‘Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life,’ declares the formidable heroine of Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I, too, was once a girl at an impressionable age; since then, I have gained perspective on who or what proved a decisive influence in my life.

I am a French Anglophile who, decades ago, deliberately left my native land behind to make a life in Great Britain. What was it that drew me here? Above all, it was the beauty of the English language which I encountered, like most French people, firstly through pop music. A French person’s classic introduction to British pop usually comes courtesy of the Beatles, and my parents did own the band’s red and blue compilation albums when I was growing up. But the artist who threw open the gates of English for me was Kate Bush – an explosive, alien intrusion into my French world.

Things might have gone another way. A couple of years previously my father, who took recommendations from record stores seriously, had given me another interestingly alien cultural object, the 1975 album Radio-Activity by German electronic band Kraftwerk, a source of great fascination at a time when French popular music oscillated between post-Piaf warbling chanson and glitzy mass-market variété. Here was a powerful alternative soundscape: I might have fallen in love with German by way of cold-wave synthesisers and an austere intonation.

But in 1978, when I was 12, I heard Bush’s song ‘Wuthering Heights’ on French radio, its high-pitched yowling arrestingly strange, its lyrics incomprehensible, like a broadcast from a distant planet. Soon after, my father came home with Bush’s debut album The Kick Inside. I listened to it on a loop in its entirety, as a wave of sound. Then I began painstakingly to parse the lyrics with the help of a bilingual dictionary, and the atmospheric open-ended vignettes began to come into focus, though only in part, and I was happy for the songs to remain to a large degree obscure, poetic, unelucidated. I could visualise the ‘wiley, windy moors’ of ‘Wuthering Heights’. I had seen and loved the 1939 film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon and had a large poster of it up in my room. I wasn’t sure what the ‘Old Goose Moon’ (a Native American term for a springtime phase of the moon) referred to; still less what on earth Bush meant when she sang (in ‘Them Heavy People’): ‘They read me Gurdjieff and Jesus.’

It was in the light of her second album, Lionheart, that Bush came into focus for me as distinctly English, as opposed, for example, to Debbie Harry of the New York band Blondie, also climbing the French charts in those years. Until then I, like many French listeners, had only thought vaguely of la pop anglo-saxonne as one undifferentiated bank of non-French songs, but one simply could not imagine Debbie Harry dressing up as a pantomime lion as Bush did on the cover of her album. In those days I did not read the music press and I was unaware that Bush had made her allegiance to her cultural heritage explicit, telling Melody Maker in 1978: ‘Everything I do is very English and I think that’s one reason I’ve broken through to a lot of countries.’ All I had to go on was Lionheart, which contained many clues, several of which, like references to Hammer Film Studios and the TV show The Sweeney, would only, in those pre-internet days, be clearly understood many years later. The melancholy closing track, ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’, is a concentrate of references that would certainly sound familiar to a British person – wassailing, London Bridge, abandoned air-raid shelters ‘blooming clover’, Peter Pan stealing children in Kensington Park, Shakespeare, the timeless poetic course of the river Thames, the ravens in the Tower – but which, to a French person trying to imagine them, sounded wonderfully strange and exotic. There was also a sense of almost post-apocalyptic loss about the song, which spurred me on to find out more about the things Bush appeared to locate in a paradise lost.

Bush’s songbook was to me a primer for learning English and becoming attuned to a British accent, though as Graeme Thomson has pointed out in Under The Ivy, his comprehensive and recently updated biography of the artist, Bush, who enjoys modulating and distorting her pretty voice, has also sung in Australian, Irish, French and German accents and ‘has impersonated a donkey, a witch, a bird and an enchanted house’. Through her songs I, a French outsider, was first shown a glimpse of the cultural landscape that had shaped her.

Bush is a cinematic songwriter. The inspiration for the song ‘Wuthering Heights’ came to her not from the novel but rather from a scene in a 1970 adaptation that showed ‘a hand coming through the window’. The song ‘Hounds of Love’, about the panic nature of love, opens with the thrilling line: ‘It’s in the trees! It’s coming!’ from the 1957 British horror film Night of the Demon and the video pays homage to Hitchcock’s 39 Steps, with a dash of the 1945 supernatural portmanteau film Dead of Night. I was living in England by the time Bush released The Red Shoes in 1993, and I enjoyed the confirmation of her allegiance to the distinctly English films of Powell and Pressburger. With their dreamlike interplay of historical timelines, A Canterbury Tale and A Matter of Life and Death always put me in mind of how, in ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’, Bush compresses thousands of years of national history into the line: ‘Dropped from my black spitfire to my funeral barge.’

I was just the right age, not yet a teenager, when I encountered Kate Bush, and perhaps my being French helped, too. It meant that I was unable to resist her. She could do no wrong; I took her oddity and wide-eyed art-rock pantomime artistry entirely at face value. I followed the pathway she offered, made more rewarding still because of the language barrier, which meant that her hinterland was not accessible to me without effort. Kate Bush’s songs were by no means my only point of contact with British culture: I spent decades listening to other music, looking at paintings, exploring the literary canon; I learned about Common Law, the Anglican church, Britain’s constitutional monarchy, and even (with difficulty) the rudiments of cricket. But from listening to her, I gained some early insights into something that many people are nowadays reluctant to mention or even acknowledge: British – or perhaps more accurately in the case of Bush, even though she is also half-Irish – English identity.

To a French person, there is something puzzling in the notion that national identity is, by definition, pernicious and unmentionable. Doesn’t much of the joy of life lie in noticing the small things that make us who we are? Kate Bush rewarded my curiosity with her combination of English mysticism – a sort of haunted vein of pastoral – with an equally English taste for absurd, daft humour. Her musical universe pointed me to folk songs, the experimental choreography of Lindsay Kemp, the imagery of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, the cadences of the King James Bible. From all this I gathered the rather un-French idea of eccentricity being a desirable quality. Who else but Bush, a hippyish auteur ploughing her own furrow, would insouciantly slip references to the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich or the mystic G.I. Gurjieff into the charts?

I have now lived longer in Britain than in France and I have adapted rather well. The vagaries of the weather no longer trouble me: I find them interesting. After more than 30 years of immersive, attuned observation, I feel as though I am beginning to understand the British mentalités and the frequently oblique ways in which they are expressed. Looking back, I can still see the gateway where it all started. And my Kate Bush primer remains with me.