FEATURE:
I’ve Come Home
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights at Forty-Seven
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LET’S start out…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
with some background behind the writing of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. There is some mystery around the date of its creation. Bush wrote it around midnight when there was a full moon in March of 1977. Many say the date is 5th March, 1977. It was a song that almost did not make it onto her debut album, The Kick Inside. The last song written for that album, Wuthering Heights reached number one. Bush became the first female artist to achieve a U.K. number one with a fully self-written song. Bush got inspiration to write her debut single having watched the final ten minutes of a 1967 BBC miniseries adaptation of Wuthering Heights. I have seen that adaptation and it seems like maybe Bush caught the last fifteen or twenty minutes. A powerful scene where the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw Linton appears at the window as this ghost. Filmmaker Emerald Fennell is adapting Wuthering Heights for a new film out this year. Although the casting has raised eyebrows, it is another chance for people to discover the novel. I hope people do go to the source. The only novel written by Emily Brontë, it was published in 1847. One-hundred-and-thirty years later, Bush was inspired to write a song based on the novel. Although she didn’t read the book until a while after the single was released, it is incredible that this amazing and iconic artist would launch into the world with a song that was so original and unusual. I will end by writing as to why people need to read Wuthering Heights and how important that source is. I want to bring in a few features about Wuthering Heights. The first is from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia:
“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”.
Kate performed ‘Wuthering Heights’ numerous times in TV programmes.
9 February 1978: Bio’s Bahnhof (Germany)
[unknown date] 1978: Magpie
16 February 1978: Top of the Pops
2 March 1978: Top of the Pops
23 March 1978: Top of the Pops
25 March 1978: The Late Late Show
25 March 1978: Toppop (Netherlands)
7 May 1978: Rendez-vous Du Dimanche (France)
12 May 1978: Efteling TV special (Netherlands)
19 May 1978: Szene (Germany)
9 September 1978: Festivalbar (Italy)
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”.
In 2015, Uncut published a feature around the making of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. Some words from those who recall how the song came together and why it is resonant. Forty-seven years after its release, this song still creates shivers. It is a remarkable debut single that catapulted Kate Bush to the forefront. She was an instant star:
“The fact that Bush shared her childhood name (Catherine) with Earnshaw, and a birthday (July 30) with Bronte, fostered a sense of cosmic kinship with the subject of “Wuthering Heights”, a bond acted out when she recorded the song with members of the Alan Parsons Project. “She seemed to adopt different personas when she was singing,” recalls guitarist Ian Bairnson. “Suddenly there was another person there.”
Aided by a wildly eccentric video and some choice publicity photos, “Wuthering Heights” was instantly impactful, and later spoofed by everyone from Pamela Stephenson to Alan Partridge. These days Bush may regard its unbridled romanticism with mixed feelings (it was nowhere to be heard in Before The Dawn), but it remains one of music’s boldest opening statements of artistic intent, and an unforgettable exploration of obsessive love, supernatural imagining and powerful femininity.
“ANDREW POWELL (Producer, Arranger, Bass): In 1975 I got a call from David Gilmour, saying he’d got this artist and he just thought she was something really special. This was substantially prior to Kate signing to EMI. Initially he said he was going to produce her, but in the end Dave put up money for some sessions. These were really superior demos, and I ended up producing them, including “The Man With The Child In His Eyes”. A couple of years later I went in to do the album. She had so many songs. I’ve still got some of the cassettes. I must have 100 songs here, still, written pre-The Kick Inside.
BRIAN BATH (Guitarist in KT Bush Band): She wrote “Wuthering Heights” at her flat at Wickham Road in Brockley when she was living with [KT Bush Band bassist] Del Palmer there. At the time [their relationship] was all a bit hush-hush, a bit keep it careful.
POWELL: My memory is that “Wuthering Heights” was written very close to us going into the studio. I think it was only a matter of a few days before. Kate came around to where I was living and said, “What about this one?” She sat down at my piano and out it came. It was obvious to me immediately that it was something extraordinary.
