FEATURE:
A Perfect Introduction
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
Returning to the Bedazzling Wuthering Heights
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INSPIRED by a tweet from BBC Radio’s Mark Radcliffe…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in March 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix
recently, I have been thinking about Kate Bush’s debut single, Wuthering Heights. Radcliffe has filmed a piece about that song and Kate Bush, and it will be interesting to see what the film explores. He has visited the Yorkshire moors, and I think he will discuss the song in relation to the landscape, and why the track remains so evocative and wind-swept. Based on the novel, Wuthering Heights – though Bush was inspired by a T.V. adaptation of the novel and caught the last ten minutes -, it is a spooky coincidence that Emily Brontë and Kate Bush have the same birthday (30th July). Achieving a number-one with your debut single is impressive enough, but doing so with a song that remains so singular and unusual is one reason why Wuthering Heights is so adored and studied today. From my favourite album, The Kick Inside, many people might not have been aware of the song prior to the album coming out. Imagine having heard The Man with the Child in His Eyes – the second single taken from the album – and being blown away by that (as that is track five, and Wuthering Heights is track six) and then hearing Wuthering Heights! Not only is it a strong and perfect way to end the album’s first side, but it was brave that the album’s finest song was left so late – many artists would have opened an album with a song like Wuthering Heights! I wrote about Wuthering Heights recently, but I want to expand on that feature.
Before moving on, I want to source from the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia, that provides more details about the song, in addition to Kate Bush’s tale of how she wrote one of her most-famed moments:
“The song was recorded with Andrew Powell producing. According to him, the vocal performance was done in one take, "a complete perfomance" with no overdubs. "There was no compiling," engineer Kelly said. “We started the mix at around midnight and Kate was there the whole time, encouraging us… we got on with the job and finished at about five or six that morning." The guitar solo that fades away with the track in the outro was recorded by Edinburgh musician Ian Bairnson, a session guitarist.
Originally, record company EMI's Bob Mercer had chosen another track, James And The Cold Gun as the lead single, but Kate Bush was determined that ‘Wuthering Heights’ would be her first release. She won out eventually in a surprising show of determination for a young musician against a major record company, and this would not be the only time she took a stand against them to control her career.
The release date for the single was initially scheduled to be 4 November 1977. However, Bush was unhappy with the picture being used for the single's cover and insisted it be replaced. Some copies of the single had already been sent out to radio stations, but EMI relented and put back the single's launch until the New Year. Ultimately, this proved to be a wise choice, as the earlier release would have had to compete with Wings' latest release, ‘Mull of Kintyre’, which became the biggest-selling single in UK history up to this point in December 1977.
‘Wuthering Heights’ was finally released on 20 January 1978, was immediately playlisted by Capital Radio and entered their chart at no. 39 on 27 January. It crept into the national Top 50 in week ending 11 February at No.42. The following week it rose to No.27 and Bush made her first appearance on Top of the Pops ("It was like watching myself die", recalls Bush), The song was finally added to Radio One's playlist the following week and became one of the most played records on radio. When the song reached number 1, it was the first UK number 1 written and performed by a female artist”.
“I wrote in my flat, sitting at the upright piano one night in March at about midnight. There was a full moon and the curtains were open, and every time I looked up for ideas, I looked at the moon. Actually, it came quite easily. I couldn't seem to get out of the chorus - it had a really circular feel to it, which is why it repeats. I had originally written something more complicated, but I couldn't link it up, so I kept the first bit and repeated it. I was really pleased, because it was the first song I had written for a while, as I'd been busy rehearsing with the KT Band.
I felt a particular want to write it, and had wanted to write it for quite a while. I remember my brother John talking about the story, but I couldn't relate to it enough. So I borrowed the book and read a few pages, picking out a few lines. So I actually wrote the song before I had read the book right through. The name Cathy helped, and made it easier to project my own feelings of want for someone so much that you hate them. I could understand how Cathy felt.
It's funny, but I heard a radio programme about a woman who was writing a book in Old English, and she found she was using words she didn't know, but when she looked them up she found they were correct. A similar thing happened with 'Wuthering Heights': I put lines in the song that I found in the book when I read it later.
I've never been to Wuthering Heights, the place, though I would like to, and someone sent me a photo of where it's supposed to be.
One thing that really pleases me is the amount of positive feedback I've had from the song, though I've heard that the Bronte Society think it's a disgrace. A lot of people have read the book because of the song and liked it, which I think is the best thing about it for me. I didn't know the book would be on the GCE syllabus in the year I had the hit, but lots of people have written to say how the song helped them. I'm really happy about that.
There are a couple of synchronicities involved with the song. When Emily Bronte wrote the book she was in the terminal stages of consumption, and I had a bad cold when I wrote the song. Also, when I was in Canada I found out that Lindsay Kemp, my dance teacher, was in town, only ten minutes away by car, so I went to see him. When I came back I had this urge to switch on the TV - it was about one in the morning - because I knew the film of Wuthering Heights would be on. I tuned in to a thirties gangster film, then flicked through the channels, playing channel roulette, until I found it. I came in at the moment Cathy was dying, so that's all I saw of the film. It was an amazing coincidence. Kate Bush Club Newsletter, January 1979”.
