By Ian Woolley
Kate Bush has just beaten Tom Jones’s record of making it back to the top of the UK charts after her last chart-topper…
It was forty-four years ago since the singer-songwriter last made the top of the charts with Wuthering Heights. The song was all about a young girl’s fascination for a man known as Heathcliff inspired by the Emily Brontë novel of the same name.
Now at the age of 63, it’s another young girl who has helped catapult Running Up That Hill to the new heights at the top of the BBC singles charts. In the latest series of Netflix’s Stranger Things.
Played by one of the teenage protagonists, Max Mayfield, she struggles to come to terms with her brother’s death and so plays the Kate Bush song over and over again.
It was on Bush’s fifth studio album Hounds Of Love and subsequently released as a single in 1985. Self-composed by Bush, she used a ground-breaking digital sampling synthesizer which was revolutionary at the time, her reward was that the album reached the top of the charts. The single reached No.3.
“Music is a safe place, the place she goes to feel like she’s OK, and I think we can all relate to that. And Kate Bush is her favourite song.” explains Jamie Campbell-Bower, who plays this Netflix series’ main antagonist, Vecna.
On her official website, the star wrote “I’ve never experienced anything quite like this before. It’s all so exciting”.
Currently, the song is the most-streamed song in the world and also No.1 in the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Australia, Austria and Switzerland. It has also given her her first top 10 hit in the US.