A deal with God or just a fabulous fluke? How the first Kate Bush record I ever bought became a hit single in three different decades. Four if you count Placebo’s coruscating cover. This is the story of the effortlessly enduring Running Up That Hill.
It’s consistently fascinating how much a song or record can trigger memories of the past, many of which we imagined were lost forever. Without warning, a lyric, a hook or even a beat can instantly transport you back in time, like a Tardis excursion in the head that only you’re privy to. Songs can be, quite literally, in the key moments of life.
Coming from Britain, home-grown acts like Kate Bush have had more than their fair share of personal musical markers for me. I entered my teens in the summer of 1982, a time when she demonstrated how inspiration and inventiveness trumps calculated commerciality every time, with the release of her fourth album The Dreaming.
Self-producing for the first time, on The Dreaming the Welling Wonder used her futuristic Fairlight machine to generate a pot-smokers’ smorgasbord of exotic samples, indicating gazes set down the rabbit hole. But in retrospect I was perhaps too young to appreciate her peculiarly English wayward warblings, which is all the more ironic considering how much I loved the gloriously strange Dandy Highwayman, the parochial pirate that was the equally eccentric and utterly unique Adam Ant.
Indeed, it’s always with a sense of wonderment at how tribal I was in my slowly developing musical tastes. But then weren’t we all a bit like that back in the day? Single minded. Subconsciously sexist even.
Kate Bush had been around for awhile, and I certainly remembered many of her earlier often ethereal records, from the audacious debut Wuthering Heights right through to the brilliantly bonkers Sat In Your Lap, but for this timid male it never occurred to me to actively follow female artists. It’s a lads’ thing, right?
Thankfully that was about to change. And how. With age, experience and, hopefully, a level of maturity comes great wisdom, and the chance to broaden one’s perspectives; facilitated by an open mind and our ever changing moods.
A solitary single of Natasha England’s Iko Iko excepted, the first batch of records I purchased by a female fronted act were all by Eurythmics, led in irrepressibly androgynous form by a creature that came across as the slinky secret lovechild of Ziggy Stardust and Grace Jones, the intensely formidable Annie Lennox.
After that, the femme floodgates were well and truly kicked wide open, and in 1985-86 I hurriedly added a variety of vinyl to my collection by the likes of Amii Stewart, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Debbie Harry with and without Blondie, and Russell Harty’s favourite houseguest, Grace Jones herself.
My 1985 diary doesn’t record exactly when I first heard Running Up That Hill but one thing that was striking was how completely different it was for Kate Bush at the time. Where her detractors would cite her wide-eyed shrieking as kooky, oh-so-theatrical affectations that got in the way of enjoying her music, it was impossible to level those accusations at the artist’s first release of the post-Live Aid era.
After a half decade spent wandering the forests of art-damage, she re-emerged (dressed as a druid, no less on the Wogan tea-time telly slot, below) with one of the most warmhearted distillations of desire ever committed to pop. Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) was glacial and minimal, as if propelled by some sort of knowing elemental force.
You could say its toned down starkness had more in common with the haunting The Man With The Child In His Eyes but this was no simple piano ballad or teenage trifle: Bush was now aged 27, and the song knows about the pitfalls, dangers, and disappointments that come with every relationship, and it holds enough faith to move forward anyway. In simplistic terms, how a man and a woman might view their relationship roles differently if God gave them the ability to trade places. In other words, it’s a sophisticated meisterwerk that longs to be understood, but to better understand someone else, too, capturing the balancing act in its tussle between atavism and futurism, vulnerability and might, empathy and lust.
More than any song in her catalogue, it symbolises being out of your comfort zone while your elliptical path gets wider, however incongruous that sounds. Here, the synth is a divining rod, the padded footprints to Stuart Elliott’s heartbeat snare, and the effect is epic without employing her regular windy signifiers of scale. Kate’s regained direction is utterly piercing without sacrificing the track’s complex and perilous ascent: all these years later, the view from the top is still breathtaking every time.
Running Up That Hill and the album from which it’s extracted, the inspirational, incomparable Hounds Of Love, resulted in a large resurgence in Bush’s fan base, and a rare moment in music history when an artistic peak coalesced with commercial success.
But more than that, it’s one of those epochal releases where everything about it was utterly perfect: the stunning cover artwork (forever, never has Kate Bush looked more beautiful), the evocative video (her early years of mime training under the tutelage of Lindsay Kemp really shines through in the interpretive dance sequences with Michael Hervieu), and hidden away on the flipside, the swoonsome, revealing Under The Ivy.
The trusty diary records that in September 1985 I threw convention out of la fenêtre and, as purchased in the B&A Records emporium in Bletchley’s Queensway, Running Up That Hill became my very first 12” single by a female solo artist, bought the week after its bronze chart peak of No.3.
Well, for 37 years anyway.
It was also the first 45 I bought with proceeds from my new Saturday job at British Home Stores in Central Milton Keynes (the week after Bryan Ferry’s Boys And Girls had become my first album via the very first pay packet, fact fans). Sitting not so pretty at the top of the singles chart that week was, naturally, David Bowie and Mick Jagger’s Live Aid charity campathon, with that Motown cover, Dancing In The Street.