It is bittersweet that Wuthering Heights did so well. On the plus side, the song catapulted Bush and brought attention to The Kick Inside – the single and album were released about a month apart. Also, it announced this unique songwriter who instantly captivated millions. The song is one of the most-loved and popular, and chart success did give her some pull and clout – seeing as she knew that the first single had to be Wuthering Heights and was proven right! Bush performed the track several times on Top of the Pops and, as the first appearance was a nightmare – as a solo artist, she was not allowed to play with her band and had to sing to a backing track -, future slots on the show were not particularly comfortable! Also, she was parodied quite a bit by comics of the time, because the video for Wuthering Heights – lots of dramatic movements and wide-eyed looks – casts her as quite kooky and flighty. I love the video and I think Bush’s originality was unusual for people to understand, and she was a real antidote to the more basic music of the time. That sounds reductive, but I think, as Punk was dominant, anything that contrasted that so boldly and obviously was going to find itself mocked. Wuthering Heights has endured longer than most of the Punk songs of the time, and it is a track that is almost impossible to equal.
Every year, as I have said before, there is an event called The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever, where fans around the world don a red dress (that Bush wore in the U.S. version of the song) and celebrate its famous routine. There is so much to unpackage and celebrate when we think about Bush’s Wuthering Heights. As a vocal performance, it is so spectral and striking! I think a lot of critics felt that her voice was hard to appreciate, and others were quite unkind. It was an effect Bush was lending to give the song the drama and power it required, and one feels they are listening to the possessed Catherine Earnshaw (the fact that Brontë’s heroine and Bush were both called Catherine is another great coincidence) calling out to Heathcliff. The video, in spite of some who poke fun at it, is amazingly moving and hypnotic. The video’s routine, choregraphed by Robin Kovac, brings the song to life, and it actually goes a long way to drawing one into the novel itself. The composition is gorgeous and tender, and the opening piano notes alone are enough to cause one to shiver. What remains the most amazing facet of Wuthering Heights is how it connects with the book and the fact that a new, teenage artist would choose a rather rare source of inspiration for her debut single!
In this article from Literary Hub from last year, we learn more about how she took from the text and you get this sort of absorption:
“But as Bush borrowed from the dialogue, she made a crucial transposition in the point of view. When she sings, “You had a temper, like my jealousy / too hot too greedy,” the my refers to Cathy and the you to Heathcliff, the novel’s brooding protagonist/antagonist/antihero/villain (depending on your point of view). But the novel itself never inhabits Cathy’s consciousness: she is seen and heard, her rages and threats vividly reported, but everything we know about her comes from either Nelly Dean, a longtime housekeeper for the Earnshaw and Linton families, or through Lockwood, a hapless visitor to the Yorkshire moorlands and the principle first-person narrator of the novel (most of the novel consists of Nelly’s quoted speech to Lockwood, who is eager to hear the complete history of the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights and its neighboring property, Thrushcross Grange). Although the novel spans decades and multiple generations of Earnshaws and Lintons, Kate Bush’s shift into Cathy’s point of view centers the song entirely on Cathy and Heathcliff—which is fittingly how Cathy, in the novel, views the world. She and Heathcliff share one soul, she claims; everyone else, including her husband Edgar, is little more than scenery.
With this choice, Bush gives voice to a female character who—though an electric presence in the novel—is denied the agency of self-narrating, or even of being narrated through a close third person. Nelly may be presented to us by Lockwood as a simple, transparently objective narrator, but the novel is littered with moments where Nelly complicates the lives of those around her by revealing or concealing what she knows. Bush’s musical interpretation of the novel makes visible the questions that surround point of view: who does the telling? What is their agenda? Who can we really trust?
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush shot 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
By opening up these questions, the song situates itself in the tradition of other so-called “parallel texts” that respond to or reinvent earlier, often canonical works of literature: think Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, or Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation and Albert Camus’s The Stranger. In each pairing of “parallel” and “source” text, the later work privileges characters narrated about, but never before narrated from within”.
It is interesting that there is a further connection between Kate Bush and Brontë in terms of entering and trying to succeed in a very male-dominated landscape. Though they are polls apart in many respects, Bush and Brontë are both groundbreaking and pioneering. The article talks about similarities between author and songwriter:
It was unthinkable at the time that young, unmarried women would circulate their names so freely on books that portrayed the love between a wealthy man and his hired governess, or the flare-ups of passion and cruelty that marked the relationship of Cathy and Heathcliff. The sisters also knew that women authors were routinely dismissed or pilloried by the all-male fraternity of critics, and they hoped that the Bell names would offer protection and a fair shake from reviewers. Still, one early review blasted the incidents in Wuthering Heights for being “too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive,” while even a more positive review called it “a strange book. It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable.” Two years after Emily’s death in 1848, an edition of Wuthering Heights was published under her own name, with a preface and biographical note by Charlotte defending her sister’s moral character against the aspersions cast on her.
Fast forward to the late 1970’s and Kate Bush finds herself a young female artist in a culture industry still dominated by men. Her record company, EMI, pushed for another song, “James and the Cold Gun,” to be her first single, but Bush insisted that her debut had to be “Wuthering Heights.” After winning that argument, she delayed the release of the single in a dispute over the cover art, and later referred to herself as “the shyest megalomaniac you’ll ever meet.” When the single was finally released in early 1978, it needed only a few weeks and a performance by Bush on Top of the Pops to claim the #1 spot on the UK charts, displacing ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me.” Only 19, Bush became the first female singer to make it to #1 with a song that she herself had written. At a time when women were viewed primarily as interpreters of others’ lyrics—as instruments rather than creators—Kate Bush upended the narrative with her first piercing notes. She would narrate from within, and in her own words”.
I look forward to seeing what Mark Radcliffe produces for his Kate Bush show, as I think Wuthering Heights as a track is an intriguing, attention-worthy and interesting as any single Kate Bush album. Forty-two years after it was released and climbed to number-one, the song (and video) still sounds like nothing in the world! It is a magnificent and staggering song and, when you think about it, not a bad way…
TO start your career!