FEATURE:
They Told Me I Was Going to Lose the Fight…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights at Forty-Six: The Battle to Release an Iconic Debut Single
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ON 20th January, 1978…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978 for the Wuthering Heights single cover shoot (Bush was unhappy with the selected image so another one was chosen, delaying the single release by a couple of months)/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
a debut single was released that changed music. It introduced the world to the phenomenal Kate Bush. Even so, many knew about Wuthering Heights before it was released in 1978. It was leaked and played before the official release, so there was some awareness of this beguiling and unique song. I have written about Wuthering Heights a lot. Here, I want to discuss the battle with EMI to get it released as her debut single – one of the most important releases of her entire career. EMI's Bob Mercer wanted to release the more conventional James and the Cold Gun. Kate Bush did not feel the same. A song never released as a single, she knew that she had a more fascinating and impactful song that would be a much better introduction. I will look at the track and its background, in addition to the reason Wuthering Heights made some people reassess and more deeply examine the novel it was inspired by. The only novel from Emily Brontë, it was first published in 1847. Brontë was also born on 30th July. Bush was born in 1958; Brontë in 1818. Bush clearly felt this natural connection to the author. Someone whose life and writing somehow resonated and was similar to hers. Before going into the song and this struggle she had with EMI to get Wuthering Heights released as her debut single, let’s find out more about her magnificent and spinetingling number one debut:
“Song written by Kate Bush, released as her debut single in January 1978. She wrote the song after seeing the last ten minutes of the 1967 BBC mini-series based on the book ‘Wuthering Heights’, written by Emily Brontë. Reportedly, she wrote the song within the space of just a few hours late at night. The actual date of writing is estimated to be March 5, 1977.
Lyrically, “Wuthering Heights” uses several quotations from Catherine Earnshaw, most notably in the chorus – “Let me in! I’m so cold!” – as well as in the verses, with Catherine’s confession to her servant of “bad dreams in the night.” It is sung from Catherine’s point of view, as she pleads at Heathcliff’s window to be allowed in. This romantic scene takes a sinister turn if one has read Chapter 3 of the original book, as Catherine is in fact a ghost, calling lovingly to Heathcliff from beyond the grave. Catherine’s “icy” ghost grabs the hand of the Narrator, Mr Lockwood, through the bedroom window, asking him to let her in, so she can be forgiven by her lover Heathcliff, and freed from her own personal purgatory.
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”.
Imagine a still-teenage artist so determined to get a particular song released as a debut single. It is natural and lazy that a record label would push for a Pop-sounding and more radio-friendly song for the debut. Thinking more about chart positions and sales, their insistent would have backfired. James and the Cold Gun would likely not have gone to number one. I would have been interested in a music video, though the song is not as nuanced and standout as Wuthering Heights. Instead, following this magical discovery of the novel (via T.V. mini-series) and the way she composed the song, coupled with the vocal being recorded in a single take, Bush would have felt like it was destined for a single release! Something that could not be kept on the album alone. Maybe it would have been a single eventually though, if fortunes had been different were another song released as the debut, maybe there would not have been commercial demand for Wuthering Heights. As some see it, Bush was so determined that Wuthering Heights was being dismissed as a debut single, tempers flared and she cried. This is something that did not happen. What is clear that things were getting tense and there was almost something more explosive about to take place. Whilst in a meeting with the label and others to discuss the single and her career, a man popped his head around the door saying he loved Wuthering Heights and it should be the single. That was perfectly timed and shut down the debate! EMI backtracked and said Bush isn’t a singles artist so it wouldn’t matter. They were more worried about the album. That sounds like pouting, as they seemed pretty clear of James and the Cold Gun being the debut single. When the second single was planned, Bush won another fight – where The Man with the Child in His Eyes was favoured and won over EMI’s choice.
Even if Bush knew which song should be her debut single, there were mixed blessings when it got to number one and was successful. She had to perform the song numerous times. After a disastrous and miserable debut appearance on Top of the Pops (as a solo artist, Bush was not allowed to play with her band and had to use the studio musicians/backing; something she hated, and a big reason she did fewer Top of the Pops appearances after), it was a rocky start to her T.V. live career. Bush’s debut T.V. appearance was in Germany on 9th February, 1978. She would find herself performing on T.V. around Europe. There were interviews further afield. It was a bright and extraordinary young artist really hitting the ground running! I will come back to the fight with EMI and why it was a huge moment when Bush won and was proved right. First, an article from 2020 discussed female hysteria, melodrama, and racial complexity within Wuthering Heights. There are some interesting observations:
“There’s a delicious aspect of utter ridiculousness to the song, a melodrama as self-aware as it is sincere. I wonder if that multiplicity is what draws so many people in, while of course still scaring a few away. It mirrors Emily Brontë’s novel in this way—a book that shocked critics upon its publication, even though she wrote under a male pseudonym out of fear that audiences would judge her harshly for being female. With its unique plot structure, severe setting and tone, and unscrupulous characters, Wuthering Heights was a literary anomaly for its time.
Bush and Brontë, in their respective moments of creation, were attempting to produce and disseminate their art through apparatuses dominated by men—the publishing industry for Brontë and the music industry for Bush. Brontë was unable to lay claim to her work publicly and never saw the greater impact her book would have on the literary world, as she passed away only a year after its release. Friend and teacher Constantin Héger once described Brontë as such:
She should have been a man—a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never have given way but with life.
