5. Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill

I'm sure that one sex-obsessed psychologist or another would have claimed that the first famous person you ever develop a crush on as an adolescent forms the template for everyone you are sexually attracted to in the future.  If they didn't, then I'd like to throw my hypothesis into the psychological debate.  Test the theory.  Ask yourself first, what's your type?  Then who was the first person you fancied?  Do they match?

In my case, the waters are muddied somewhat by an early thing I had for Catwoman (Julie Newmar that is, not Lee Meriwether and definitely not Eartha Kitt, especially given the rhyming slang connotations.  And Michelle Pfeiffer and Anne Hathaway were yet to fill those latex suits).  But I don't believe that I was in love with her.  After all, she tried to kill Batman.  Also, I was heartbroken when Raquel Welch was strangled to death with rosary beads in the 1973 film, The Three Musketeers.  But really, the first famous woman I had a BIG crush on was Kate Bush.

My recall is a little hazy here, unfortunately.  I'm guessing from the historical chronology that the trigger for pinning to the wall over my bunk bed a huge poster of Kate Bush's face - three times the actual size of a normal head (and therefore twice the size of mine) - was the release of Running Up That Hill in August 1985 and subsequently the album, Hounds of Love that same year.

On a superficial level since then, I have always found myself FAR more enamoured by brunette hair - preferably long and flowing - full lips and brown eyes.  In that sense, Kate Bush was my template.  Fortunately that template was no more sophisticated than that and didn't include her uniquely beautiful art-rock song-writing ability and a singing voice to melt the marrow in your bones.  Had THAT been part of the template for women I fell for from then on, I'd have ended up leading a lonely life these past 33 years.

I'm not sure that Running Up That Hill blew me away like other songs included in this series of blogs.  It was more that it prompted me to buy the album that did and that in turn led me to Our Price in pursuit of a back catalogue that firmly welded my 15 year old heart to Kate Bush, a heart that struggled to mend itself after Tanya Mackessey from confirmation classes had agreed to go out with me and then changed her mind.

But now that I think about it, I must have fallen for Tanya Mackessey BEFORE Kate Bush.  And she had long, slightly wavy brunette hair and brown eyes.  So Kate Bush wasn't the template, she just fitted it.  Bollocks, that's my theory blown out of the water.  Right, moving on...


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