On September 8, 1980 Kate Bush released her third album, Never For Ever. This charming release entered the UK charts at #1, making Never For Ever not only her first UK#1 album but the first ever album by a British female solo artist to top the UK album chart . It features three hit singles, "Babooshka", "Army Dreamers" and "Breathing". The cover, featuring all kinds of creatures flowing out from under Kate's dress was also voted 'Greatest Album Cover of 1980' by Record Mirror.
NME called Never For Ever Bush's 5th best album, writing:
“As soon as I met the Fairlight,” Bush admitted in 1985 about the digital sampling synthesiser, “I realised that it was something I really couldn’t do without because it was just so integral to what I wanted to do with my music.” The possibilities are obvious on ‘Never For Ever’, the most lush of her albums to that point, where dreamy Minnie Riperton soul (‘Blow Away’) meets berserk vamping rock (‘Babooshka’). Its finest moment is the haunting ‘Breathing’ with Bush facing up to the burgeoning nuclear crisis as weapons move into Greenham Common. “What are we going to do/We are all going to die” is as direct as she ever gets, and has all the more grim power for that.
The song "Blow Away" was dedicated to to her lighting engineer Bill Duffield, who died in a tragic accident at Poole Arts Centre on April 2, 1979. Bush would stop touring for years.
In July of 1980 Kate Bush's single "Babooshka" raced up the UK charts to peak at #5. Though "babooshka" is Russian for grandmother, the song is about a wife who tests her husband's loyalty by sending him perfume-scented letters. The letters remind the husband of his wife "before the tears/And how she was before the years flew by/And how she was when she was beautiful".
Kate would tell Countdown in Australia, where the song hit #2:
It was really a theme that has fascinated me for some time. It's based on a theme that is often used in folk songs, which is where the wife of the husband begins to feel that perhaps he's not faithful. And there's no real strength in her feelings, it's just more or less paranoia suspicions, and so she starts thinking that she's going to test him, just to see if he's faithful. So what she does is she gets herself a pseudonym, which happens to be Babooshka, and she sends him a letter. And he responds very well to the letter, because as he reads it, he recognizes the wife that he had a couple of years ago, who was happy, in the letter. And so he likes it, and she decides to take it even further and get a meeting together to see how he reacts to this Babooshka lady instead of her. When he meets her, again because she is so similar to his wife, the one that he loves, he's very attracted to her. Of course she is very annoyed and the break in the song is just throwing the restaurant at him... (...) The whole idea of the song is really the futility and the stupidness of humans and how by our own thinking, spinning around in our own ideas we come up with completely paranoid facts. So in her situation she was in fact suspicious of a man who was doing nothing wrong, he loved her very much indeed. Through her own suspicions and evil thoughts she's really ruining the relationship
The song peaked at #5 in Italy where Kate performed on stage with actor Gary Hurst.
