With Running Up That Hill, only Wuthering Heights ever got higher than that.
As probably most of you know this is due to it being featured in season 4 of the popular teen horror series Stranger Things on Netflix
Pretty amazing. Wow!
It is one of the greatest records ever made, nice that it has found a new audience after nearly 40 years
(Also God Save The Queen by the Sex Pistols is a re-entry at 57)
I actually bought the 12” of Running Up That Hill the other day, amongst other things. I was just testing all the records out, to no reaction from the kids, but when I put that one on they both ran out of the kitchen, where they were eating their tea, shouting “I love that one”. I thought I’d finally got them to appreciate my music, which all sounds the same apparently, until they told me why they liked it. I did get a ticking off for it not sounding “like that actual song” though, cos it was the remix. It is, however, the first time I’ve bought a single that’s currently in the top 10 for at least a quarter of a century.
I gave my 13 year old daughter my 12” single and it was on tik tok within 30 minutes as a prized thing I guess.
I preferred her in the KT Bush Band, before she sold out. *sniffs*
I like it, and her but why does it have the effect it does?
You’re asking about how and why music affects us? Come on old son, this is hardly the place. Can we get back to identifying random plastic doodads?
Ok. I’ll try. At a pinch, I’ll say the song is a walking pace composition with a lyric that is like an inner monologue and has emotive tone in Ms Bush’s tones. Lots of music like this, but this clearly gets it just right, as it hits just the right combinations to draw you in. Despite hearing it for nearly 40 years, I’ve never quite understood the lyric, maybe as the whole gestalt is the thing. Or I simply don’t listen closely enough.
The meaning has been discussed here before, or maybe in the old place, which baffled me because so far as I’m concerned it’s a barely-cryptic metaphor for shagging. Someone then suggested that it was about wanting to take on the suffering of a friend who is dying, which while undoubtedly moving is plain wrong because it is just so obviously about shagging and wanting to experience what the other feels. I wouldn’t have thought there could be any doubt or debate over this.
On the song’s Wiki page Kate is quoted as saying:
So in other words it’s about shagging.
Are you sure you don’t just want it to be about shagging?
Or, let me put it like this*: You want it to be about shagging.
*hurrr
Of course it’s about shagging. With Kate on top.
Now, cope with that image! 😜
You people disgust me.
You wouldn’t be claiming, erroneously, that this song is about shagging if it was by Jethro Tull.
Now, cope with that image, you blackguards.
I am incapable of imaging Jethro Tull shagging.
Well how do you think he managed to get those crops rotated?
He hired cheap labour from Europe. Post-Brexit, he is fucked.
Perhaps he’ll write a song about it.
Pussywillow!
I just realised I misunderstood the semantics of it. I thought she wanted to make a deal to swap places with GOD, not making a deal with God to swap places with another person. You live and learn.
So what’s Sat in Your Lap all about then?
Searching for knowledge, but not prepared to do the hard yards. Now we have wikipedia.
“Sat In Your Lap’ is very much a search for knowledge. And about the kind of people who really want to have knowledge but can’t be bothered to do the things that they should in order to get it. So they’re sitting there saying how nice it would be to have this or to do that without really desiring to do the things it takes you to get it. And also the more you learn the more ignorant you realize you are and that you get over one wall to find an even bigger one.”
https://www.katebushencyclopedia.com/sat-in-your-lap
Thanks. Now do If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me.
The fruit of ‘knowledge’ is to be found in your lap.
“I hold a cup of wisdom
But there is nothing within
My cup, she never really floweth
‘Tis I that moan and groaneth”
Of course it’s about sex!
😜
This from t’ Beeb:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4MmgcKBf0V13M0r8jNQPH18/8-things-you-might-not-know-about-kate-bushs-hounds-of-love-album
Including the incredible insight that Hounds of Love is about being hunted by love. It’s this level of investigative journalism that justifies the license fee alone.
In other news, Yesterday is about a bloke who just split up with his bird, and 2 Unlimited are deeply skeptical about limits.
I found out yesterday at Anita from 2 Unlimited was a traffic warden before she became a star. This is why her heart isn’t in it when she sings about no limits. Inside, her soul is screaming “but there ARE limits! There ARE!…”
Anita as a traffic warden. Oh dear. I think I shall have to repress that image.
