FEATURE:
Kate Bush: On Location
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, South Kensington, London on 18th November, 1979 for the 75th Anniversary of the London Symphony Orchestra
Inside a Fascinating and Important New Book
__________
I am going to highlight…
a few exerts from a marvellous new book that I think every Kate Bush fan should own. As I have been writing about extensively, Hounds of Love turns forty on 16th September. Though there is a lot to discuss, will we spend time exploring the important locations? The home-made studio she built near her family home at East Wickham Farm in Welling? The Irish Sessions in Dublin at Windmill Lane Studios? The location of the iconic Cloudbusting video? I have not seen too many podcasts or articles that explore the locations. A podcast a while back where author Tom Doyle talked about East Wickham Farm for Music Maps Podcast. Kate Bush musical map is truly fascinating. When I recently contributed to a French documentary about Kate Bush (which has not yet aired), I was asked by the producer about spots in London relevant to Kate Bush she could visit. I could have done with Kate Bush: On Location! Check out the Twitter account here. There are so many great sections about London locations that were crucial in Kate Bush’s career. Before coming to some of the chapters/places, below is some information about the upcoming book:
“On 16 September 2025, Kate Bush’s timeless masterpiece, Hounds of Love, turns 40. But have you ever wondered where the album was recorded? Or maybe you’ve always wanted to know where the video for Running Up That Hill was filmed, or where Kate’s No. 1 hit, Wuthering Heights, was penned? Well, you’re about to find out.
Kate Bush: On Location brings together in one book the location secrets behind Kate’s iconic career, allowing you to discover the fascinating stories and histories of over seventy locations that have played a part in her incredible journey. From recording studios to concert venues, television centres to outdoor filming locations, record company offices to vinyl record pressing plants – this fan-written book will take you on a virtual tour across the UK and the rest of the world to experience the real-life locations that have shaped Kate's music and career.
- Explore recording studios, soundstages, TV studios, tour venues, music video filming locations, and rehearsal spaces, as well as the places where Kate's early life and career began before she was signed to EMI Records.
- Use the given coordinates to pay a virtual visit to each location using online maps and Google Street View.
- Dive into the history of each real-life location and learn of its connection to Kate, with a handful of fascinating facts and trivia along the way.
Kate Bush: On Location visits a number of iconic rock music landmarks, including the legendary studios of Abbey Road, AIR London, Super Bear, and Windmill Lane; venues related to Kate’s 1979 Tour such as the Rainbow Theatre, the Poole Arts Centre, and the Hammersmith Odeon; famous film studios like Shepperton, Bray, and Elstree; the Efteling Theme Park and the London Laserium; TV studios such as BBC Television Centre, Pebble Mill, ATV Birmingham, and RTÉ Dublin; EMI Records and its vinyl pressing plants; Black Park and the beautiful Vale of the White Horse; the curious home of Bio’s Bahnhof; the Soho photography studio used to capture those famous ‘pink leotard’ portraits; and the setting for Kate’s pivotal recording session with David Gilmour in 1973. And so much more”.
The book will be released as both an eBook (£8.99) and paperback (£12.99), and they will be released on 1st September via Amazon. (The eBook is available to pre-order now - the paperback will be available to buy from 1st September. It will be available from Amazon in the U.K., U.S., Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia and India.)
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
You can pre-order the Kindle version here. I have read through the book and I love how it is this extensive, exhaustive and comprehensive love letter to Kate Bush and the locations that played their parts. Whether they are venues she performed at, studios she recorded in, or locations videos were shot on, this is like a travel guide! The book almost has the format and look of a classic travel guide. It is very easy to read and has excellent detail. I have not yet mentioned the book’s author. Max Cookney. In an email, he told me that the book might not give too much new information to diehard Kate Bush fans. I would disagree! I consider myself to be among the ultimate diehards and there are locations and titbits I was not aware of! I was engrossed. Before getting to some specific locations, this section from Cookney’s introduction stands out (he tells me that his fan club membership number was K9423, and you can find his name in the Pen Pals and Swaps sections of a couple of old KB club magazines from around c.1986-1988):
“The fan club’s address – at the time in Welling, Kent – wasn’t much more than a post office box number (‘PO Box 120’) and postal code (‘DA16 3DS, You’re welcome’) that would have directed all your letters and membership subs to the Royal Mail delivery office in Bexleyheath1 (actually, a little over a mile to the east of Welling proper). The only reason I’m able to tell you this with some confidence today is due to the one thing we didn’t have access to in 1986: the internet. A quick online search will confirm the location, although this “large user” postcode became defunct in 2010. But in 1986 and living some 240 miles away in the furthest western corners of Devon, my only option was to try and locate Welling on a map using my father’s well-thumbed RAC road atlas. I did manage to locate the Kentish town on the map, as I did East Wickham – the high-medieval hamlet a little to the north of Welling and location of the Bush family home. But I only ever knew these place names as the one- or two-word toponyms they were without the knowledge of any other more precise geographical detail or imagery. I was never going to find them in the Encyclopedia Britannica Children’s Yearbook 1986. As a result, they became almost mythical to my curious eleven-year-old self, in much the same way the not-too-far-away Cornish 1 An assumption has been made that the KBC collected their mail from the delivery office, although it should be noted that Royal Mail PO Box users could also opt to have their mail delivered to a different address if, for example, they wished to maintain their privacy.
