Thinking about that line in Simon Reynolds' Kate Bush piece about her not quite being cool...

That's how I remember it, although I'm roughly a year younger than KB's recording career so my impressions are from the late 80s(?)/early 90s. And therefore essentially without authority. But I remember that KB seemed to be Of The 80s in a way that made her popular apparently only with dweeby French language assistants. There was a point where a terrible UK punk-metal band covered Heathcliff, and it was definitely covered in the weeklies as a transgressive, cool-risking maneuver. Not Therapy?, someone even greyer and gristlier.

Theories – because KB was associated with/championed by Dave Gilmour, which post-Pistols had a similar dynamic to being someone your dad likes on Jools Holland? Because having been signed with a major label so young there was a sense of dues unpaid? That was held against Pixies I think, who signed a deal and hit the college radio playlists without having Got In The Van and done their time in the post-punk trenches like so many other bands had who knitted together the scene bookended by The Ramones at one end and Nirvana at the other. Otherwise, maybe just a snowball groupthink effect from some damning early screed tossed off on a speed comedown by someone at MM/NME.