That bbc article is much better than I thought it would be, Here in NZ it was on the news as an And Finally-type item. Apparently…Kate Bush has waited nearly 40 years and now, at the age of 63, she has a UK number one single! …royalties from sales have made her over a million pounds…rumours of a comeback..,.” .
Complete bollocks.
I thought all stories about the UK in Oz/NZ were “Something goes wrong in England, AHAHAHAHAAA Serves em bladdy right!”
Are you sure it wasn’t “royalties from a million streams have made her a pound?”
I saw the Harry Styles album with that cover design on CD in the Chazzer yesterday.
If our 4 by 400 metres relay team can offload that quickly at the Olympics we’re a shoe-in for gold.
I’ve kept butter for longer.
Non-sequitur of the week award.
Dont Stop Me Now is a re-entry. 52 weeks on the chart now, more than Bohemian Rhapsody. Wasnt a big hit back in the day, No. 9, respectable, but not one of their biggest. Stopped playing it live after one tour if i’m right. Didnt play it at Live Aid or Wembley.
It’s very difficult to sing – even for Freddy.
To be fair, anything’s difficult for him to sing these days.
Why? What’s happened?
What! Brezhnev never told you?
I prefer the original title which was A Deal With God, until Kate Bush was pressured in to changing it by her American record label, which thought it might offend some religious folk.
That’ds rather unsporting. They love being offended.
While I wouldn’t be surprised if thoughts of Bible bashing ‘Merka came into it, I can’t help suspecting that the principal reason for the song’s final title is that it’s a quintessential example of the case represented in paragraph 4 of what my peers have described as my groundbreaking paper from earlier this year on bracketed song titles
To wit – the artist, tied to the high concept of their song, clings to a title which expresses what it’s about, but the record company, eager to shift units and, aware that ver kids, upon hearing said tune on the radio will flock to their music emporium of choice demanding to buy that “Running Up That..” song, will insist on the title being THE CATCHY BIT, while, perhaps, throwing the writer a bone by including their own preferred title in supplementary parenthesis..
And now likely to go to number one on Friday…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-61797012
Wonder how many of those who heard it on Stranger Things and are now streaming it think it is a new release
The impression I get is that the younger set aren’t interested in whether music new or not: it’s total and instant availablity makes it current whether it was recorded yesterday or fifty years ago. I think this is good, as it will lead music being judged on its actual merits rather than being damned or praised for coming from the right or wrong era.
This does not apply to films however, where anything further back than 2010 might as well be the Lumiere brothers.
Trying to recall whether there was this much fuss, over old music being rediscovered, when Nick Kamen was strutting around the launderette to I Heard It Through the Grapevine in the 1980s.
Things were always getting reissued, sometimes because they were in films (eg Stand By Me) and ads, sometimes seemingly completely at random.
Suddenly in 1987 Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel by Tavares was in the charts. Uh?
Almost none of them I’d wager, as ST is very clearly set in the mid-80s and all the cultural touchstones are of the era
Yeah probably, I think the song actually sounds pretty modern though
All right, grandad. 🙂
Based on hearing lots of new stuff courtesy of my 15 yr old daughter
Yep, we’ve definitely reached the point when the 80s are the retro influence. Kids today, eh?
Come on bwana Steve, the 80s have been the retro ‘fluence since Lady Gaga* emerged from a cinema showing Donnie Darko in about 2001.
(Probably plain old Ms Gaga in those days)
And it’s no. 1! 44 years after her last one
https://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/kate-bushs-running-up-that-hill-is-official-charts-number-1-single-singer-becomes-3-x-official-charts-record-breaker-with-stranger-things-success__36605/
I honestly thought it was going to be number one in September 1985. It was a comeback single and seemed as much a bolt out of the blue as her last number one had been – when it came on the radio everything seemed to stop. There was a lot of phoney pseudo-American bonhomie in the singles charts in 1985, St Elmo’s Fire and the like, perhaps it was on the wrong side of that.
(Bonhomie like N-N-N-N-Nineteen, eh Moose?)
Comeback single – after 2/3 years away.
Them were different times – no singles released in the last 6 months then you’re down the dumper
It wasn’t just that, The Dreaming had died on its arse. Compared with the previous records. KB was regarded as a has-been. Her last big hit had been Sat In Your Lap, a full four years earlier.
