Kate Bush's Never For Ever enters the UK charts at #1

Kate Bush : Army Dreamers

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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.

With "Breathing" Kate Bush releases a single for our times

Kate Bush : Breathing

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On April 14, 1980 Kate Bush released the UK#16 single "Breathing". Most of the lyrics sound as though they were written for these times, locked inside our homes , afraid to breathe in what strangers are breathing out.

Sung from the point of view of a foetus frightened by the effect of nuclear fallout, Bush says the song --with its lyrics 'Chips of plutonium are twinkling in every lung' --was inspired by a documentary she had seen on the effects of nuclear war.  

"It's about a baby still in the mother's womb at the time of nuclear fallout, but it's more of a spiritual being," she tells Smash Hits. "It has all its senses: sight, small, touch, taste ad hearing and it knows what is going on outside the mother's womb, and yet it wants desperately to carry on living, as we all do of course.

"Nuclear fallout is something we're all aware of, and worried about happening in our lives, and it's something we should all take time to think about. We;'re all innocent, none of us deserve to be blown up."

For the video, Kate performed the song in what appears to be a womb.