No one could have seen it coming. During the late spring and summer of 2022, Kate Bush’s 1985 hit Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) enjoyed a barely credible commercial resurgence, spot-lit by its usage in the fourth season of the Netflix sci-fi horror series Stranger Things. Over multiple episodes, Bush’s Hounds Of Love keynote emerged as not just a groovy soundtrack inclusion but instead as an essential narrative device. Beleaguered tomboy teen Max Mayfield deploys the song as a sonic talisman; played through the headphones of her cassette Walkman, it strengthens her in her battles against a supernatural, serial-killing entity.
-
READ MORE: Kate Bush’s 50 Greatest Songs
The post-Stranger Things stats were staggering. Fuelled by an average six million Spotify streams per day in June and July, Running Up That Hill became the most-played track in the world, twice topping Billboard’s Global 200 chart. In the UK, it reached Number 1 and stayed there for three weeks, trumping its initial ’85 chart placing of Number 3, while also hitting the top spot in Australia, Ireland, Belgium, Lithuania, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Switzerland and Sweden. In the US – where the song had previously been Bush’s biggest hit at Number 30 – it gave the singer her first American Top 5 hit when it reached Number 4.
Meanwhile in the UK, she broke no less than three Guinness World Records: oldest female artist to reach Number 1 (at the age of 63), longest time for a track to reach the top of the charts (37 years) and biggest gap between Number 1s (44 years since Wuthering Heights). Music sales data company Luminate calculated that in 2022 alone the track has earned Kate Bush $2.3 million.
It appeared that Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God), far from losing any of its appeal in the intervening four decades, had only gained in power and potential. In some respects very much of its time – perfect for the ’80s staging of Stranger Things – its breakout into the wider world in 2022 underlines what’s timeless and unique about the song. Built around a circular, tom-tom heavy LinnDrum groove programmed by Bush’s then-boyfriend – bassist and recording engineer Del Palmer – its staccato chord stabs and quirky instrumental hookline were added by Bush using the effected waveforms of the Cello 2 patch on her then-high-end sampling system, the Fairlight. Yet in 2022, barely a whiff of anachronism arises from its dated technology.
Subject-wise, the song continues to intrigue. Bush imagines making a bargain with the Creator in which she swaps souls with her lover, so that they can both experience the feelings of the opposite gender, leading to, as the song’s creator put it, “a greater understanding”. Both lyrically and musically, it remains an outstanding example of how innovative, catchy and weird pop music can be.
It’s not the first time Running Up That Hill has turned Kate Bush’s fortunes around. Ahead of its original release on August 5, 1985, the singer had seen increasingly diminishing returns in the British singles charts. While 1981’s stunningly peculiar Sat In Your Lap had climbed to a respectable Number 11, the title track of ’82’s challenging The Dreaming album stalled at 48 and follow-up There Goes A Tenner only managed to reach Number 98. It seemed Bush’s career as a hit-making artist might well have been over.
Beating a retreat from London to a new rural home near Sevenoaks in Kent, in 1983 Bush set up a songwriting room centred upon her piano, her Fairlight and an eight-track tape recorder. “I intend just to keep on writing,” she informed the members of her fan club that summer, in one of her increasingly irregular newsletters. “So, yet again, I slip away from the eyeball of the media to my home.”
Here, Bush demoed the song that was first titled A Deal With God. Then, at the beginning of 1984, she moved operations to her new private studio at East Wickham Farm, her childhood home in Welling, Kent, where her parents still lived. It was in this closeted, creatively-freeing environment, over the next year-plus, that Bush honed the album that would revive her broader appeal: Hounds Of Love.
As work on what would become Running Up That Hill progressed, top UK session guitarist Alan Murphy arrived to add his clipped, percussive lines and skronky power chords over Palmer’s pulsing bass line, while the singer’s brother Paddy Bush laid down a wristy balalaika part. Drummer Stuart Elliott – who had appeared on every Kate Bush album since 1978’s The Kick Inside – was brought in to record his rolling overdubs, many of which were fed through voluminous reverb to thunderous effect.
