FEATURE:
When Kate Bush Became Catherine Earnshaw
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
The Reaction to and Legacy of the Beguiling Wuthering Heights
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IT is usually around…
IN THIS PHOTO: Emerald Fennell/PHOTO CREDIT: Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP/Shutterstock
January that I focus on Kate Bush’s debut single, Wuthering Heights. I am pulling it forward because there is a new film adaptation coming up. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are going to be paired together. The Australian actors will play Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff in director Emerald Fennell's much-discussed adaptation of the classic Emily Brontë novel. The adaptation is getting a lot of mixed reaction. It is great brining the novel to the screen but, as there have been quite a few versions of the book and the definitive version is many years old, there is scepticism. I guess a modern twist or update could bring more people to Wuthering Heights. It is a novel that is still taught in schools and hugely popular. I want to talk about Kate Bush and her being inspired by the novel in 1977. The song Bush wrote around the book was a late addition to The Kick Inside. Even though the song was recorded quickly and Bush nailed her part on the first take, it might not have made it. In the sense it was written in the evening before going in to record the album, under a full moon on a midsummer’s night. Bush caught the last part of a 1967 BBC adaptation of the classic book. Starring Ian McShane as Heathcliff and Angela Scoular as Cathy, its atmospheric, haunting and strange ending captivated the teenager. Kate Bush was born Catherine Bush. Relating to another Catherine. Emily Brontë was also born on 30th July. There was connections between the author and Kate Bush. Bush could put herself in the song. Kate becoming Cathy! Producer Andrew Powell was blown away when Bush played the song for him on the piano. As Graeme Thomson writes in Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush, it is about the emotion details rather than the intellectual or overly-analytical. A song that hits you when you hear it. The connection it has!
Bush noted how this young girl/women was centre of a novel in a time (1847) when women’s roles and opinions were overlooked and seen as inferior. As we have this new film coming along, many people will ask whether Kate Bush’s song will feature. If Stranger Things catapulted Kate Bush to a new audience through this use in a powerful scene, will we get the same with Wuthering Heights?! It may be a bit on the nose including the song, though many have discussed her track in relation to the film. One of the things that defined how people perceived Kate Bush from 1978 is her vocal. This perception is was all high-pitched and girl-like. She was trying to improve her range and the high vocal for Wuthering Heights was deliberate. Embodying this spirit and ghost rather than anything with a heart and flesh. Released on 20th January, 1978, Wuthering Heights climbed to number one and announced this unique and startling musical talent. The fight to get that song released as the single is infamous. Bush was insistent that this was going to be her debut single. EMI wanted James and the Cold Gun. A more conventional and straight-forward song, you can see their reasoning. However, hit by this bolt of inspiration, Bush knew that Wuthering Heights had to be a single! Bob Mercer maintains that Bush burst into tears when things got heated. She strongly refutes it. It is clear that she was determined and strong-willed with her own music. Knowing that Wuthering Heights would translate. It was meant to go out on 4th November, 1977, however there were setbacks. Wings’ Mull of Kintyre dominated and was a massive number one at the end of the year. Also, the single cover with a photo by Gered Mankowitz was scrapped. It was a photo of Bush with her nipples showing trough a leotard.
Regardless, the delay did the single good. Two months before its release, promotional copies had been sent out to stations from EMI’s Automatic Mailing List. Eddie Puma, producer at Capital Radio, and presenter Tony Myatt did not follow EMI’s request to not play the single. They kept playing it! Thanks a lot to Graeme Thomson for that information! I love the whole gestation and life of the song. How it started outside the top forty and reached number one. Bush appeared on Top of the Pops several times. She never really enjoyed the experience. However, she performed the song live a fair few times and was asked about it. This idea Bush was hippy-like or something insignificant. Many dismissed her. However, plenty of people recognised her gifts and the wonder of Wuthering Heights. I always assumed that the white dress version of the Wuthering Heights video came first and then the red dress versions. The U.S. audiences being freaked by the wide-eyed and smoky video with the white dress. In fact, the red dress version came first. Keith MacMillan (Keef) directed both videos. The originals was shot in a day on Rockflix and was very low budget. EMI swiftly withdrew the version of Bush in a red dress on Salisbury Plain – exactly Baden's Clump, near Sidbury Hill – and it was recommissioned. The white dress version was shot in Ewart’s Studio A. The video was shot in the middle of the night. Brian Wiseman explains how they got halfway through and stopped and did something else. Wiseman would go on to direct the videos for Sat in Your Lap and Suspended in Gaffa.
