Kate Bush: The Sensual World

It’s 1978 and I’m a student, and I hear this amazing new noise coming out of my radio and I stand, entranced, and listen to this mad whirl of sound about wuthering wuthering wuthering heights…

Later I’m in a darkened room, the drama studio, and there are twenty, thirty of us freestyling to Virginia Plain and Bohemian Rhapsody and, yes, Wuthering Heights (and, trust me, you haven’t lived till you’ve been with a group of drama students making abstract expressionist movement with the speakers turned UP TO ELEVEN and the air full of sweat and cigarettes and patchouli oil..)

I have history with Kate Bush, I suppose I am saying. Wuthering Heights is mad marvellous and Baboushka is proper bonkers and Cloud Busting is plain disturbing and I still see Donald Sutherland being led away in my nightmares. I can’t hide you. From the government.

I can’t fathom how it is that I have never previously seen today’s offering, The Sensual World but Oh it is glorious! and Oh, I am so happy I never saw it when I was twenty, never longed to prance through a burning forest in a velvet dress and watch the stars drop glitter, yes, I would have said, yes.

If you know anywhere I can get the exact shade of purple of the dress in the moonlight – not a dress, obviously: not at my age, with my figure. But maybe a scarf, something. In memory of lost moments.

• Novelty: surprisingly new to me
• Content: eleven, what else?
• Performance: eleven. Bonkers but brilliant.
• Soul: sighing, replete