(Credit: Alamy)

Kate Bush is one of the greatest avant-garde artists in history. Throughout her discography, she pushed the confines of rock into new, strange and artistic places with a kind of unrivalled vision that made her utterly peerless. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t look to other artists for inspiration or wasn’t a huge fan of some other big names. In particular, Captain Beefheart stood out as a firm favourite.

Bush’s love for Beefheart makes perfect sense. Much like the British musician, Beefheart completely threw out the rock rule book to write his own. Especially in the 1960s and ‘70s Californian music scene, when classic rock and roll was leading the way, he refused to settle into typical sounds. Instead, he created his own unique musical language that he borrowed from rock, blues, jazz, and other genres, merging them into something new and sometimes utterly odd.

Much like Bush, Beefheart seemed to see music as sitting within a broad scope of artistry. He wasn’t just trying to write songs; he was trying to paint thorough pictures. Sometimes, that took the shape of a story, like so many of Bush’s tracks do, and sometimes, it was an absurdist abstraction, like a musical Dalí artwork.

Even though Bush is often seen as standing alone as a singular and unique artist, she always saw herself as a student in his school. “He’s the original,” she said of the American pioneer.

She saw him as an artist to aspire to but also one that few could hope to compete with. “When you look at a lot of the new wave groups and the punk groups, they’re really nothing compared to Beefheart,” he said. In particular, she loved his writing as she added, “For me, he’s a natural poet. I mean, he’s incredible.”

That’s what she loved about one of his albums especially. In a list of her favourite albums of all time, she chose his 1974 record Bluejeans & Moonbeams. “This is the Beefheart album where he writes love songs like nobody else,” she said of the record.

With music as experimental as his, Beefheart’s lyricism isn’t always the first thing that’s thought of in connection to his work. But it’s really the same story for Bush. Her lyricism remains poignant and poetic despite her most adventurous instrumental efforts or within her wildest narrative pieces or concepts. That side of her role as a musician is never lost, even as she leans furthest into her identity as an avant-garde force. As she points out Beefheart’s own wordsmith ways, it’s clear that she learnt that balancing act from him.