In January, it will be forty-seven years since Wuthering Heights was released as a single. Her debut. This huge moment! Since 1978, Wuthering Heights has reached different generations. It remains flawless and endlessly fascinating. In May 2020, when selecting the one-hundred best U.K. singles ever, The Guardian placed Wuthering Heights fourteenth:
“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”.
Before getting to a few other features, there is one from Literary Hub published in 2019 that makes some interesting observations about Kate Bush’s interpretation of Wuthering Heights. How the song is almost like an essay or critique of the novel on how women were perceived when Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights. Such a phenomenal songwriter, Bush opened up people’s minds and attitudes. Looking at Wuthering Heights in a deeper and new way:
“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.
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”.
There is this great feature I would recommend people check out. In 2012, NME named Wuthering Heights the eleventh-best Pop song ever. It is an inescapably moving and original song that will never fade in its power. The second-most streamed song on Spotify (behind Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), it is reaching new ears by the year. More people experiencing this song for the first time. I will end by discussing the new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights and why people need to think about Kate Bush’s astonishing debut single:
“A GP’s daughter from Bexleyheath in Kent, she began playing the piano at aged 11 and composed her first song at 13. Such was her precocious, unique talent that it attracted the attention of Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour who was a friend of the Bush family. After hearing her play, he helped the teenager gain a recording contract with EMI. The deal included two years of development that included dance lessons, vocal training and rehearsal time with the band the KT Bush Band.
The initial spark of inspiration for ‘Wuthering Heights’ came when the singer was 12 and had caught the last 10 minutes of the 1970 TV version of the book as a child. She recalled:
I’d just caught the very end of the film. It was really freaky because there’s this hand coming through the window and whispering voices and I’ve always been into that sort of thing, you know, and it just hung around in my head. I had to write a song about it.
She finally put pen to paper in March of 1977, composing the song in her South London flat, under typically ‘Bushian’ conditions. She revealed: “I wrote it in my flat, sitting at the upright piano. There was a full moon and the curtains were open and every time I looked up for ideas, I looked at the moon.
Having seen the TV adaptation, she also flicked through Bronte’s classic: “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,” she admits.
The track was apparently done and dusted in ten minutes, and to Bush it seemed clear that it should be the first track to announce herself to an unsuspecting British public. But EMI did not agree. They wanted the somewhat more obvious ‘James And The Cold Gun’ to come first, but she was adamant that it should be ‘Wuthering Heights’.
When the song hit the top of the charts she became the first female UK singer to get to the position with a self-penned track. It also lead the EMI boss to buy her a Steinway piano to say sorry for doubting her first single instincts.
Despite having pursued a career defined by lyrical inventiveness (much of which has been inspired by novels) and musical risk-taking, to many Bush will eternally be defined by the willowy lady from the mountains, singing about “Cathy” and “Heathcliff”. As she disappeared from view in the mid-90s, to some tabloids Bush had become the ageless spirit hovering around the dales. Fiction is definitely stranger than the truth.
‘Wuthering Heights’ remains an astounding track. Timeless in its authentic strangeness and the way Bush exudes the glee and borderline madness of mysterious, young love. Dismissed at the time as a novelty hit, instead it would begin the story of Bush’s expectation-defying career with a brilliant bang”.
The final feature/article I will bring in is from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia. There is a lot of depth and interesting information about the song. Wuthering Heights was unlike anything around in 1978. I wonder how it would fare if it was released today. Could it ever get to number one?! I do hope that the song has a new lease of life in some form very soon. It is a masterpiece:
“Critical reception
The music magazines in 1978 had different reactions to Kate’s debut single. Record Mirror described the song as ‘B-o-r-i-n-g’. Others were a bit more positive.
Kate is a complete newcomer, is 19, was first unearthed by David Gilmour, and has spent time with mime coach to the stars Lindsay Kemp… the theatre influence comes through strongly from the cover… to every aspect of Kate’s song. The orchestration is ornate and densely packed, but never overflows its banks, Kate’s extraordinary vocals skating in and out, over and above. Reference points are tricky, but possibly a cross between Linda Lewis and MacBeth’s three withes is closest. She turns the famous examination text by Emily Brontë into glorious soap opera trauma.