“It was good fun doing Running Up That Hill,” Elliott told MOJO in 2018. “I just sort of overdubbed on top of the LinnDrum and did big, explosive drum fills at the end. But the tension in that track is just remarkable. Every step of the way, there’s a little twist and turn that’s different from the previous verse – an extra line or one line less, or a repeat just in the perfect places. There’s absolutely no dead space in that track and it’s just so deceptively simple.”
Vocally, Running Up That Hill showcased a full range of Bush’s lead and backing vocal styles. A confidante in the verses (“D’you wanna hear about the deal that I’m making?”) supported by an odd-sounding choir (“Yeah yeah yo…”), she becomes insistent in the choruses, yet at the same time retaining a strange sadness (her affectingly pining delivery of the line, “Say, if I only could…”). In the middle eight, she turns urgent and demanding (“Come on darling, let’s exchange the experience!”).
Bush herself felt that Running Up That Hill sounded like a winner. And it was to provide the catalyst for the completion of the rest of its parent LP. “From that moment,” she later noted, “the album process steadily rolled.”
Upon the completion of the Hounds Of Love LP in the summer of 1985, it was clear to both Kate Bush and her label EMI that the opening track was the frontrunner for the first single. The only problem was that it was still called A Deal With God. EMI argued that any song with “God” in the title carried risks.
Four years on from Bush’s last Top 20 hit, neither artist nor record company wished to hamper the single’s commercial chances. So, in a rare moment of artistic capitulation, Bush agreed to change the title to Running Up That Hill, bracketing A Deal With God. In her mind, the latter remains the proper name of the song.
“For me, that is the title,” she said at the time. “But I was told that if I insisted [on keeping it], the radio stations in at least 10 countries would refuse to play it – Spain, Italy, America, lots of them. I thought it was ridiculous. Still, especially after The Dreaming, I decided to weigh up the priorities. I had to give the album a chance.”
Just how low Bush’s commercial stock had plummeted was highlighted by the fact that in the summer of 1985, one weekly music paper included her in a “Where Are They Now?” feature. Within days, she appeared on BBC1’s chat show Wogan, debuting her comeback single for an estimated TV audience of nine million UK viewers.
The strangeness of Running Up That Hill was made explicit during Bush’s performance, in which she stood singing behind a lectern, backed by two standard-bearers wielding billowing flags and a six-piece band that included Del Palmer and Paddy Bush. All wore buttoned-up brown duster coats that could easily have been mistaken for monks’ habits. As the song moved through its slow-building arrangement, the musicians stepped closer and closer to the singer. Particularly in the context of a cosy mainstream show, there was something distinctly ritualistic about the whole affair, certainly in keeping with the song’s magickal theme.
When Running Up That Hill subsequently hit Number 3, it became Kate Bush’s biggest hit since her Number 1 Wuthering Heights debut, seven years before. Off the back of the single’s success, Hounds Of Love became her biggest-selling album, topping the chart after its first week of release and going on to achieve double platinum status in the UK, with more than 600,000 sales.
When I interviewed Bush for MOJO in 2005, I asked her if she’d consciously tried to regain commercial ground with the singles released from Hounds Of Love.
“There probably was a little bit of that,” she admitted. “I think there was an element to me thinking that [Side 1 of the vinyl record] that had those single tracks, that it would make sense if they were more kind of… what’s the word? Not commercial. But more…
I don’t know. I can’t find a word.”
Accessible? Hooky?
“Yeah, I guess hooky.”
As a plan, it paid off. Hounds Of Love would produce four Top 40 hits.
“Were four of them hits?” Bush wondered aloud. “I can only remember three.”
I listed them for her: Running Up That Hill (Number 3), Cloudbusting (Number 20), Hounds Of Love (Number 18) and The Big Sky (Number 37).
“Oh yeah,” she brightly responded. “I don’t remember there being four. Oh, that’s not bad, is it?”
Thirty-seven years later, in Episode Five of Season 4 of Stranger Things, Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield frets of Running Up That Hill, “What if, by listening to this over and over, I get sick of it, and suddenly it’s not my favourite any more? Will it still work? Or will Kate Bush lose her magic power or something?”
“Kate Bush?” responds her co-star Caleb McLaughlin aka Lucas Sinclair. “Never.”
This article originally appeared in MOJO 347. Tom Doyle’s Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions Of Kate Bush, is out now on Nine Eight Books.
