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

“I was definitely influenced by Lindsay Kemp because he is one of my heroes and he was my teacher for a while,” she told Aspel. “Marcel Marceau, I admire his stuff, but it’s a bit monotonous for me. It’s the art of illusion. It’s not really the actual display of emotion, which is what Lindsay teaches, and to me that’s perfect because that’s what music is about. Any art form is about emotion.” “It comes from within.”

At the same time, she was also working on honing her musical talent. She formed a group called KT Bush Band and started playing in London pubs while working on songs for her debut album The Kick Inside. The singer told the BBC that she tends to compose these songs late in the evening. “It seems like that’s the time of day when things come together, you know. I wake up around 11 p.m., I feel sleepy all day, and then at 11 p.m. I really wake up.” One night when she was eighteen, she sat down at the piano to write a song from the perspective of Brontë’s passionate and conflicted heroine, Catherine Earnshaw, who haunts her lover, Heathcliff, both during her life and after her death. She said the images from the TV series Wuthering Heights “had been around for years, so I read the book in order to do the research properly.”

New effects and new technologies

The song’s lyrics evoke Catherine’s obsessive longing for Heathcliff, her mercurial nature, and the couple’s fraught and destructive relationship. Bush also wanted to convey Catherine’s ghostly presence, so she adopted high-pitched, harsh vocals to give the song an eerie, eerie feel. “That song was really personalized, and it was so loud because of the subject matter,” she said. “I play Cathy and she was a spirit, and she needed some kind of ethereal effect, and it seemed like the best way to do that, to have a high register.”

Wuthering Heights, with its lush, sweeping orchestration, literary sensibility, and Bush’s soaring theatrical delivery, did not strike her record company as an obvious radio hit. Instead, EMI wanted James and the Cold Gun, a favorite from the KT Bush Band pub group, to be the first single from the album. But Bush was adamant that “Wuthering Heights” be her debut – and eventually EMI relented.

To accompany its release, two music videos were filmed. He was one Studio based The other was shot outsidewith Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, standing in the windswept Yorkshire moors of the novel. For the shoot, Bush used the interpretive dance instruction she received to stunning effect. Both videos feature her staring intensely into the camera, wearing flowing dresses while performing dramatic and emotional dance moves to express the spectral essence of Cathy. Her dance routine was so distinctive that it became a cultural touchstone, inspiring both Comedy greeting and Annual event It’s called the “Wuthering Heights day ever”, with Bush devotees recreating her performance from video clips.

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The song would prove to be her breakthrough. Within three weeks of its release, it reached No. 1, getting a boost from Bush’s stunning pantomime-style performance on the BBC music show. Top of the pops. It knocked Abba’s Take a Chance on Me off the top spot in the UK Singles Chart, staying there for a month. It also topped the charts in Ireland, Italy, New Zealand and Australia. Her album The Kick Inside, when released the following month, sold over a million copies. She would go on to receive an Ivor Novello Award in 1979 for The Man with The Child in His Eyes, which was released as her second single from the album.