DAVID PATON (12-string guitar): Andrew gave us a brief outline as to what Kate was all about, Dave Gilmour nurturing her and all that. He said, “She’s very young but EMI are really excited about her, she’s really special.” I remember him saying the music was a bit wild, a bit wacky even. We arrived at the studio, Kate introduced herself, and Andrew just said, “Sit down and play them the song,” and that’s how it was done. She sat down at the piano, said, “It goes like this,” and just played. We were all gathered around the piano with our jaws dropped, because it was a stunning performance. Faultless, absolutely faultless, and she could do that time and time again. It sounded fantastic, there was just a great vibe in the studio.
IAN BAIRNSON (Guitar): She sat and played the piano and sang the guide vocal. We wrapped ourselves around her, looking for ways to embellish it or give it direction. For us it was a very refreshing thing, because it was wide open.
PATON: Talking about Cathy and Heathcliff was so clever. I didn’t like to ask her, “What’s this song really about?” That book must have had a huge impact on her to influence her in that way, but she kept her vision to herself. A lot of artists you work with you usually find that they’re besotted with themselves – like Freddie Mercury, all he could do was talk about himself all the time. She wasn’t like that at all. She didn’t say, ‘”I want to do this and that, me, me, me, me.” She wasn’t that kind of person at all and that in itself was very refreshing.
BAIRNSON: I didn’t pay a lot of notice to the lyrics. It was only about a year ago when I read the lyrics and appreciated them so much more.
PATON: Her influences were pretty unique, pretty stylised. And that high–pitched voice. It wasn’t until I was listening to “Wuthering Heights” on the radio that I really realised, Woah, that’s really high pitched! When she sat and sang live for us I didn’t really notice anything unusual about it, I just felt her style was very unique.
POWELL: I loved it, I was very much in favour of it. She was doing some very interesting things with her voice. She was experimenting more and more in all sorts of directions – vocally, lyrically and musically.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
GERED MANKOWITZ (Photographer): I took the infamous ‘leotard’ photo in my Great Windmill Street studio in Soho in early 1978. I was doing a lot of work for EMI, and they called me and said, “We’ve got this extraordinary young woman called Kate Bush, she sounds like nobody else, she’s wonderful to look at, but we don’t know what to do with her. We need some photographs, we need an image.” I always found the clothes that dancers used during rehearsals a very attractive look, and I thought it was a natural fit for Kate because she was so into dance and movement. I simply suggested we got leotards and woollen working socks and all that gear, and they put it to her and she seemed to like it. When the pictures were processed, the advertising agency EMI had employed to promote “Wuthering Heights” came up with the campaign of putting the posters on buses, and selected the one in the pink leotard – famously showing her nipples – and the rest is history. She certainly wasn’t uncomfortable with it. She was perfectly aware of how she looked, because she had spent two hours in the dressing room during the shoot. It was her choice, done with her full participation and knowledge. She was very comfortable with her body. The pictures were a huge commercial success and I think they had a great deal to do with putting Kate on the map.
KELLY: I can remember saying to Kate, “You’re going to be so famous you’re not going to be able to walk down the street.” I said that to her after the first week of recording, though she wouldn’t have believed it.
POWELL: The unusualness was key, this strange girl. As soon as she did “Wuthering Heights” on Top Of The Tops, that made a difference, too, because it wasn’t a conventional performance.
BAIRNSON: It was quite a shock when I saw her first on Top Of The Pops, because the Kate that we knew in the studio and the one that turned up on TV was a completely different persona.
BATH: She was just a bag of nerves her first time on Top Of The Pops. Unfortunately it’s not a great performance. It wasn’t ideal. The KT Bush Band all went along expecting to play, and at the BBC they said, “Oh no, we use our own musicians.” We were all upset not to be included in it, and so was she. All we could do was stand in front of her and say, “Come on Kate, go for it.” But she was very nervous. I think if we had been on stage with her it would have been better, but it didn’t matter. The song was already massive by then. I think the video helped”.
