'There was a hand coming through the window': The surprising story behind Kate Bush's first hit Wuthering Heights

Kate Bush wrote her chart-topping debut single when she was just 18 years old. She told the BBC about the origins of a literary love song that began a unique career in music.

Kate Bush's debut single, Wuthering Heights, was theatrical, undeniably eccentric, and utterly unlike the punk, new wave, prog rock and disco music that dominated the UK charts when it was released 47 years ago this week. And yet the single became an unexpected number one hit in 1978 – the first song written and performed by a female artist to reach the UK top spot. What makes the single even more idiosyncratic is that its title and story are borrowed from Emily Brontë's 1847 novel – but it was actually a television series that spurred Bush to write the song.

"Well, I hadn't read the book, that wasn't what inspired it. It was a television series they had years ago," she told Michael Aspel in a BBC interview in 1978. As a teenager she had come across the end of an episode of a 1967 BBC adaptation of Brontë's tale of doomed love. Its startling imagery had captivated her. "I just managed to catch the very last few minutes where there was a hand coming through the window and blood everywhere and glass. And I just didn't know what was going on and someone explained the story."

Bush was just 19 years old when the single was released. Although she may have seemed precocious to the public, she had been writing songs for years. Born in June 1958, the youngest of three children, she grew up in an artistic household in Kent, England. Her father, a doctor, and her mother, a nurse, surrounded their children with music, and encouraged them to learn instruments from an early age. Both of her older brothers were heavily involved in music and poetry, and she would join them performing Irish and English folk songs at home. "My brothers are very musical, yes. They were really responsible for turning me onto it in the first place. They were always playing music when I was a kid," she told Aspel.

Bush began to compose her own songs in her early teens, recording them on homemade demo tapes. One of these tapes found its way via a family friend into the hands of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, who recognised the promise in her songwriting and was particularly taken with the otherworldly quality of her voice. "I was intrigued by this strange voice," he told BBC podcast Profile in 2022. "I went to her house, met her parents down in Kent, and she played me, God, it must have been 40 or 50 songs." 

Gilmour re-recorded three of Bush's songs with her in his studio for a new demo, and then encouraged Pink Floyd's record label, EMI, to sign her at the age of 16. As Bush was still at school, she spent the first two years of her contract continuing with her studies, while using the record company's advance to enrol in interpretive dance classes with mime artist and choreographer Lindsay Kemp, who had previously taught a young David Bowie.

"I've definitely been influenced by Lindsay Kemp because he's one of my heroes and he was my teacher for a while," she told Aspel. "Marcel Marceau, I admire his stuff, but it is a little too staid for me. It's the art of illusion. It's not really the actual showing of emotion, which is what Lindsay teaches, and for me that's perfect because that's what music in any form of art is about. It's emotion, it's from inside." 

At the same time, she was also honing her musical craft. She formed a group called the KT Bush Band and began playing in London pubs while working on songs for her debut album, The Kick Inside. The singer told the BBC that she tended to compose these songs late in the evening. "It seems to be the time of day that things gather, you know. I wake up about 11pm, I'm sort of sleepy all day, then at 11pm I really wake up." One night when she was 18, she sat down at the piano to write a song from the perspective of Brontë's passionate, conflicted heroine, Catherine Earnshaw, who haunts her lover Heathcliff, both during her life and after she dies. The imagery from the Wuthering Heights TV adaptation "was just hanging around for years", she said, "so I read the book in order to get the research right".

The song's lyrics evoke Catherine's obsessive longing for Heathcliff, her mercurial nature, and the couple's charged, destructive relationship. Bush also wanted to convey Catherine's ghostly presence, so she adopted high-pitched, keening vocals to give the song an eerie, haunting air. "It was really specifically for that song, it was that high because of the subject matter," she said. "I'm playing Cathy and she was a spirit, and it needed some kind of ethereal effect, and it seemed to be the best way to do it, to get a high register." 

Wuthering Heights, with its lush, sweeping orchestration, its literary sensibilities, and Bush's soaring theatrical delivery, did not strike her record company as an obvious radio hit. EMI instead wanted the rockier sounding James and the Cold Gun, a favourite from her KT Bush Band's pub set, to be the first single from the album. But Bush was adamant that Wuthering Heights should be her debut – and EMI eventually relented. 

To accompany its release, two music videos were filmed. One was studio-based and the other was shot outside, with Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, standing in for the novel's windswept Yorkshire moors. For the shoots, Bush used the interpretive dance instruction she had received to mesmerising effect. Both videos feature her gazing intensely at the camera, clad in floaty dresses while performing dramatic and emotive dance movements to express the spectral essence of Cathy. Her dance routine was so distinctive that it became something of a cultural touchstone, inspiring both comedic homages and an annual event called The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever, at which Bush devotees recreate her performance from the videos.

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The single would prove to be her breakthrough. Within three weeks of being released, it had reached number one, getting a boost from Bush's arresting mime-style performance on the BBC's music chart show, Top of the Pops. It knocked Abba's Take a Chance on Me off the UK singles chart's top spot, and stayed there for a month. It also topped the charts in Ireland, Italy, New Zealand and Australia. Her album, The Kick Inside, when it was released the following month, sold more than one million copies. She would go on to collect an Ivor Novello award in 1979 for The Man with The Child in His Eyes, released as her second single from the album.

Wuthering Heights marked the start of Bush's innovative, critically acclaimed and shape-shifting musical career. She has now released a total of 10 studio albums, melding diverse influences, complex musical storytelling and new technologies, such as sampling, to spawn hit singles like Hounds of Love and Babooshka. She has also collaborated with artists including Prince and Elton John. Her duet with Peter Gabriel, Don't Give Up, would pick up another Ivor Novello award in 1987.

In 2022, Bush reached a whole new generation of fans when her 1985 hit Running Up That Hill started trending on TikTok, after being used in the Netflix series Stranger Things. It gave Bush her first top 10 hit in the US and reached number one in the UK charts, 44 years after her debut single. "It's just extraordinary," she told BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour in 2022. "It's such a great series. I thought that the track would get some attention. But I just never imagined that it would be anything like this."

At the time of her appearance on Michael Aspel's show in 1978, she was already working on her second studio album, Lionheart, and preparing to tour her music with what would be a lavish stage show called The Tour of Life. The performances embraced the theatricality of Bush's songs, featuring dance, poetry, mime and magic, with the singer making multiple costume changes and pioneering the use of a headset microphone on stage. "I've always wanted to be involved in music," Bush told Aspel. "I never thought I would be able to sing them, to sing my songs, but it seems that I have done it."

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