The media preoccupations essentially boiled down to three things: sex, age and class. The fuss made over her age was baffling. She was 19, no longer a babe in arms when it came to the pop industry, certainly not in comparison to her male contemporaries at that time: Paul Weller was 18 when ‘In The City’ went into the Top 40; John Lydon was still only 21. But the discrepancy between the maturity of the songs and her physical youthfulness and occasional gaucheness was emphasised again and again, particularly coming from someone from such an apparently ‘sheltered’ background, the dancing doctor’s daughter from the suburbs who had never had a ‘real’ job. She was a young woman with big ideas, and thus someone, somewhere, must be pulling her strings. “The thing with her career is that it started off, and people were thinking there was obviously some man behind her success,” says producer Steve Lillywhite, who worked with her on Peter Gabriel’s third album. “With ‘Wuthering Heights’, you thought she had a lovely voice, but somebody else was doing all the work.” It’s hard to believe now, but there was no comparable artist on the British scene at that time: a young, beautiful female who wrote and performed her own words and music to great popular and artistic success. As the first through the gates, she took many brickbats
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