There are a couple of other features that I want to introduce. Dreams of Orgonon wrote a wonderful feature about Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. It was so different to everything that was around at the time. Released on 20th January, 1978, it is amazing that the public connected with the song and made it a success. Bush was right to fight for this song. She instinctively knew that Wuthering Heights would be taken to heart:
“In accordance with this liberty, Bush carries off “Wuthering Heights” with such ease. Her singing is offbeat and non-conventional but blatantly works. She phrases her lyrics with dramatic pauses and breaks in odd gaps. Her emphasis on “you had a temper” followed by the rapid concession of “like my jealousy” is terribly in character for Cathy. She knows how to be coy and how to express fear (“turn down that road in the night” sounds genuinely panicked, as if she’s ready to lunge headfirst through Heathcliff’s window.) These turns would sound jarring from any other singer (covers struggle with the song’s tonal shifts), but Bush anchors it all with a mercurial gravity that takes the material dead seriously. Who else would handle placing the first syllable of “Heathcliff” in the pre-chorus and using the second to land the chorus this well?
Bush has total command of the song’s melody. “Wuthering Heights” has a concise structure of intro/verse/pre-chorus/chorus/verse/pre-chorus/chorus/bridge/chorus/outro which keeps the song moving and indulges in its pleasures without overstaying its welcome. The song appears to begin in A major but quickly reveals itself to be in F sharp minor, a conspicuous choice of key change signaled by the two keys’ use of three sharps, creating a fascinating mix of tension and uplift. As Cathy experiences her “bad dreams in the night,” the song creeps into B flat minor, before explosively modulating into D flat major for the chorus. While these key changes dazzle, the time signature is just as malleable. The first verse moves forward in 4/4 while the pre-chorus dips into 2/4, before the chorus pulls a series of time signature shifts from 4/4 (“it’s me, Cathy”) to 3/4 (“I’m so cold”) down to 2/4 (“let me in-a your window”) before settling on 3/4 for “window.” The second verse then slows down to 2/4, the time signature of the pre-chorus which is retained for the bridge. The chorus repeats and the outro carries on in 4/4, led by Iain Bairnson’s legendary guitar solo. There’s not a bum note in “Wuthering Heights.” As a song, it’s a masterpiece.
To sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee
And one can’t imagine a more fitting visual rendering of “Wuthering Heights” than the music videos produced for it. The first video directed by Nick Abson filmed on location at Salisbury Plain is probably more iconic as it’s the more literal video. Bush’s red dress and the use of an actual moor has to many people become the definitive image for Wuthering Heights as well as “Wuthering Heights.” The second video shot by Bush mainstay Keef Macmillan is perhaps more in tune with the atmosphere of the song, with its black room and echo-visual-effect placed on a glowing Bush, but it’s stodgier and less satisfying. But perhaps even more iconic than either video is the dance. Bush had been learning dance from legendary mime Lindsay Kemp for a time, and it shows. Bush’s choreography is less classical and more representative — she’s intent on capturing a character. “When I needed to possess you” is expressed poignantly by early Bush’s signature glance directly into the camera, while she directly holds her hands out for the pre-chorus. The precise spinning of “Heathcliff, it’s me, Cathy” is, of course, the highlight, right next to the farewell wave of the outro. “Wuthering Heights” is not only sung but danced.
