It was one of the most popular songs of the late 1970s and early ’80s.
Now, Wuthering Heights, the debut song of iconic British singer-songwriter Kate Bush, is enjoying a resurgence, thanks in part to Australian actress Margot Robbie.
Bush made history in 1978 when, at the age of 19, her debut single made her the first female artist to reach number one in the UK with a self-written song.
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Forty-eight years after it was first released, Wuthering Heights has attracted a new generation of fans, courtesy of a reworking of the movie that shares its name and a video of Robbie dancing to the song.
Watch the video above.
Here’s the story behind the song – and the music icon who gave it to the world.
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Career beginnings
Catherine Bush was born on July 30, 1958, in Kent, England. Her father was a GP and her mother was a nurse.
The family embraced music. Her father played piano while her mother enjoyed Irish dancing, and her two older brothers played folk music.
Bush taught herself to play piano at 11, then added organ and violin, and was soon composing her own songs and writing the lyrics.
While she was still at school, her family helped her produce a demo tape containing more than 50 of her own compositions, but was initially turned down by record labels.
However, it later made its way into the hands of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, who helped her record Passing Through Air in his studio a few weeks after she turned 15.
He later financed more demo tapes, one of which eventually caught the ear of EMI record executive Terry Slater, who signed Bush when she was just 16.
She used part of a large advance she was paid to enrol in interpretive dance classes taught by David Bowie’s former dance teacher as well as mime training.
The record label was concerned about launching Bush too soon, given her young age, so kept her on retainer for two years while she finished her schooling.
In that time, she wrote more than 200 songs.
Wuthering Heights
Bush’s debut song Wuthering Heights was released on January 20, 1978.
It was the first single from her debut album The Kick Inside, which was released a month later.
Bush reportedly wrote the song in a few hours one night in 1977, when she was 18.
She was inspired after watching a 1970 BBC adaptation of the 1847 novel by Emily Bronte. She subsequently read it and discovered she shared a birthday with Bronte.
The lyrics were from the perspective of a ghostly Catherine Earnshaw, while the melody featured unusual harmonic progressions and irregular phrase lengths.
Bush recorded her vocals in one take. Her haunting lyrics matched perfectly with two official music videos released with the song.
The first showed Bush wide-eyed and looking ethereal in a long white gown.
A second video was shot a year later on a bigger budget, and this time showed Bush wearing a red gown and matching flower in her hair as she danced in a field.
Both versions featured her own choreography.
The song raced to the top of the UK singles chart, where it spent four weeks at No. 1. It also topped the charts in Australia, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand and Portugal.
Mega stardom and disappearance
After the success of her first album, which sold one million copies in the UK alone, she released a second album, Lionheart, just eight months later.
The album spawned the hit Wow, but failed to live up to the first album.
However, as part of her contract, she was required to embark on an exhaustive tour across Europe in 1979. It would be her last for 35 years.
Afterwards, she set up her own music publishing and management companies.
She released her third studio album, Never for Ever, in 1980. It included the hit song, Babooshka.
A fourth album, The Dreaming, followed two years later. It was the first of her albums to make the US album top 200 charts.
In 1985, came her fifth album, Hounds of Love. It contained the hit, Running up that Hill, which reached No. 3 in the UK charts and No. 30 in the US.
She had wanted to call the song Deal with God but was prevented by music execs.
That same year, she recorded the duet Don’t Give Up with Peter Gabriel.
She followed this with a 1986 compilation album that included a new version of Wuthering Heights.
In 1989, she released what would be her most successful album in the US, The Sensual World.
She continued to release new material throughout the ’90s, including her seventh studio album The Red Shoes, after which she dropped out of the public eye.
A break from stardom
Bush decided to take a break from stardom. During this time, she gave birth in 1998 to a son, Albert, known as Bertie, and led a reclusive life with her partner Danny McIntosh in Devon, England.
Bush has said she wanted to keep her family life out of the media even though she was one of the most well-known musicians in the world.
“My life and my work are very interlocked. That’s partly why I like to keep my private life private,” she said in 2014.
What was meant to be a one-year break from recording new music lasted 12 years.
Bush finally made her return in 2005 with her album Aerial. She released her 10th studio album, 50 Words for Snow, in 2011, but did not embark on another tour until 2014 – 35 years after her last.
Her first show sold out within 15 minutes but Bush banned cameras from the concert venue during her performances.
The tour was huge and pressure of being back in the spotlight took a toll on Bush, who revealed the “terror” she felt when performing live shows for the first time in decades in a 2016 interview with BBC 6 Music.
“I was so terrified that if my mind wandered off, that when I came back I wouldn’t remember where I was,” she said.
Despite the intrigue surrounding her disappearance from the spotlight, Bush rejects the idea she is a “weirdo reclusive” during a 2005 interview with The Guardian.
“I go out of my way to be a very normal person,” she told The Guardian in 2005.
“I just find it frustrating that people think that I’m some kind of weirdo reclusive that never comes out into the world.”
Bush’s last interview was in 2016, where she recalled the “terror” of performing live shows for the first time in decades.
A new generation of fans
In 2022, Bush’s iconic song Running Up That Hill climbed to the top of the charts 37 years after its release after it was featured in the Netflix series Stranger Things.
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This allowed the song to reach a new generation of fans and resulted in a rare statement on her website
“You might’ve heard that the first part of the fantastic, gripping new series of Stranger Things has recently been released on Netflix,” she wrote.
“It features the song Running Up That Hill, which is being given a whole new lease of life by the young fans who love the show – I love it too!
“Because of this, Running Up That Hill is charting around the world and has entered the UK chart at No. 8.
“It’s all really exciting! Thanks very much to everyone who has supported the song.”
The Margot effect
Now, it appears another of her songs may be set for a revival, thanks to Margot Robbie, who was seen dancing to Wuthering Heights in an Instagram post that has since gone viral.
The star of the new film adaptation was dressed in a red and black dress as she performed her own interpretation of Bush’s iconic dance moves on the moors in Yorkshire, where the book is set.
The video was shared this week on the Instagram account of the film’s dialect coach William Conacher.
“Cathy may not have a great time in the movie but we had a lovely time making it,” he wrote.
“Here is the joyous Margot on our last day of shooting.”
The song has been streamed on Spotify more than 255 million times, making it Bush’s third biggest hit on the platform behind a remastered version of Army Dreamers and Running up that Hill (A Deal with God), which has been streamed more than 1.6 billion times.
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