Top 12: From the brilliantly bizarre Babooshka to the revered Running Up That Hill – Kate Bush’s best songs

11 Babooshka (1980) A babushka, to the uninitiated, is an old Russian woman. Bush tweaked the spelling slightly for a rip-roaringly giddy tune about a woman who decides to test her husband’s fidelity by sending him notes in the guise of a much younger lady. She ends up wrecking the relationship because it stirs in her husband a desire for her as she once was. What’s remarkable about so many of Bush’s early songs — this one included — is how young she was when she wrote them. Babooshka sounds like the work of a veteran, not someone who’s just reached 21.

10 King of the Mountain (2005) There was huge excitement when this song — from her comeback album, Aerial — came out. It was her first original track in 12 years and it confirmed that her brilliance as a songwriter hadn’t dimmed one bit in the time she had taken out to look after her young son Bertie. (The then eight-year-old features on the album.) The song is clearly about Elvis, and partly inspired by Orson Welles’ groundbreaking movie Citizen Kane, but it’s also about the corrosive effects of fame.

9 Wow (1979) Her oeuvre tends to favour the esoteric, but Bush knows how to write a mass-market pop banger, too. Wow is such a song, although it eschews the usual subject matter of pop. Instead, it’s focused on the entertainment industry. “People say,” she said at the time, “that the music business is about rip-offs, the rat race, competition, strain, people trying to cut you down, and so on, and though that’s all there, there’s also the magic.” The suggestive video, in which Bush playfully slapped her bottom while singing “he’s too busy hitting the Vaseline” was banned for a time by the BBC.

8 The Sensual World (1989) Bush has always been acutely aware and proud of her Irish heritage and here she harnesses the power of two Hiberno greats — James Joyce and Davy Spillane. The former’s Ulysses provides the lyrical inspiration, while the latter is on hand with sublime uilleann pipes. The Joyce estate initially refused permission for her to use lines — Molly Bloom’s speech from the end of Ulysses — directly from the Modernist masterpiece, so Bush tweaked them slightly. The estate later relented, and she re-recorded the song as Flower of the Mountain.

7 The Man with the Child in His Eyes (1978) It seems scarcely believable, but Bush wrote this song when she was just 13 years old and recorded it in 1975, when she was 16. Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour was one of the first to recognise her precocious talent and it was he who helped guide the song in the studio. It’s both bewitching and ever so slightly creepy, and its poetic lyrics still leave an impact all these years later. Critics agreed and in 1979 the song was awarded the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding British Lyric.

6 Hounds of Love (1986) Few people would think to try to capture the fear of falling in love with the sensation of being attacked by a pack of hounds, but Kate Bush’s mind works differently to most people’s. It’s one of her most anthemic songs, one that revels in its innovative drum beat and her playful dog-like yelps.

5 This Woman’s Work (1989) There are several candidates for the song that features the best Bush vocal, but this might trump the lot. It’s chiefly built on a plaintive piano, although the final part of the song features her vocals layered on top of each other. Lyrically, the song is a sucker punch to the gut: “All the things we should’ve done that we never did… Give me back these moments.” Unusually for Bush, it was written to order — for the John Hughes film She’s Having a Baby.

4 Moments of Pleasure (1993) There has always been a sensuous component to Bush’s songwriting, and that’s very much the case on this gorgeous song built on piano and swelling strings. Partly inspired by her Waterford-born mother, Hannah — she borrows one of her mum’s favourite phrases, “Every old sock meets an old shoe” — the song finds her in reflective mood. Some have interpreted it as one of her sadder compositions; but Bush doesn’t see it that way. “I think of it more as a celebration of life,” she said, years later.

3 Cloudbusting (1985) One of the reasons why Kate Bush is so revered stems from the fact that she finds inspiration for her songs in places no one else would think to look. Cloudbusting came from the true-life story of German psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and the ‘cloudbuster’ rain-making machine he built on the family farm. The song centres on the relationship his son Peter had with him. Bush’s writerly instincts were heightened after she read Peter’s memoir, A Book of Dreams. It’s a stirring, captivating missive from the far reaches of pop.

2 Wuthering Heights (1978) Even now, 44 years after its release, Wuthering Heights sounds quite unlike anything else. How apt that Emily Brontë’s singular novel should inspire a song so utterly unique. Bush wrote it when she was just 18, and she had such unshakable belief in the song that she insisted her record company, EMI, release it as her first single from her debut album, The Kick Inside. She got her way and it went straight to the top of the chart — making her, at 19, the youngest female artist to have a self-penned UK No 1, a record that still stands. Her performance of Wuthering Heights on The Late Late Show is well worth checking out on YouTube.

1 Running Up That Hill (1985) Originally titled A Deal With God, this sensational song was the first Bush wrote for her best and most consistently strong album, Hounds of Love. It is a thrilling, fantastical composition employing much of the cutting-edge studio technology of the time and digital instruments. Her impassioned singing never fails to thrill and the oddness of the lyrics continues to ask questions of the listener. This is what Bush herself said about its meaning: “I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman can’t understand each other because we are a man and a woman. And if we could actually swap each other’s roles, if we could actually be in each other’s place for a while, I think we’d both be very surprised!”