Some songs feel so distinctive when they arrive that they spend their afterlives being celebrated in peculiar ways. Take Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”, released 40 years ago last month. As his TV alter ego Alan Partridge, Steve Coogan sang it at 1999’s Comic Relief. For the same charity telethon in 2011, Noel Fielding aped Bush’s famously theatrical dance moves, and wore a red dress like the one she wore in one of two promotional videos for the single. Then things went crazy: more than 300 Kate Bushes, similarly clad in flowing scarlet, recreated the video in Brighton’s Stanmer Park in 2013. By 2016, The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever was doing the same in 18 cities internationally, including Sydney, Tel Aviv and Amsterdam.
But however outlandish Kate Bush’s debut single seemed, “Wuthering Heights” was not a song without precedent. Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick was singing in an upfront, wild style about a 19th-century literary classic back in 1967 (“White Rabbit”riffed off Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and became a countercultural classic, as well as a US top 10 hit). Five years before “Wuthering Heights”, David Bowie was making deeply unusual, piano-led songs for the pop market, and indeed, the young Kate Bush was a fan. “He was one of my great heroes when I was growing up,” she told Fader magazine in 2016. “A brave artist, so unusual.”
Bush was incredibly young — signed at only 16 to EMI — and looked like a ’70s magazine cover star, but she wasn’t static and silent. In “Wuthering Heights”, she wails and whoops in a high pitch, her melodies swooping and diving like a bird going in for its prey. Her song’s subject matter — Emily Brontë’s only novel — was also intellectual, and this teenager talked about it intellectually. “When I first read Wuthering Heights I thought the story was so strong,” Bush told Record Mirror in February 1978. “It was a real challenge to précis the whole mood of a book…and this young girl in an era when the female role was so inferior, coming out with this passionate, heavy stuff.”
Bush was captivated by Cathy Earnshaw, Heathcliff’s foster sister, and great lost love, whose ghost visits the story’s narrator, Mr Lockwood, in the novel’s third chapter. Bush said that her commitment to the character was helped by the fact that she was born Catherine, not Kate; her family called her Cathy when she was a child. “I found myself able to relate to her as a character,” she said. “It’s so important to put yourself in the role of the person in a song… when I sing that song, I am Cathy.”
Bush’s commitment to “Wuthering Heights” went into her career planning, too. She fought EMI to make it her debut single (they preferred the straighter, poppier “James and the Cold Gun”). Its release was also postponed from November 1977 because Bush hated the picture they had chosen for its cover. This delay was fortuitous: Wings’ “Mull of Kintyre” had just begun its nine-week reign at number one at this point, becoming the first British single to sell more than 2m copies. “Wuthering Heights” reached number one in March 1978, becoming the first UK chart-topper to be written and performed by a female artist.
So connected to Kate Bush’s image is “Wuthering Heights” that successful cover versions of the song have been few. Pat Benatarrecorded a guitar-heavy cover for her 1980 album Crimes of Passion, while Norwegian electronic pop band Röyksopp have included a version in their live sets since 2010. In 2011, Bush’s original took on a new life when a slowed-down 36-minute version became an internet viral hit. Then came the video re-enactments, kicked off by UK performance art group Shambush! at the 2013 Brighton Fringe Festival. Men and women took part, videos circulated online, and re-enactment events were set up all over the world.
Similar events across Australia also became fundraisers for domestic violence charities: in Canberra and Melbourne, thousands of dollars were raised for frontline response services. And to think all this joy and generosity came from one distinctive song, written by a teenager writing, singing and dancing to her own formidable tune. We let her in.
Has anyone bettered Kate Bush’s version of the song? Have you taken part in a ‘Wuthering Heights’ re-enactment? Let us know in the comments below.
‘The Life of a Song: The fascinating stories behind 50 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Parlophone UK, Red Cab Records, Parlophone UK, Chrysalis Inc