Kate Bush

Signed to EMI at the tender age of 16, singer songwriter Kate Bush is one of England's most successful solo female performers of the past 30 years, having sold over 20 million records worldwide. But Where Is She Now?

We all know some Kate Bush songs: Wuthering Heights, Running Up That Hill, Babooshka and The Man With The Child In His Eyes - which staggeringly she wrote when she was only 13.

We also all know that voice; too squeaky and odd for some, but for many a truly unique talent, here was a strangely beautiful young woman who actually wrote her own songs, each one utterly unique and catchy.

Kate also did that whole kooky, slightly insane thing so well that it has inspired a generation of female vocalists, from Bjork and Tori Amos to Bat For Lashes and Ladyhawke.

So prodigious was her musical creativity that while she was growing up in the mid Seventies she already had a demo tape compiled of 50 songs, but which were turned down by record labels. Eventually it was Pink Floyd's David Gilmour who heard the tape and told EMI to sign her.

Her rise to superstardom came in 1978 when at age 19, she had a No. 1 hit for four weeks with her debut song Wuthering Heights, becoming the first woman to have a UK number-one with a self-written song.

The following year she released the 1980 album Never for Ever, which made her the first British solo female artist to top the UK album charts, and the first female artist ever to enter the album chart at no. 1. Not bad going for a kooky kid from Kent.

After that she dominated the 80s with a string of albums and hit singles, not to mention a collection of rather surreal music videos.

Kate bookended that decade with the album The Sensual World in '89 and then in 1991 with the Red Shoes, an album which featured cameo appearances from Lenny Henry, Prince, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck to name a few.

But then she literally vanished.

Well it turns out she made a conscious decision to retreat from show business after which the press started to paint her as some sort of eccentric recluse. In reality she has since revealed that she was trying to raise her son in a normal environment.

She had a son Albert with her guitarist and now husband Danny McIntosh and after living for many years in a large Victorian house in southeast London, they now have two homes: a £2.5 million house in Salcombe and, rather bizarrely, a mansion on an island on a canal at Sulhamstead in West Berkshire.

In 2002 Kate Bush performed live with her old mentor Dave Gilmour singing the part of the doctor in the Pink Floyd classic Comfortably Numb at London's Royal Festival Hall.

In 2007 Kate recorded a song Lyra for the big budget movie The Golden Compass, based on Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials novel. But two years prior to that she released Aerials, her first album in twelve years.

Aerials is a concept album split into two parts, which received great reviews, in which she sings about typically odd things from Joan Of Arc, to the mathematical principal of pi and washing machines.

Trust us, this writer owns the album and it's very good, except for the bit about washing machines - and hey, who wouldn't love an album with a cameo by Rolf Harris playing the didgeridoo?

Yeah it's weird but it's also proof  that she's lost none of the crazy charm that made us fall in love with her in the first place. And for the record, here's her official website.