Kate Bush, photographed by the Dutch photographer Claude Vanheye in a car park in Amsterdam in 1979

Kate Bush, photographed by the Dutch photographer Claude Vanheye in a car park in Amsterdam in 1979. The crocodile is not real.

I know nothing about Kate Bush, except that she is a singer and in her day made, together with Terry Gilliam and some celebrated actors, a video for her song Cloudbuster, based on a very strange story.

The story is as follows.

Wilhelm Reich, an Austro-American psychoanalyst of the early last century, had a theory that there exist energies of various kinds, and that people possess a psychic energy produced by all manner of physiological psychic manifestations and reflexes, which can be accumulated and put to use. Beginning with creepy experiments in the spirit of Victorian sensation novels, he ended by founding orgonomy and building cannons that fired this human psychic energy at the clouds in order to bring on rain. For the most part he was regarded as a mad professor, but at some point, in the fifties or thereabouts, it seems, something like the FBI burst in on him and destroyed all his scientific works, which nobody has ever seen since.

The end.

I hereby officially declare this to be the exhaustive body of knowledge about Kate Bush.