On December 9, 1978, Kate Bush performed live on US TV for the first and only time, as the musical guest on NBC's long-running comedy show Saturday Night Live.
It wasn't the first time Bush had visited the US. She'd flown over in May for a brief promotional visit in the wake of the belated North American release of her debut album The Kick Inside, but the idea of doing whatever it took to break America didn't appeal. She'd already turned down the chance to spend the summer supporting Fleetwood Mac on their massive Rumours tour, reportedly unhappy at the sacrifices she'd need to make to perform as a support act.
"I've never seen it in terms of you make an album and then conquer the world," she later said. "I must say it's never really worried me that I've not been big in America."
In December Bush reluctantly boarded Concorde for the three-hour flight across the Atlantic to JFK before travelling on to NBC's studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where Mick Jagger and Paul Simon paid their respects during rehearsals. On the live broadcast itself, she was introduced by Monty Python star Eric Idle, who'd extended the invitation after trying to convince her to appear in a movie version of Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera The Pirates Of Penzance with David Bowie.
"I thought she would be brilliant in it," Idle told Yahoo! in 2022. "I'd written to her about it, and her management was very encouraging. I think I wanted Bowie as the lead, as Frederic. I thought they’d be terrific. I was very happy that she was doing SNL. I was very touched that she came on. It was obviously important; everybody didn't just do SNL in those days, and it was new to have pop groups on."
Bush's first song was the one she famously wrote when she was just 13, The Man With The Child In His Eyes, backed on the piano by Paul Schaffer, who'd spend five years at SNL before a four-decade stint as David Letterman's band leader. And then it was These Heavy People, with Bush dressed in raincoat and fedora.
The two songs may not have transfixed the American public in the way the Beatles on Ed Sullivan had 14 years earlier – although the catsuit she wore during The Man With The Child In His Eyes caused some predictable controversy – but at least one budding musician's life was transformed by her appearance.
"I'd seen Kate Bush on Saturday Night Live, performing The Man With The Child In His Eyes," remembered American singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant, who watched the show as a 14-year-old, in Amy Raphael's A Seat at the Table: Interviews with Women on the Frontline of Music "She was wearing a silver lamé bodysuit and was crawling around catlike on the lid of a Steinway piano. She was unlike anyone I'd ever seen or heard before. I wanted to know more about her world."
Meanwhile, at the campus of the Univerisity of Washington, second-year student and future Hollywood star Kyle McLachlan – still six years away from his film debut in David Lynch's Dune – was similarly wowed.
"Sitting on top of the piano, gold sparkly body suit, pouty lips, provocative undulations, she definitely made an impression on me!," said McLachlan in the 2013 book The Way We Ate: 100 Chefs Celebrate a Century at the American Table, which drew unlikely parallels between Bush's Sensual World album and his recipe for braised spare ribs. "I have all her albums and a personalized photograph she sent to me that was in response to the only fan letter I ever sent."
