You might know Kate Bush, the singer who exploded among the GenZ with her song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)”, that was featured on Netflix’s show, Stranger Things, but her story with spooky tales started way before that, almost four decades ago.
HOW SHE STARTED
Back in her early teenage years, Bush began to write her own songs and recorded them on homemade demo tapes, and one of them reached the Pink Floyd guitarist, David Gilmour. Intrigued by her voice, he travelled to Kent, in England, and met young Kate, re-recording her tapes in his studio, and finally encouraged EMI – Pink Floyd’s record label- to sign her at only sixteen years old.
While still at school, Kate spent two years of her contract finishing her studies and took interpretative classes with Lindsey Kemp, a mime artist and choreographer – that worked with David Bowie – and who helped to shape her musical style, because “that’s what music in any form of art is about. It’s emotion, it’s from inside.”
WHEN ALL CHANGED
At eighteen, after working hours at a pub in London, she woke up and saw the 1970s BBC adaptation of Wuthering Heights on the TV, and immediately wrote a song from the perspective of Catherine Earnshaw, who haunts her lover Heathcliff, in the classic novel of Emily Brontë, published in 1847.
The lyrics have an eerie vibe – which matches with the ghostly seek of vengeance and love from the story -, mainly because it has an unusual harmonic progression, along with irregular phrase lengths; Another thing that adds to the vibe, is the technique used to sing the music, a soft palate, which changes the vocal timbre and it’s very used in Peking opera.
And the cherries on top are the two music videos, one where Kate is singing in a ghost-white dress inside a studio (which is the version number one), and the second one, where she dances outside the woods in a blood-red dress. Both of them have a very characteristic trait of Bush: she stares deeply at the camera, while performing her dance moves, expressing not only her emotions, but Cathy’s as well.
Even though Kate didn’t read the book before composing the music, she did read it after, and discovered a few coincidences: both Brontë and Bush shared the same birthday date (July, 30th), and both Kate and Catherine shared the same nickname, Cathy.
With “Wuthering Heights“, as her debut song, she entered in the charts at number 42, and in the next week, she went to number 27, making her first appearance on the “Top of the Pops”, becoming one of the most played songs on BBC Radio 1 in 1978.
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The article above was edited by Duda Kabzas.
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