As Leah Kardos notes in the 188th book in Bloomsbury Academic’s esteemed 33 1/3 series, Hounds Of Love is “grossly overdue”. After all, Kate Bush’s stats, set out in the first chapter proper, are incredible – perhaps most prominently the fact that she was “the first woman in pop history to write a million-selling debut album”, 1978’s The Kick Inside, at the age of just 19.

Kardos is making a very valid point: Bush’s artistry is widely celebrated, but her sales success is rarely fully recognised. That she achieved it while instinctively following her own idiosyncratic muse illustrates that the public don’t need to be spoonfed lowest-common-denominator pap.

Kardos hails Bush’s fifth album as a commercial and creative triumph – “a work of sweeping, thrilling ambition with a wealth of meticulous detail rendered in widescreen cinemascope” – that owes its brilliance to self-belief, singularity of vision, exploration of new technologies, and the luxury of time and space in a purpose-built recording studio at her childhood home. While the non-musicologist may get mildly bogged down in the forensic analysis of chord structures, Kardos also captures what makes Hounds Of Love so magical, its legacy so luminous and its creator “a barrier-smashing, template-defying, business-smart, record-breaking, never-compromising role model for artists everywhere”.