As my enthusiasm for Kate grew, so too did the list of locations that became of interest to me, taken from the sleeve notes of Kate’s albums or any of the other material I had access to, which at the time was limited to one biography, a couple of fanzines, and a copy of the Kate Bush Complete sheet music book (with its very thorough chronology). Places like Bexleyheath, the Super Bear studios, Abbey Road, Manchester Square, Windmill Lane, the London Laserium, and the Poole Arts Centre all became the stuff of legend”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at Abbey Road Studios, London during recording of her third studio album, Never for Ever
In addition to information about the locations, Max Cookney provides history, some interesting facts and coordinates (and what3words). It means that fans can find these location if they are nearby. I have been to East Wickham Farm a couple of time recently and was blown away standing outside it! Cookney struggled to find some of these locations as they are quite obscure, but Google Maps is among the resources that helped him nail them down. Lets start off with some words about East Wickham Farm:
“East Wickham Farm was bought by Kate’s father, Dr Robert Bush, in the early 1950s, presumably not that long after the death of its former owner/resident, Mrs Rose Elizabeth Gibson. Rose Elizabeth was the wife of Bruce L. Gibson, the Kentish son of an agricultural master smith and a “much respected figure in the local community.” Bruce bought East Wickham Farm in the early 1900s, and as a result, it became known locally as Gibson’s Farm. Bruce made a success of the farm, and his family grew wealthy from their supply of fresh produce to the markets in central London. The Gibson’s farmland stretched as far as Brampton Road in Bexleyheath, about a mile east of the main farmhouse in Wickham Street, although much of that land was later sold off for housing, with part of it remaining as East Wickham Open Space, which the Bush family would have been able to see from the rear of the farmhouse. Bruce L. Gibson died in February 1939, having lived well into his seventies. Rose Elizabeth remained at the farm until her own death in January 1953 at the ripe old age of 92. East Wickham Farm is now occupied by Kate’s nephew, the bladesmith Owen Bush, from where he now runs his ‘Bushfire Forge’ School of Bladesmithing”.
We can think about all the remarkable and fascinating locations where Bush shot her music videos. As we are marking forty years of Hounds of Love, perhaps Cloudbusting is the most iconic. The cover for Kate Bush: On Location is a shot of the Vale of the White Horse in Oxfordshire. However, few video locations are as iconic as for Wuthering Heights. Specifically, the video for the version (the first video) where Bushy wore a red dress. A moment that is recreated each year for The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever:
“On 26 October 1977, the first of two promotional videos for the soonto-be-released Wuthering Heights was filmed on a grassy lea in the middle of Salisbury Plain in Southern England. Directed by Nick Abson, the Rockflix video (shot on 16mm film and more commonly referred to as the “red dress version”) was ultimately ditched in favour of a second video produced by Keith ‘Keef’ MacMillan, who would go on to produce several more for Kate. For a long time (and well before the arrival of YouTube), the Rockflix video wasn’t easy to find, with Keef’s video forever remaining the preferred choice released on official videotape compilations such as The Single File and The Whole Story. But for those who had managed to watch Nick’s version, no one really knew where it had been filmed. However, in 2018, following some impressive investigative work by some particularly dedicated fans, the exact location for the video was finally identified. Fortunately, the cameraman on the day, Mike Miles, was happy to share with fans everything he could remember about the shoot and provided an incredibly detailed report, especially given it was over forty years ago. The location was confirmed as being Salisbury Plain, and more specifically, Baden’s Clump – chosen for no reason other than because Nick and his team were in the area anyway, heading west towards Wales to continue filming a feature-length fly-on-the-wall documentary for a Stiff Records tour of the UK (the Live Stiffs Tour)”.
