On this day in vegan history · July 30, 1958
Kate Bush Is Born in Bexleyheath
The girl who would top the charts with a song about a ghost on the moors also went on primetime British TV to explain, in plain and startling terms, why she'd stopped eating meat.
The facts
- Born
- 30 July 1958, at a maternity hospital in Bexleyheath, Kent
- Raised in
- East Wickham, near Welling, adjoining Bexleyheath
- Chart breakthrough
- "Wuthering Heights" (1978), first UK number one by a female artist with a fully self-written song
- Diet
- Vegetarian; discussed the decision publicly as early as 1979-1980
Catherine "Kate" Bush was born on 30 July 1958 at a maternity hospital in Bexleyheath, Kent, and grew up nearby in East Wickham in a musical, artistic household. In 1978, at 19, she became the first female artist to top the UK singles chart with a fully self-written song, "Wuthering Heights," and went on to make Hounds of Love, one of the most acclaimed British albums of the 1980s. Off stage, Bush became vegetarian as a teenager after a visceral moment of recognizing meat as a once-living animal, and in 1980 she discussed it on BBC television with cookery writer Delia Smith. Decades later, Wikipedia still records the plain fact in its entry on her: she never went back.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
I do eat plants, and I know they're living, and I'm fond of them, but I think you have to find your own level.
Kate Bush, in a 1980 interview reprinted from Kate Bush Club newsletter Issue 5
Source: John Russell's Kate Bush interview archive -
Bush is a vegetarian.
From the Personal life section of her Wikipedia biography
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
One of Britain's most influential musicians talking matter-of-factly about vegetarianism on mainstream television in 1980 put the idea in front of an audience that pop culture rarely reached back then, well before plant-based eating had any cultural cachet.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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