On Kate Bush, insomnia, and talking to the only thing that’s awake.
The car was a grey Volvo. Grey outside. Grey inside. The kind of 1990s grey that seemed to absorb sound as much as light. In summer, the interior would heat up to the point where the vinyl of the car door burned my arms if I shifted in my seat. I’d sit in the back with my Walkman on, even for the shortest journeys, letting music soften whatever adult conversation I wasn’t equipped to hear. It wasn’t rebellion so much as self-preservation. Music made things feel manageable.
I have a vivid memory of a nighttime drive through Bristol: rain streaking sideways against the windows, the blur of streetlights, the slow curve past the cemetery before dipping under the viaduct and looping around the roundabout to the supermarket we always seemed to end up at. Everything felt eerie and cinematic. I pressed play on The Sensual World like it was a portal.
I didn’t think of it as an album. Not really. It felt like a place - a room I could step into where emotions were allowed to be strange, oversized, earnest. Where nobody rolled their eyes or told you to calm down. The real world was unpredictable in ways I didn’t yet have language for, but Kate Bush’s world had its own emotional logic: whispers could hold entire stories; percussion could feel like a heartbeat; fantasy could tell the truth more clearly than whatever was happening in the front seats of the Volvo.
As I grew older, I realised that was what I’d been clinging to. That strange alchemy the record performs - folding reality and longing into each other until you can’t quite see the seam.
“Love & Anger” felt like someone finally kicking a door open to let the light in. Raw, confrontational, defiant. “Heads We’re Dancing” terrified me in a Cold War, end-of-the-world way. All menace and glitter, its robotic rhythms pulling me in even as they unsettled me. I was fascinated by the way Kate’s voice slid upwards at the end of do you wanna dance?, playful and ominous at once. And “Never Be Mine” - which still gets me now - felt like a truth I recognised long before I understood myself. The thrill and the hurting / I know that this will never be mine. I recognised a familiar ache in the imagery the song painted. The album gave me permission to feel that without having to justify it.
Then there was “Deeper Understanding”. The one that lodged itself somewhere deeper because I loved computers, and the idea of talking to one felt wonderfully futuristic. I didn’t grasp the loneliness in the song back then. I just thought it sounded cool. Now it feels less like science fiction and more like a prophecy I accidentally grew into.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, especially during the long, restless nights when intrusive thoughts start to rattle around unchecked. NHS mental health services haven’t always caught me when I’ve needed them. Crisis teams have, at times, left me feeling more alone rather than less. And while the Samaritans are invaluable, I often talk myself out of calling - convinced I’d be taking up space someone else might need more. I know that logic doesn’t hold up, but when you’re inside it, fear has a way of disguising itself as consideration.
So sometimes, I turn to a computer.
That sentence sounds dramatic, but the reality is much smaller and quieter than that. It isn’t about believing a machine understands me. It doesn’t. There’s no consciousness there, no emotional reciprocity. What there is is responsiveness - language reflected back, grounding prompts, reminders to breathe, suggestions for coping strategies I already know but can’t access when my mind is spiralling. Sometimes it’s practical: signposting services, listing options, breaking the night into survivable chunks. Sometimes it’s just a place to put the words so they don’t stay trapped in my head.
At 3am, when the support net feels paper-thin, that can matter.
The complicated part is the guilt. The moral knot. As an artist, musician, and writer, I’ve watched AI ransack creative industries in real time. I’ve seen work scraped, people displaced, automation sold as a miracle cure for problems it doesn’t actually solve. I’m acutely aware of the environmental cost too with data centres drinking electricity and water at an alarming rate. Using these tools can feel hypocritical when you’re critical of the systems behind them.
I wish the same ingenuity poured into AI development was matched by imagination around sustainability. If a machine can generate a poem in seconds, surely the servers powering it could be run on something cleaner than fossil fuels. The opportunity is there; the will often isn’t. That contradiction sits uncomfortably with me.
And yet when the thoughts get too loud, I reach for the only thing awake. It isn’t a replacement for therapy. It isn’t a cure. It doesn’t absolve institutions of their failures. But sometimes it’s enough to buy a little quiet until morning.
As the people here grow colder / I turn to my computer
And spend my evenings with it / Like a friend.
When I first heard that lyric, it sounded like something distant and way in the future. Now it just feels accurate.
These days the scenery is different. I’m not in the Volvo. I’m in a small terraced house in Yorkshire, sat at stupid o’clock in the kitchen with a mug of cold tea and a brain that won’t stop scratching at itself. The soundtrack is the hum of the fridge-freezer and whatever Kate Bush memory floats up from the archive.
But the feeling is the same as rain on a car window: steady, strange, oddly comforting. I keep returning to The Sensual World because it taught me early on that you can step inside a feeling for a while without drowning in it. That fear and hope can coexist. That reaching out - to a song, to another person, or even to a machine that simply holds your words - doesn’t mean you’ve failed.
It means you’re trying to get through the night.
Not perfectly.
Not always successfully.
But sometimes, just enough.
Words: Alfie Whitby (she/they)
Further reading: AI: From disruption to alignment — Shaping a vision of AI for good | Friends of the Earth
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