Songfacts®:

• Kate Bush recorded her reggae-tinged version of Elton John and Bernie Taupin's "Rocket Man" in 1989, shortly after completing her The Sensual World album. It sat unreleased until November 1991, when it appeared on the tribute album Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin. It became a bigger hit than any single from The Sensual World. Sometimes it pays to let a song sit in the cupboard for a couple of years.
• Ray Bradbury's short story "The Rocket Man," published in the 1951 collection The Illustrated Man, inspired Taupin's lyrics. Bradbury's astronaut spends months away from his family on interplanetary journeys, caught between the demands of his job and his longing for home. Taupin explores a similar loneliness, with its central character struggling to reconcile his life in space with the man his family imagines him to be.
• John and Taupin invited Bush to contribute to the tribute album, and she chose "Rocket Man," one of her favorite songs. They gave her complete creative freedom, a prospect she found both exciting and daunting. She responded by taking the song somewhere its original creators never expected, blending a reggae groove with the feel of an old-fashioned sea shanty.
• Bush produced the track herself. She approached the song as a musical voyage, bringing in Northumbrian folk musician Alistair Anderson on concertina and Irish musician Davy Spillane on uilleann pipes.
  
  "Kate came up with this idea of concertina and pipes," Anderson told Uncut magazine. "She told me she was very influenced by people like Bert Lloyd and Eastern European folk music. I was from a different world to her, but she regarded everyone as interesting. She was seeing the parallel that a person's mindset taking a rocket ship to Mars wouldn't be so different to someone going off to Australia 130 years earlier, and perhaps it was a bit like an old sea song, and perhaps he would take a concertina. There's a lightness to the recording despite all the people the character's leaving behind, and this tremendous sense of forward motion, helped by the reggae section."
• Bush handled the keyboards and vocals, with Del Palmer on bass, Charlie Morgan on drums, and Alan Murphy on guitar. Murphy died before the single was released, and Bush paid tribute to him, calling him "a truly special musician and a very dear friend."
• Released on November 25, 1991, Bush's "Rocket Man" reached #12 in the UK and #2 in Australia. It also reached the Top 40 in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The B-side is her version of another Elton John song, "Candle in the Wind."
• In 2007, readers of The Observer newspaper voted "Rocket Man" the greatest cover version of all time.
• Bush and Elton John eventually recorded together on "Snowed in at Wheeler Street," a duet on her 2011 album 50 Words for Snow.