She's here again!

By Alexa Baracaia, Evening Standard 27 September 2005

Pop music recluse Kate Bush returns to the limelight today with her first single in more than 12 years.

But her comeback song, King Of The Mountain, is only available via the internet in America and Canada and will not be released in Britain and the rest of the world until 24 October.

The singer, 46, whose last release was The Red Shoes in 1993, has not planned a supporting tour or promotional appearances. Her one and only tour was in 1979.

Bush decided to vanish from public gaze after her eerie ballad Wuthering Heights reached No1 in 1978 and her promotion of her debut album, The Kick Inside, was so successful that she was pressed the same year for the follow-up release, Lionheart.

"They took me away from everything familiar and, four months later, wanted another record," she later said. "I figured out then that music was a priority, not publicity. And that completely changed my life. I stopped doing all the things that were expected."

Bush, who earns an estimated £1million a year in royalties, shares a house in woodland on a small island on the Thames near Theale, Berkshire, with her partner, musician Danny McIntosh, 49. Her studio is in the grounds. Earlier this year, they bought a remote house in
Devon with 17 acres and its own beach for £2.5 million.

She is protected by friends, including Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour and ex-Genesis singer Peter Gabriel, and kept the birth of her son Bertie, now six, secret for 18 months.

It is one of Bertie's drawings which graces the cover of King Of The Mountain. The single will be followed by a double album, Aerial, on 8 November.