Melody Maker, 1978
Kate about ‘Wuthering Heights’
When I first read Wuthering Heights I thought the story was so strong. This young girl in an era when the female role was so inferior and she was coming out with this passionate, heavy stuff. Great subject matter for a song.
I loved writing it. It was a real challenge to precis the whole mood of a book into such a short piece of prose. Also when I was a child I was always called Cathy not Kate and I just found myself able to relate to her as a character. It’s so important to put yourself in the role of the person in a song. There’s no half measures. When I sing that song I am Cathy.
(Her face collapses back into smiles.) Gosh I sound so intense. Wuthering Heights is so important to me. It had to be the single. To me it was the only one. I had to fight off a few other people’s opinions but in the end they agreed with me. I was amazed at the response though, truly overwhelmed.
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”.
On 24th September, British Vogue gave their take on the upcoming Wuthering Heights film from Emerald Fennell. There have been accusations that the film is whitewashing the book. That the casting is flawed and strange. Most articles about the film mention Kate Bush’s classic debut single. It makes me wonder if it will feature in some way:
“On 12 July, the director took to X to share an illustration of a ghostly skeleton by artist Katie Buckley. At its heart sits the title Wuthering Heights, and below it the strapline “A film by Emerald Fennell”. Above the image, it reads, “Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad,” the immortal words Heathcliff utters after the tragic death of Catherine Earnshaw.
Given her last feature, and Promising Young Woman before it, were both about obsession – the former about one student’s infatuation with another, and the latter about a woman’s single-minded determination to avenge the death of her best friend – the decision to adapt Emily Brontë’s seminal tale of doomed love, as well as the accompanying tagline, make perfect sense.
However, it did leave us with a number of questions, too. Will this be a faithful period adaptation, or a modern-day update? How will it compare to the countless other big-screen renderings of this particular story, from Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon’s 1939 version, to the 1992 film starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 reimagining with Kaya Scodelario and James Howson?
Would it be Barry Keoghan, I wondered, who’d don a waistcoat and scraggly mane to play our brooding Byronic hero? And who could possibly take the part of Cathy? Well, at least on that front, we now have some answers: on 23 September, it emerged that it was not the Irish Oscar nominee but – staggeringly – his Saltburn co-star Jacob Elordi who’d be delivering Heathcliff’s impassioned monologues, while Margot Robbie, now the world’s most ubiquitous blonde after Barbie herself, would (presumably) be going brunette to embody his tormented paramour. The latter will also be producing through her company, LuckyChap, after having backed Fennell’s last two films, too.
It’s not yet clear who else will be filling out the predictably starry ensemble (personally, I hope Carey Mulligan makes an appearance again, as she has in Fennell’s past two hits, in some bonkers and unexpected role), though we do know that Fennell will be writing and producing as well as directing, and that the film is already in pre-production ahead of a UK-based shoot in 2025. So, I say to my fellow Brontë obsessives: this is not a drill. It’s time to blast Kate Bush and dig out your own battered copy of this literary classic once again”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Margot Robbie/PHOTO CREDIT: Lachlan Bailey
Although Emerald Fennell is a Kate Bush fan, I don’t think that Wuthering Heights will feature in the film. It might seem a bit shoehorned and jarring. However, what is happening is people discussing the song. How Bush was inspired to write it after watching a 1967 BBC adaptation (I think Graeme Thomson said Bush saw a 1970 film of the novel with Timothy Dalton playing Heathcliff, so maybe Kate Bush would have to confirm exactly which version she saw). I do like how there has been a shift away from Hounds of Love and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Army Dreamers had a bit of a viral moment this year, though we do hope that Wuthering Heights gets this new focus. Maybe not as big as the Stranger Things effect. Emerald Fennell might include the song. You never know! I wanted to revisit it, as I think so many people have discovered Wuthering Heights because of Kate Bush. Can a modern film do the same thing?! I don’t think so. In 2018, Bush returned to the song and the author of the novel that inspired it. The Brontë Stones are a collection of four stones engraved with specially commissioned poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Jeanette Winterson, Kate Bush, and Jackie Kay. You can read more about Kate Bush’s 2018 contribution here.. Even if Wuthering Heights might not feature in the film of the same name, people are talking about Kate Bush’s 1978 debut single. That is a wonderful thing! Almost forty-seven years after its release, it remains a song that…
SOUNDS like nothing else!