STRANGER THINGS HAVE HAPPENED
How the hit TV series also made 2022 Kate Bush’s biggest year.
“I thought the track would get some attention”, Kate Bush told Emma Barnett on Woman’s Hour in June this year, talking about Running Up That Hill, “but I never imagined it would be anything like this. It’s so exciting – but it’s quite shocking really, isn’t it? I mean, the whole world’s gone mad.” While few would dispute Bush’s assessment of the current state of the world, you’d have got long odds a year ago on her 1985 hit single becoming one of the biggest hits of 2022. Thirty-seven years after it initially reached No.3 in the UK, its extraordinary resurgence was prompted by its prominent inclusion in the fourth season of Stranger Things, the 1980s-set Netflix series which Bush said she had “watched from the first series onwards”.
The stats are impressive. Running became the UK’s most downloaded song of the summer, beating the big-hitter likes of Harry Styles and Beyoncé, with 42,000 sales and 86.6 million streams between June and August, racing to No.1 and making Bush, just before she turned 64, the oldest woman to top the chart. It was also the longest ever gap between an artist or band’s number ones (44 years after 1978’s Wuthering Heights made the top spot). It even went top-three in the US, her first ever Top-10 there. “We’ve all been astounded to watch the track explode!” the usually private Bush enthused. Although she gamely broke cover for that Woman’s Hour chat, it’s unlikely the second coming of Running Up That Hill will mean she’ll make any attempt at all to boss another news cycle. When Bush made her first live appearances for 35 years at her Hammersmith Apollo residency in 2014, her back catalogue was parked in the album chart for a while and a new generation wondered what the fuss was about. Now it’s the new generation leading the parade. One suspects that will be sufficient gratification for Bush, especially as the album from which the track came, Hounds Of Love, is one of her own favourites – if that 2014 set-list was anything to go by. Of course, this isn’t the first time a hook-up with a big TV show or film has boosted a career that had settled on to a satisfactory plateau. From the 1980s Levi’s ads that revived old soul music, to the present-day turbo-charging of TikTok – not forgetting the same season of Stranger Things’ shout-outs to Metallica, The Cramps and Siouxsie & The Banshees – it happens. And Running Up That Hill, which was played at the 2012 London Olympics closing ceremony, hadn’t been hiding under a rock. Yet this revival ran and ran, giving Bush a 2022 that made you believe in strange phenomena.
“What’s really wonderful is this is a whole new audience who, in a lot of cases, have never heard of me”, she said. “And I love that. The thought of all these young people hearing the song for the first time and discovering it, it’s very special”.