When Kate Bush was 8 years previous – she writes within the introduction to How To Be Invisible, her assortment of lyrics – she discovered a discarded instrument an unlikely outlet for her rising musical ambitions. “I used to play an previous harmonium that had ostensibly been dumped within the outhouse within the backyard,” she remembered. “It was so thrilling. One cease was ‘flutes’, one other ‘trumpets’. I adored enjoying with these completely different sounds, however then, one after the other, the stops had been eaten away by the mice who lived within the harmonium.”

It’s an instructive anecdote, not least in what it tells us about the way in which Bush may discover one thing magical in an object the remainder of us would possibly in any other case contemplate junk. However in essence, Bush has been truffling out enchantments underneath the ivy – or, maybe, within the barn – for over 40 years now. As “Working Up That Hill” celebrates passing one billion streams on Spotify, and with the dad or mum album Hounds Of Love due for a reissue later this 12 months, we try and reveal the mysteries behind Bush’s idiosyncratic imaginative and prescient, whose dedication to carry that imaginative and prescient to fruition, has been there proper from the beginning. Reflecting on Bush’s alchemical presents for reworking the abnormal into the surprising, I’m shocked she didn’t write a music about that harmonium – one so as to add to her uncanny bestiary alongside snowmen, magicians, angels and washing machines…

Elsewhere on this challenge, you’ll discover different exponents of English music, no much less shocking than Kate Bush. The various faces of Ronnie Lane – from mod to seeker, gypsy and past – are celebrated by a bunch of pals, together with Pete Townshend, whereas everlasting refusenik Andy Partridge shares his inimitable views on XTC’s wonderful canon. We journey additional afield, to San Fransicsco’s Bay Space circa 1969 to fulfill Moby Grape, then to New York within the late ‘90s the place Elliott Smith finds himself at a pivotal level in his profession, and lastly to Paris, within the current day, the place Tinariwen are rising from a interval of enforced hibernation. There’s extra, in fact – Betty Davis, Joan Jett, the return of Blur and a free, 15-track new music CD.

It’s sufficient, we hope, to maintain you entertained for the month forward…

Comply with me on Twitter @MichaelBonner