The solitary neighbour
The spectacle of a 19-year-old auteur pulling this off was astonishing to record label EMI. Indeed it seems like they didn’t realize they had a hit on their hands. Executive Bob Mercer wanted “James and the Cold Gun” for lead single on The Kick Inside, but Bush was tearfully resolute on making “Wuthering Heights” her thesis statement. She got her wish, and handled the market better than the experts did. EMI did, however, make the wise decision to not bill their new star right before Christmas (and rightfully so — Paul McCartney and Wings were hijacking the charts with “Mull of Kintyre,” the bestselling single in UK history at that time). Unfortunately for EMI (or perhaps rather fortunately), copies of the single had been sent out prior to the delay, and radio stations loved “Wuthering Heights” enough to play it prior to its release. The ghost was making its way into audience’s ears.
And then it exploded. “Wuthering Heights” debuted on the 20th of January 1978, lingering for a month before moving comfortably into the Top 40 on the 14th of February. Two days later Bush was on Top of the Pops, making an unprepared performance of the song and looking appropriately ready for death. But the appearance caught enough people’s attention that by the 21st “Wuthering Heights” was at #13 on the charts. As Bush got more press attention and did scads of interviews, the song rose to #5 on the 28th. On the 2nd of March, the Macmillan video was showed on Top of the Pops and insured that “Wuthering Heights” wasn’t going away. Finally, on the 7th of March, Kate Bush’s debut single, recorded and released when she was 19, topped the charts, less than two months after its release. EMI were appropriately gracious, holding a champagne reception for Bush and giving her dinner in Paris. To celebrate, Bush used some of her royalties to buy a £7000 Steinway piano. Her success made her confident she wouldn’t stop there.
And she didn’t. The Kick Inside peaked on the albums charts at #3. In the same year, Bush would release her second album and begin planning her one and only concert tour. This was the most promising start to a career Bush could have asked for, and she wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. In 1986, she cut a new vocal for the song to appear as the opening track of her compilation The Whole Story. Yet the story of “Wuthering Heights” had a life beyond that.
In 2018, Kate Bush made a rare public appearance to pay tribute to her old muse, Emily Brontë. As part of the Bradford Literature Festival, Bush was one of numerous writers to write a poem set in stone in Brontë’s honor:
She stands outside
A book in her hands
“Her name is Cathy,” she says
“I have carried her so far, so far
Along the unmarked road from our graves
I cannot reach this window
Open it, I pray.”
But his window is a door to a lonely world
That longs to play.
Ah, Emily. Come in, come in and stay.”
Perhaps the years has shifted Kate Bush’s perspective on Cathy and Heathcliff. But her respect for Emily Brontë and her creation has never gone. “Cathy will live on as a force. I was lucky she stopped in me long enough to write a song,” Bush mused in a 1980 book of sheet music. The ghost of Cathy hasn’t stopped haunting Kate Bush. She gave Bush a career. And Bush hasn’t left us alone either. May she haunt us for years to come”.
In many ways, Kate Bush brought Wuthering Heights to life. Made it more accessible to people. How the song is almost a lesson. Together with the extraordinary videos for the song – the first video of her in the red dress or the white dress version that followed -, this incredible novel was given this extraordinary and unforgettable interpretation. This feature from 2019 is must-read. Even though I have featured this article before, I wanted bring it in again:
“I’m not alone in hearing echoes of Kate Bush’s voice echoing across the culture. Though she has always been much better known in the UK, her American fans make up in ardor what they lack in numbers. To celebrate the November release of a career-spanning Rhino Records boxed set, Margaret Talbot unpacked her decades-long connection to the songs of Kate Bush, whom she identifies as a forerunner to Perfume Genius, St. Vincent, and Mitski. Earlier in the year, Wesley Morris lovingly deconstructed the use of “Running Up That Hill” in the FX series Pose.
So if a consideration of Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” briefly leads the class away from discussions of the uncanny in Wuthering Heights or the othering of Heathcliff or the tricks that Brontë plays with the reader’s complicity, the song is well positioned to open up a host of other, equally valuable, conversations that have nothing to do with my inclination toward post-punk British music. A close look at the video puts us only a cartwheel away from conversations about art, where it comes from, who it ignores, and who gets to make it.
