The song that took pop to new Heights
Forty years ago tomorrow, Wuthering Heights – by an unknown 19-year-old called Kate Bush – was released.
At around midnight on a clear London night in the spring of 1977, an 18-yearold Kate Bush sat at an upright piano in her flat in Wickham Road, Brockley, and wrote Wuthering Heights. Inspired by the novel by Emily Brontë, with whom Bush realised she shared a birthday, the song took just a few hours to craft. “There was a full moon, the curtains were open and it came quite easily,” Bush told her fan club in 1979.
But despite the song’s easy creation, no one, Bush included, could have predicted the impact that Wuthering
Heights, her debut single, would have on popular culture. Released 40 years ago tomorrow, during an era when disco and punk reigned, it knocked Abba’s Take a Chance on Me off the number one slot and turned Bush into a global star.
With its high-octave vocals, ghostly piano and gothic and darkly romantic subject matter, it’s sung from the point of view of a deceased Cathy Earnshaw, yearning for Heathcliff from beyond the grave, and was unlike anything many listeners had heard before. Yet it has beguiled generations of pop fans and performers ever since.
Bush’s delivery, her language and her use of dance and mime heralded a new epoch in pop music, and the song’s direct influence can be seen on everyone from Björk, Tori
Amos and PJ Harvey to Florence + The Machine, Goldfrapp and St Vincent.
“She is part of our DNA now,” says the singer Beth Orton, a fan from the start. “It is not easy to imagine where her inspiration begins and ends.” Wuthering Heights
blazed a trail in another way too. Despite the singles chart having run for 25 years by 1978, Bush was the first female artist to reach number one in the UK with a self-penned song.
Even today, people involved in the song’s recording remember how different it sounded. “I’d certainly not heard anything like it in the pop world,” says Andrew Powell, the classically trained musician who produced, arranged and played bass on Wuthering Heights.
“The whole tessitura [vocal pitch] was unusual to say the least.”
So just what was it about this song by a middle-class singer from the Kent-london fringes that broke the mould? What clues did Wuthering
Heights give us about the extraordinary career that would so enthral music lovers for the next 40 years?
Bush started playing the piano and writing songs at 11. In 1972, Ricky Hopper, a family friend with music industry connections, heard a promising demo tape and, after failing to convince record companies to sign Bush, contacted an old mate from Cambridge, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. Keen on Bush’s sound, Gilmour paid for a professional recording to be made and suggested that Powell, who had by then arranged an album for British prog rockers The Alan Parsons Project, oversaw it.
Powell recalls Bush being “very shy, very taciturn” on their first meeting in 1975 but his reaction to her music was simply “wow”. The three-song recording, which included The Man with the Child in His Eyes, landed Bush a record deal with EMI. But for two years nothing happened, partly because EMI seemed unsure of how best to bottle Bush’s unique talent – at that point she was still at school. So she spent time writing songs, playing pub gigs and studying mime and dance under teachers including Lindsay Kemp, who taught David Bowie. In 1977, with Powell again at the helm, Bush headed into the studio to cut her debut album, The
Kick Inside. It was only days before recording commenced that she unveiled Wuthering Heights.
“Kate came round to my flat and said ‘I’ve got another song’,” Powell says. “So she sat down at the piano and played Wuthering Heights and said, ‘Do you think that might be all right to go on the album?’. I said, ‘Um, yes!’”
The song was already the finished article, Powell says. He was immediately struck by its dramatic atmosphere and other-worldly vocals. So complete was it that “in a strange sort of way she’d already written the orchestra parts as, to my mind, they were implicit in what was there”.
The high voice was her “in character” as Cathy, he says: “Everything about the voice was totally original: original conception, original performance.” Explaining the vocals to Melody Maker in 1978, Bush said: “I just opened my mouth and it came out.”
And if Bush, still a teenager, was unfazed by playing with a new band assembled by Powell for the studio (two members from the band Cockney Rebel and two from Pilot), the same could not be said for EMI when it came to plotting the next move. The label wanted James and the Cold Gun, the most traditional rock track on The Kick Inside, to be her first single. But, displaying the determination that has characterised her career, Bush demanded it be Wuthering Heights. She won. “I felt that to actually get your name anywhere, you’ve got to do something unusual,” she later explained. She also forced EMI to delay its release for two months so the sleeve photo could be changed from her in a revealing pink top to a more arty shot of her hanging from an Asian kite.
Wuthering Heights charted at number 42 in February 1978 and hit number one on March 11, staying there for a month. Powell believes the song resonated because, for all its eccentricity, people responded to its honesty. “It was a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t an artificial construct created by six songwriters coming together and saying ‘This chord and that bridge work well together’. This was her expression. It came genuinely from her.”
But it was Bush’s first live appearance on Top of the Pops that February that seared her into the nation’s consciousness. Her voice, sensual dancing, flailing arms and intense eye contact with the camera became a national “water cooler” moment.
Orton, then aged seven, remembers it vividly. “Everyone was doing impressions of her in the playground: the arms, the theatre of it and the humour as well. It was like ‘Who is this extraordinary woman?’” she says.
Bush hated that first performance. “It was like watching myself die,” she has said. But it established her, turning her into a reluctant sex symbol in the process. However, it also planted a misleading seed in the public’s mind: that Bush was an ethereal singer, a musical will-o’-the-wisp. The truth was that, despite her sound, she was in thrall to punk.
In 1978, Bush cited Patti Smith, Johnny Rotten and The Stranglers as major influences. Good music, she said, “is like an interrogation, it really puts you up against the wall, and that’s what I want to do. I’d like my music to intrude. I think that anything you do that you believe in, you should club people over the head with it. Not many females succeed with that. Patti Smith does.”
Orton says that by being fearless and “not answering to anyone”, Bush embodied the attitude, if not the sound, of punk. In this sense, the softness of Wuthering Heights was a red herring.
“Everyone said ‘Ooh isn’t she ‘crazy’’, but no, she was really profoundly strong. Anyone who can hold that energy has to be incredibly focused. She’s got a punk spirit. It takes incredible strength to hold your own, especially at that time, as a woman who looks like her, writes like her and sounds like her,” Orton says.
Paranoid about being labelled, Bush strove to keep changing after Wuthering Heights. She said she wanted people to “chase after her”, to find out what she’d do next. “If I really wanted to, I could write a song that would be similar to Wuthering Heights. But I don’t want to. What’s the point?” she said in 1978.
This explains why over 40 years, it’s been impossible to anticipate her next move. She’s constantly created extraordinary musical netherworlds that have, in turns, taken in mainstream pop, Philip Glass-like minimalism and Balearic house, to name just three. To this day, Bush remains one of pop’s last great eccentrics. Her sold-out and critically lauded run of 22 shows at Hammersmith Apollo in 2014 showed what a force she remains.
But it was the uniqueness of Wuthering Heights that gave her this licence to experiment. Its release announced the arrival of an honest, unusual and fearless performer, rather than the arrival of a singer of piano ballads based on Victorian gothic literature. As all truly great performers would, Bush used her unforgettable and idiosyncratic debut as a springboard rather than a template. And it is sadly unimaginable, in our more homogenised pop climate, with its fragmented listening patterns and lack of must-see TV music shows, that a song such as Wuthering Heights would have such a national impact if released today.