more recently – only bettered by Elvis and the Beatles herself for having 8 albums in the top 40 at the same time during her recent sell out tour Before The Dawn in 2014.  But as the pair of them edge towards picking up their bus passes (somehow one thinks Bush might just use hers whereas Madonna, well…) and while the Queen of Pop outsells Bush globally by an x-factor to one she’s also become tiresomely predictable.  We all know what we’ll get – more attempts at outrage involving breasts, babies, or crucifixes, yet another disco pop record and yet another tour extravaganza.  Yet Bush remains (for her fans, maddeningly so) wholly idiosyncratic.  She plays live once then not again for over 35 years, takes twelve years to complete an album (Aerial), and then releases two in the same year (Director’s Cut and 50 Words For Snow in 2011).  Then disappears.  Again.

No one knows what Katie will do next – more tours, a record, a DVD, all three, or none of the above and when – well God only, and maybe she, knows.  Her mystique is her greatest triumph whilst appearing to otherwise make cups of tea and do laundry.  Madonna, once the mother of reinvention, now seems in danger of damaging her colossus of a legacy with every move – the albums no longer sell, the tours no longer shock, and few care who she fucks or what she has for breakfast as, frankly, we’ve heard it all before.  Of late all that has been memorable are her near attacking a fan in her onstage antics and falling over.  She can still sing, still dance, still pen a tune even…  yet she would do well to take a leaf from Catherine’s book and just do less.  Kate Bush CBE has become a sacred goddess for doing next to nothing most of the time it seems.   One suspects, however, that Bush intended none of this whereas of course Madonna is the most driven woman on the planet – fundamentally Katie just does not care what anyone thinks which could, and should, register with her ever so slightly younger sister.