According to the lore that surrounds the song, Kate Bush’s first encounter with Wuthering Heights came in 1977 when she caught the closing minutes of the BBC miniseries. She wrote the song in a single night, mining lyrics directly from the dialogue of Catherine Earnshaw Linton, one of the star-crossed lovers at the heart of the novel.
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?
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.
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.
Kate Bush may not have been aiming to supplant Emily Brontë, but just as the song itself points to issues within the novel, Bush’s role as its creator exposes the straitened public personae of the Brontë sisters in 1840s England. Remember that the Brontës—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—published their own work under vaguely male pseudonyms: their first joint publication, in 1846, was The Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Jane Eyre appeared a year later, attributed to Currer Bell, and a year after that Ellis Bell’s name appeared on the title page of Wuthering Heights.
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.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in March 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix
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.
The song’s connections to debates about cultural literacy, art-as-critique, and the fraught space of the female artist are enough to earn the video its place in the classroom. But I also count on “Wuthering Heights” to speak directly to my students about some of life’s other, bigger questions. My students, like teenagers everywhere, often wonder when their real lives will begin: when their ideas will matter to the wider world; when the art they make will feel like more than another assignment to be graded. But if high school students campaigning across the country against gun violence can illustrate the political power of the young, then Kate Bush argues that your artistic impulses also matter, that they’re valid, and that there’s no reason to wait.
And, it’s important to add, Kate Bush doesn’t care if you’re laughing. Because she is all-in, all the time. To watch the “Wuthering Heights” video is to see an artist consumed by a sense of personal vision. She isn’t aiming for the mainstream. She’s singing about a 19th-century novel known to most of her peers from their A-Levels cram sessions. Her voice soars and rumbles, and her dancing is a mix of pirouettes, leaps, and contortions. She even mimes sleepwalking. The video also uses every trick in the 1970’s A/V club handbook: gauzy filters, freeze frames, lighting gels, multiple exposures, a fog machine. It’s completely over the top, but Bush seems to know that holding back or winking at the camera will break the spell and cause the entire project to collapse into a cheap parody. If nothing else, Kate Bush is authentically herself”.
Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights has this strong legacy. Each year, there is The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever. It is an event held at locations around the world where participants recreate the music video (of her in the red dress). Last year’s event took place in Margate on 28th July. In 2018, Kate Bush paid tribute to the Brontë sisters in a new memorial on the Yorkshire Moors on the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth. In 2013, three-hundred Kates gathered in a park in Brighton to break the record for most lookalikes in one place at one time. Steve Coogan performed Wuthering Heights as part of a medley sung by Alan Partridge for his stage show (he did it again for Comic Relief in 1999). Kate Bush popped out for the evening and caught the final performance of Coogan’s run and told him after the show that “it was nice to hear those songs again”. Noel Fielding danced to the song in 2011 for Let's Dance for Comic Relief. Bush sent him a message wishing him good luck. With the Emerald Fennell film out soon, I do hope that many people read Emily Brontë’s novelistic masterpiece. I am reading it at the moment. Whilst Kate Bush was inspired by the final parts of a 1967 BBC adaptation, she did read the novel and loved it. Wuthering Heights is fascinating. Forty-seven years after it was released as a single, I would urge people to read the novel. It is beautifully written and endlessly fascinating. You quickly become invested in this story of destructive power of love, revenge, and obsession. We follow the passionate love between Catherine Earnshaw (Linton) and Heathcliff, a poor orphan taken in by Catherine's father. You can read a fascinating summary here. I would suggest you invest in the novel as, in some ways, it brings you closer to Kate Bush’s masterpiece song. I imagine Bush reading Wuthering Heights for the first time and her reactions. How stirring it must have been. When thinking about the song, I wonder what it would have been like hearing it for the first time. The strangeness, beauty and originality of the song. It endures to this very day. Wuthering Heights remains one of the greatest and most important debut singles…
EVER released.