As I and many others are thinking about Hounds of Love at the moment, it is interesting drawing a mental map of the spots where songs were recorded and videos filmed. Ireland and its influence extends beyond lyrics and sounds. The physical recording space of Windmill Lane in Dublin saw some of the most magic and best moments from the 1985 album. It is a spot I will definitely visit if I ever go to Dublin:
“The Irish instrumentation sessions of Night of the Swallow, Hounds of Love, and The Sensual World were all recorded at Windmill Lane Recording Studios, which, incidentally, caught me out in much the same way as EMI in Hayes. If you were to search an online map for the studios today, you’d be signposted to a rather impressive turquoise and cream-coloured Art Deco building located on Ringsend Road, Dublin. Originally a power station for the Dublin United Tramways Company, you can find it at 53.342052, -6.234657 ///thanks.agreed.manage. But this is not the building we’re looking for. The sessions for Kate’s albums were recorded at the studio’s original site, located in, unsurprisingly, Windmill Lane. The original docklands site on the southern banks of the River Liffey was opened in 1978 by Brian Masterson and James Morris. Originally used for recording traditional Irish music, the studios were soon playing host to bands like Clannad, Def Leppard, The Waterboys, and most notably, U2, whose first three albums were recorded in full there. Because of the connection, many U2 fans from across the world used to visit the site and pay homage to the band by covering the outside walls with graffiti”
There is one more location I want to highlight before round off. One of my favourite ever moments in Kate Bush’s career is when she performed songs from her 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside, to promote the opening of a Dutch amusement park. It was suitably bizarre and wonderful. Before The Tour of Life in 1979, this was a chance for people to see her perform ‘live’ – she was miming for the performance – these tracks that would be brought to life a year later:
“The Efteling theme park in the Netherlands was the filming location for a twenty-minute, six-song television special Kate recorded for the Dutch broadcaster, TROS. The special, produced and directed by Rien van Wijk, was filmed in April 1978 and aired on the 12th of May, 1978. The given coordinates are for the old entrance to the former Haunted Castle (also known as the Spookslot) that Kate danced in front of at the start of the show (during the opening song, Moving). The Spookslot was designed by creative director Ton van de Ven, who’d designed most of the attractions at Efteling. It opened just two days before the airing of Kate’s TV special and remained so right up until 2022, when the park owners determined the attraction could no longer be maintained. In its place now stands a new attraction called Danse Macabre, in the Huyverwoud Forest-themed area. The tenebrous gravestone (or ‘zerk’ in Dutch) bearing Kate’s name that was used to open the TV special was kept as a memento and spent a good number of years at the park in storage before making a surprise reappearance outside the Spookslot in 2003, presumably in recognition of the attraction’s 25th birthday. It soon disappeared before resurfacing in 2007, when it was put on display in the Spookslot catacombs, where it remained until the attraction’s closure in 2022. It briefly showed its face again in the spring of 2023 during an Efteling exhibition at the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch. The gravestone’s current location remains a mystery to the author of this book; however, it is said that if you were to visit the new Danse Macabre attraction and maybe even stop for some refreshment at the Black Cat Tavern (‘In den Swarte Kat’), you might just stumble across one or two hidden references to Kate, but you’re not going to find any spoilers here!”.
This is just a small representation of a book that I think Kate Bush fans should carry around with them. Maybe you will not be based in England or Ireland or near any of the locations. However, I do know of people who come to the U.K. specifically to trace places Kate Bush has been and is part of her legacy. This book is indispensable for that reason. Also, it paints a more detailed and nuanced picture of her career. Why these locations are important and why they need to be discussed. I know there are some old documentaries where some of the locations are mentioned, though nothing new where someone visits many of these spots and talks about them. As I said, the French documentary I was involved with covers a few. I was at a park near East Wickham Farm. Covent Garden will also feature (the site where The Dance Centre used to be located) and there are so many places and wonderful areas dissected for Kate Bush: On Location that I did not know about. It goes to show that no Kate Bush fan can never know everything! Go and buy the book on 1st September, though you can pre-order the eBook. I am going to buy a physical copy, as it has provided inspiration for some new features! I have been writing about Hounds of Love ahead of its fortieth anniversary on 16th September, so this is very timely! I love the style and tone of the book. How it does seem like this guide book that and has the coordinates so you can go and see these places! Kate Bush: On Location is an exceptional, well-written and extensively researched book that is...
RICH with essential and fascinating information.