Incidentally, one evening in September 1994, Kate finally met Bowie. I know, because that’s yours truly in the leather jacket, not missing a thing… well, except her autograph.
Running Up That Hill and Cloudbusting, its successor on 45, were eclectic enough to be considered ‘different’ yet accessible enough to be pop mainstays. So it’s with some embarrassment to recall when I was flicking through an issue of Smash Hits in a break from further education at Bletchley Park, my fellow school-turned-college mates Joanne and Tracey remarked at how pretty Kate looked. “And she doesn’t have much make-up on either,” observed Tracey. “Are you going to buy her new single as well?”
She was referring to Cloudbusting.
“No, I don’t like it as much. It’s a bit more like the old Kate Bush, isn’t it?” In other words, a step back into quirky overly English locomotive rhythms and parochial sound effects. I sat it out and waited for the moodier Hounds Of Love to arrive instead.
And so the story continues. Amid a revitalised creative streak, twenty-seven years later almost to the day, Bush released a new version of the song via her Fish People label. Subtitled 2012 Remix, it features a vocals over the backing track of the original 12” extended version transposed down a semitone to fit Kate’s current lower range.
The new version was premiered during the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony, and I remember the insane rumour and counter-rumour as to whether she was going to make an insanely rare live appearance to tie in with the release.
As a Londoner I had the opportunity of obtaining tickets for the ceremony at the wallet-busting price of £2,000 each. Even quizzing a local friend Elsa, who was volunteering as a marshal at the Olympic Stadium didn’t provide any conclusive answers.
“Kate Bush is part of it. I’ve heard her song in rehearsals.”
“But have you seen her?”
“No, but it’s a big stadium. I’ve definitely heard it being played.”
With a heart heavier than Mama Cass after a ham sandwich binge I reluctantly gave up my allocation and then spent the first chunk of the ceremony watching on TV through gritted teeth.
When the first notes of the now acronymic RUTH burst through the stadium’s sound system I was a mountain of nerves, and, selfishly, breathed a humungous sigh of relief when Kate was a no-show as a hill or pyramid was gradually assembled by dance performers from giant white blocks, representing each of the Olympic events.
Still, only 24 months until she would resurface for real in Before The Dawn, one of the most inventive and extraordinary live acts I’ve ever seen, and there has certainly been a bit of competition.
Almost as shocking as that incredible return to the stage, the anthemic power of Running Up That Hill has made itself felt in even greater numbers in 2022.
I’ve yet to watch the programme myself, but it’s beyond thrilling to see Kate attracting so much attention again, thanks to prominent placements of the original Running Up That Hill in the fourth season of The Duffer Brothers’ Netflix exclusive Stranger Things, including as a key diegetic piece used during a dramatic scene.
Of course, Running Up That Hill is just one song from a brilliantly diverse catalogue by this extraordinary and fearless musical innovator.
And yet as I write, the song has sprinted to No.1 in the UK with incredible ease, and in doing so our lady of the manor has just smashed three British chart records:
The longest wait between number one singles ever (44 years).
The longest time taken between a song’s release and it reaching number one (37 years, surpassing the record previously held by Wham! when the George Michael-penned Last Christmas topped the chart in 2021, 36 years after its first release).
The oldest female artist to have a No.1 single (63 years and 11 months).
In addition, Running Up That Hill also makes Kate the living artist with the longest span of No.1 singles, only surpassed by Elvis Presley at 47 years, 6 months and 23 days between 1957’s All Shook Up and a posthumous reissue of It’s Now Or Never topping the chart in 2005, 45 years after first doing so.
And this is no mere Brit thing either: RUTH has also reached pole position in seven other countries: Australia, Belgium, Ireland, Lithuania, New Zealand, Sweden, and Switzerland, as well as giving Kate her career best in the American Billboard charts — it’s currently at No.4, becoming Bush’s first ever single to reach the US top ten.
The most incredible thing of all, though? How Running Up That Hill’s success in 2022 isn’t some kitschy nostalgia period piece. Though it may lack the speaker-splitting bass of many of today’s recordings, RUTH sounds utterly contemporary, and probably always will do.
What it patently doesn’t sound like, is a record from the 1980s.
Some of Kate’s longtime fans seem a bit annoyed and, with thunder in their hearts, feel the need to act like possessive gatekeepers of her music (“I’m a real fan”, “I’m a true fan”, “I’ve been a fan since before the Internet was invented”, blah blah blahzzz) — an insecure, kindergarten type of behaviour I’ve never really understood. Personally, this medium to longtime admirer is deliriously happy that there are music lovers who get to discover her for the first time.
But most of all I’m over the moon for Kate. This new lease of life couldn’t have happened to a nicer, more genuine artist and human being.
Me? I took the opportunity to enjoy another binge of her beautifully packaged remastered box sets which replaced my older CDs a few years back. The carefully curated contents are intelligent, imaginative, brave, winsome, charismatic, cool, sexy and truly inspirational both visually and musically.
Just like Kate Bush herself then.
Long may she reign. Yeah, yeah, yo.
Steve Pafford
