Neil McCormick in the Daily Telegraph:

“In the Ivor Novello award nominations announced yesterday, the Best Album category was a women’s only event. It is the first time this has happened in the award’s 68 year history. As I have suggested before, women are taking over popular music. And what women they are. You cannot argue with these nominations: three pop generations of bold and brilliant singer-songwriters, each carving their own unique path through what has been a male dominated industry.

The extraordinary sonic adventuress Kate Bush is 53, and has been making unique, almost wilfully eccentric yet open and accessible music since 1978. Over decades in which the vast majority of female pop role models were expected to be little more than eye and ear candy, she was a beacon for high-minded female pop, forging a body of work that, in it’s interior psychology and ornate beauty, was somehow inherently feminine.

She spent most of two decades in maternal semi-retirement, but with last year’s 50 Words For Snow she demonstrated that she has lost none of her uniqueness of vision or magical touch. Popular music can be a cruel forum for aging but, like the greatest of artists, Bush has held her position with originality and maturity, and deserves to be lauded again …”