FEATURE:
Up on Those Wiley and Windy Moors
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights at Forty-Five
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I have more to say about…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
the masterful and iconic debut single from Kate Bush, Wuthering Heights. The song turns forty-five on 20th January. Ahead of that, I am writing pieces that explore the song in different ways. The first feature is a more general look at why Bush wrote the song and the impact it has. Before continuing on, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia has collated interviews where Bush discussed the song and its inception:
“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”.
Until this year – when Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) reached the top of the chart – Wuthering Heights was her only number one single. In 2020, The Guardian ranked it the fourteenth-best U.K. number one single ever:
“Had the teenaged Kate Bush listened to the wishes of her record label, Wuthering Heights would not have been her debut single. EMI preferred the pop-stomp of James and the Cold Gun to the eerie, circular song that introduced her to the world. But by her late teens, Bush clearly knew herself and wisely pushed for Wuthering Heights instead. When it saw the light of day, in early 1978, it was a hit. By March that year, it had become a No 1 hit, the first single written and recorded by a female artist to top the British charts. It replaced Abba’s Take A Chance on Me, and remained at the top for a month.
It is sometimes worth remembering the incredible fact that Bush wrote Wuthering Heights when she was 18 years old, though perhaps its keen ear for adolescent angst is part of what makes it so special. She had been inspired by an old television adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel, which led her to seek out the book. Written from the perspective of the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw, a young woman pleading with the brutal Heathcliff, whom she loves and hates, to let her soul into the house, the song is a gothic melodrama that builds until it is thick with intensity. It is a magnificent achievement, though the writing of it was seemingly painless. “Actually, it came quite easily,” Bush recalled later, telling the story of a single moonlit night at the piano. The vocal was said to have been recorded in a single take. Bush found out that she and Brontë shared a birthday, and the fates were aligned.
The casual story of its creation belies the odd unwieldiness of the song itself. The piano gently heralds the arrival of this haunted tale of lost love and longing, then that tight, high melody reels you in. It loops and lilts, ascending, descending, as Bush’s vocal urges the story on, like Catherine striding across the moors. In the BBC’s 2014 documentary The Kate Bush Story, artist after artist recalls hearing it on the radio for the first time, thinking some variation of: what on earth was that? “You can hear one note of a Kate Bush song or one note of her voice and know what it is,” said Annie Clark, AKA St Vincent, and it has been that way from the start.
The spectacle of Bush as a performer inspired similarly wowed and unsettled reactions. She made two videos for the song, and appeared on Top of the Pops with it five times in 1978, cementing her public image as an ethereal spirit, embodying the essence of Cathy through a combination of wide eyes, floaty fabrics and wild choreography, still fondly mimicked and parodied today. Wuthering Heights turned Bush into a pop star, the rules of which she continues to bend to her own will: her individuality was set in stone from the very beginning”.
Wuthering Heights still sounds like nothing else in Kate Bush’s catalogue. Such a unique and spellbinding song, there are a number of reasons why it resonates and endures. Bush’s heightened vocal (so that she could embody Catherine Earnshaw and this ghostly figure) and the fact she recorded the vocal in a single take gives it this that extra bit of urgency and magic. It is a wonderful single that introduced so many people to Kate Bush. I was a small child when I first saw the video for Wuthering Heights. It was a very special moment that opened my eyes in so many ways. As it turns forty-five on 20th January, this is the first part of a small run of features that I will do about the amazing Wuthering Heights. I have bene rewatching the music videos (the U.K. and U.S. versions), the live performances of Wuthering Heights, in addition to new vocal; Bush recorded in 1986. It is a song that, in each performance and iteration, is like nothing else! A remarkable song and one of the most impressive debuts of all time, I wonder how many critics of Kate Bush thought we would be talking about her forty-five years after her debut single was released. One of the most enduring and phenomenal artists ever, Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece! I hope, on its forty-fifth anniversary, Kate Bush debut single reaches…
A whole new generation.