(Credit: Alamy)

From the beginning of her career in the late 1970s until her supposed retirement from the music industry in 2014, Kate Bush always managed to uphold her distinctive vocal style and keep it in pristine and unaffected condition. While the squeaks and wails might not have been to everyone’s tastes, it’s certainly this uniqueness that earned her hordes of fans, not to mention her unmatched ability to produce inventive and forward-thinking pop songs with ease.

Bush clearly had this style pinned down, with her debut album, The Kick Inside, having been written and recorded while she was in her teens. There are very few other examples of artists as young as Bush was during this period who have managed to emerge into the spotlight as fully formed as she had proven herself to be, and the fact that people still consider her earliest efforts to be among the greatest recordings of all time is testament to how tremendous she has always been.

That doesn’t mean she stagnated at all during the later stages of her career and rested on her laurels, and she continued to release music that pushed boundaries throughout the 1980s, constantly finding ways to either evolve or refine aspects of her artistry. Despite this fine-tuning, there was still a clear sense of identity to her work, and it was one that was so rarely ever successfully imitated by her contemporaries.

Of course, there have been countless artists who cite her as a major influence and have managed to emulate her more peculiar vocal inflexions and intonations, but the likes of Joanna Newsom and Julia Holter have always managed to inject something of their own personality into their work to make themselves distinct from being Kate Bush clones. However, anyone who attempts to impersonate Bush either perfectly or in a parodical sense ends up falling flat.

Among some of the more catastrophic attempts to poke fun at Bush’s vocal and performative histrionics came from British impressionist Faith Brown on her ‘80s comedy show, The Faith Brown Chat Show, where she attempted to pull off a rendition of ‘Wow’ complete with flailing arms, wide eyes and high-pitched vocals. It may have been an attempt at comedy, but there’s something off about her performance from the outset, appearing more as ridicule than flattery.

Despite this, Bush took the performance in good spirits and dubbed it “incredible” while going on to say, “I think she’s a genius” in retaliation to Brown’s impression. It may have been said out of politeness or embarrassment, and the reality might be that Bush thought it was a low-brow stab at her inimitable style, but at least she was able to accept it graciously.

Impersonating or copying Bush is a task that very few are going to be able to master, and even if they were able to do so with an element of good faith, nobody should really be touching her masterful works in the first place. While her story may be worthy of dramatisation, you just have to pray that nobody’s got a Kate Bush biopic in the works because nobody is going to be able to pull it off quite like she did in the first place.