Rowan Pelling: Kate Bush is to women what Dylan is to blokes. It's a menstrual thing

Lo, she returns! Our Lady of the shadows and the raven's wing. For 12 long years we beat our breasts with nettles and tore at our hair, and the fruit of the land withered on the vine (apart from the GM stuff, which glowed in the dark). And a woman in Totnes gave birth to a stillborn wolf-cub, and the milk turned sour when we left it near the Aga, and we had to make do with Hounds of Love because we liked it rather more than The Red Shoes. And now Kate Bush ascends to her throne on a wind-blasted tor, and - Juno be praised! - there's a new album.

About ruddy time, too. I was a carefree, 25-year-old PA about town when the last Bush album was released and could still be persuaded to don a Victorian nightie and dance around the room to "Wuthering Heights" if occasion called for it. Usually the occasion was pretending to be a contestant on Stars In Their Eyes and I, along with countless other pudding-faced, earthbound females, yearned, with outrageous incongruity, to be ethereal, witchy Kate Bush. (Although all we ever resembled was escaped lunatic patients.)

I was struck down like a lovesick puppy at the age of 10 when I first saw Bush on Top of the Pops in 1978 and I have been fatally afflicted ever since. This despite the fact I was, and remain, largely resistant to popular music culture.

Like many women, I never subscribed to the "I listen, therefore I am" NME school of slavish musical devotion. Yet every now and then a particular voice penetrates my ear's inbuilt screening system (constructed to repel Dido and James Blunt). And none has ever provoked such primeval, womb-sprung recognition as that of Kate Bush.

She joins a select handful of female arts practitioners who seem to express the very essence of the lunar dreamscape that makes up a woman's most private thoughts; novelists Charlotte Brontë and Muriel Spark, painters Frida Kahlo and Paula Rego, and poets Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath spring to mind. Their fans have a tendency to treat them not so much as artists as priestesses of some long-lust cult of the mother goddess.

What can I say? It's not rational. It's a little bit menstrual. It's a woman thing. And at least it balances out all those men with speakers the size of standing stones, worshipping at the shrines of Bob Dylan and Morrissey.

So I was stirred to the entrails when I was told, as a guest on this week's BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review, that we would be reviewing the new Kate Bush album, Aerial. I even pulled out my antique linen nightgown; "It's meeee, oh Catheeee, I've come home ...". Then I fretted. What if Bush were no longer "other", but had become - gulp - circumscribable?

I took a deep breath before donning headphones at the EMI headquarters in London (the album has been ruthlessly embargoed) and felt a familiar emotion. How can I describe it? You're balanced on a knife-edge between pure, distilled, female hysteria and a pierced heart. It's impossible to listen to some of the tracks without mentally conjuring up a Smack the Pony tribute.

Take "Mrs Bartolozzi", a song about an obsessively domestic woman with the repeated refrains "washing machine" and, "Slooshy sloshy slooshy sloshy/Get that dirty shirty clean". What's noticeable is how Bush has grown with her fans. There's less teen witch and more Gaia. Since we were last summoned to court she has given birth to a son, Bertie, the inspiration for a song that's probably the only track on the album that will divide fans: those without children may reach for the sick-bucket, while besotted mothers of small sons will weep with joy at every shamelessly self-indulgent sentiment. "Lovely, lovely, lovely Bertie", she trills over and over, before going on, "Here comes the sunshine/Here comes that son of mine". Frankly, I thought my heart might not take the strain. The same was true of "A Coral Room", with its tenderness and yearning for Bush's dead mother and the capturing of some sub-aquatic quality of fading memory. And the heavy-kohl brigade will be suitably spine-tingled by, "How to be Invisible". As for the second CD, inspired and interspersed by birdsong, tracking the changing light and weather of a single day, following a painter's eye, taking you from dawn to dusk, to the sea's shore and beneath the stars, it answered my feverish heart's prayer.

All we ask of Kate Bush, in the words of Duckie (Kate Bush fan club and "South London's premiere post-gay pop & performance kinst-disco"), is that she's "eccentric, elusive and very English". The qualities are all mercifully here in Aerial. All together now: Lovely, lovely, lovely Kate. Lovely, lovely, lovely Kate.