Despite her sharp intellect and expansive knowledge, Brontë’s gender posed a fundamental barrier to achievement and acclaim. Fast forward over a century, and Bush fought an uphill battle against male recording executives to preserve her artistic vision as a young female musician, finding vindication in the way her audience overwhelmingly embraced the effusive and gleeful strangeness of her music.
I first read the novel Wuthering Heights as a teenager, assuming that I would love it due to its status as a literary classic and all the adoring reviews I had heard over the years. Instead, the deeper I trod, the more confused and repelled I felt. I had never encountered anything quite like this book and the selfish, abrasive, malevolent characters who populated it. Some of my reaction resulted from the fact that up until that moment, I had mostly read books with at least one likeable character, retaining a solid moral center even when the universe around them was cruel or unfair. But in Brontë’s etched-out world of bleak moors and shuddering winds, characters consume the cruelty they experience and spit it back out at their loved ones and the most vulnerable people around them.
The women of Wuthering Heights are neither deified nor meant to serve as moral cautionary tales, unlike the heroines of many literary works published at the time. They take up substantial space in their caustic, expansive splendor, never close to being perfect, but always compelling in their strengths and faults. In inhabiting the narrative voice of Catherine Earnshaw—the flighty, arrogant, and tragic female protagonist of Wuthering Heights—Bush gives a platform to the remarkable heights of passion that define this character, whose internal monologue is never explored in the novel.
The Cathy that Bush brings to life in her music is possibly even more demanding and incandescent than in the source material. Interestingly enough, at the point in the narrative that the song relates to, Cathy is already dead, now a ghost tormenting her former lover. But rather than silencing her, death emboldens Cathy—in it, she gains a measure of agency and clarity of thought not present in the anguished confusion of the last years of her life. No longer bound by human constraints on behavior, both in the novel and the song she fully reveals the naked longing and emotion that she had once kept controlled in her pursuit of wealth and higher social status. After all, what use is rationality to a ghost?
Bush and Brontë both evoke women overcome with hysterical emotion, laying claim to that hysteria for their own artistic works and wrenching it from the hands of creators and critics who would use the notion to denigrate and doubt women’s abilities. I wonder if, for the both of them, there was a measure of freedom in respectively creating and identifying with the character of Cathy—a woman who is openly selfish and demanding, who refuses to suppress her desires or bend to the wills of the men around her. For these female creators who must have necessarily felt a pressure to be on their best behavior in order to navigate the patriarchal structures in their lives, I imagine there to be a kind of joy in inhabiting the character of Cathy, unmitigated passions and selfish desires and all”.
The more one reads articles and interpretations of Wuthering Heights and Kate Bush translating the novel into a song, the more one wonders why EMI were ever reluctant to release it as a single! As it turns forty-six on 20th January, we can look back all these years and how the song has taken on a life of its own. The Brontë Society objected to Wuthering Heights when it was released as a single. In years since, Bush’s single and video have been used in classrooms. More people discovering the novel because of Kate Bush. Another huge reason why Kate Bush’s fight with EMI was significant. This article looks deeply at Bush’s radical reinterpretation a classic source material. Something few artists today would imagine doing – which begs questions about modern inspiration and lyrical content:
“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.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
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?
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.
Like the novels by Rhys and Daoud, Bush’s song demonstrates how art can respond to art, and points to the ways in which crucial reevaluations of past works take place not only in scholarly articles but in one artist grappling with the erasures and silences of an earlier age. Rhys and Daoud both insist on a voice for a silenced, maligned, or dismissed colonial subject. Their aim is not to create a work that merely amends (or acts as a footnote to) the earlier text, but to produce a narrative that calls into question the primacy, and even the authority, of the earlier text”.
I often muse about Kate Bush’s career and how it would have changed and gone on a different course if a song other than Wuthering Heights was released as her debut single. James and the Cold Gun would have gone top twenty. Bush might have been able to get Wuthering Heights out as the second single. Would it have got to number one in 1979 or later in 1978?! Things would have been drastically altered. Some artists in the 1970s would not have had opportunity to decide which of their songs would be released as singles. Whilst clearly talented, a teenage Kate Bush might have been expected to trust EMI and go with their single choice. The fact Bush and her KT Bush Band performed James and the Cold Gun at pubs and venues around London shortly before she headed into the studio would have given them a sense that song was particularly important to her. That it would be a single she’d bond with. Not discounting James and the Cold Gun, Wuthering Heights was a rare and almost divine moment of synchronicity and inspiration too good to leave. That urgency needed to be realised. Perhaps the Top of the Pops debut dampened some of Bush’s enthusiasm for the song. She took it around the world. It was part of the encore for 1979’s The Tour of Life. It is also a track that is one of the most-streamed on Spotify. I think back to the stress Bush would have felt thinking Wuthering Heights would not win the fight for her debut single. When it did and it went to number one, few could ever doubt Kate Bush again! The determined and brilliant Kate (whose birth name is Catherine; the same as Wuthering Heights’ Catherine Earnshaw) stood firm. Not letting anyone deny the power of Wuthering Heights, she declared “It’s me…
I’M Cathy”.