She got to like that “f888ing off for ages” thing, dint she?
Ah, The Dreaming – I know everybody votes for Hounds of Love or The Sensual World, but The Dreaming remains my favourite: after all these years it still sounds unique.
It’s ace, of course. It got very good reviews in 1982. But then so did King Sunny Ade and I don’t remember seeing him on Razzmatazz.
No it didn’t – not in the NME, anyway…I found a contemporary quote in an Uncut special and it’s NOT a compliment.
Really? They were pretty effusive about Hounds of Love, which surprised me at the time. Perhaps that’s why.
This might interest you, then…
It sounds like the so-called Leyla Sanai* didn’t actually listen to the record . If The Dreaming sounds like Dollar my dick’s a swizzle-stick.
Colin Irwin has at least listened to the record – very few artists can have messed around vocally so much as KB does on that album. Possibly why she adopted the throatier I-Am-Announcing-The-End-Of-The-Universe tone for HoL.
(*a pesudonym if ever I saw one, probably J*l** B*rch*ll judging by the ill-informed sneery tone)
Leaving aside the swizzle-stick issue, I’m sure she was commissioned to do a hatchet job – apparently those were very popular with the hip young gunslingers who were the NME target audience at the time…
Oops! My prejudice is showing again!
Yeah, they used to do that. That was presumably the intention when they gave Steven Wells Running In The Family by Level 42 to review.
It didn’t work – because he listened to it, thought that it was rather good and wrote about that instead. Crazy guy….
Layla Sanai seems to be genuine, a music journalist turned anaesthetist until, a very specific and unsettling detail, she developed gangrene in her fingers.
https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Writer/leyla-sanai
From writing NME reviews to putting people to sleep? I feel a feeble joke coming on.
FWIIW, I think she has never made a better album than her 1978 debut The kick inside
Leyla sanai
Ian as alyel ……..alias ?????
@Gatz
This is where my theory falls to the ground.
Yes, should have been no. 1 then, but it is now (miraculously). Perhaps some tiny evidence that the 2020s are not a complete shit show?
Yes. Can we now right the other wrongs of September 1985 and have Slave to the Rhythm at number 1 and an at least top 5 placing for Yesterday’s Men?
Come on you Stranger Things people – do the right thing.
But … we might end up with a revival of Baltimora’s Tarzan Boy.
Is that what you want … cos that’s what’s going to happen
Can we get VAR to look at the footage of the Miners’ Strike? They might overturn the result..
Careful now – we wouldn’t want VAR to have a look at England’s third goal in the 1966 World Cup Final. I don’t think it actually crossed the line, despite what Tofiq Bahramov might have thought …
And the last one should have been disallowed because of a pitch invasion.
That squaddie in the police uniform was way offside at Clay Cross.
Yesterday’s Men…what a bloody great song that is!
It is.
1985 pop-pickers: “Eeeeeurghhhh, they’ve done something slightly different to what they were doing five years ago. Let’s buy Tarzan Boy instead, and then vote for Thatcher”
Talking of Yesterday’s Men, I’ve just been informed by an HMV email that Mad Not Mad is being re-released on vinly this Friday.
The last few have been The Rise & Fall, Keep Moving, The Madness, Wonderful, Mad Not Mad. This is not the correct order – these things bother me.
MNM is great. The original vinly was pretty good by 1985 standards. Ditto Utter Madness from the year after. I think UM may be the best single vinyl Madness album in existence.
Will there be a Mad Not Mad CD release any time soon? It’s the only CD version I haven’t got, and the old vinyl copy is a bit scratched
(and my hovercraft is full of eels).
The order of things bothers me too … it’s just wrong
As far as I am aware, these reissues are vinly only (onyl?)
There was a 2CD+DVD Mad Not Mad released a few years ago
{checks notes} in 2010.
Yes there was, and it’s the missing one. The shelf spells MADNES
And usually found for 20 to 30 quids
(It’s on my Record Fair search list)
Crikey. I took a punt on it in a Virgin/Zavvi sale for about 3 quid. The DVD is quite entertaining – includes Yesterday’s Men on, erm, Wogan.
Where is she now, by the way? Aren’t we due a new album about now?
It’s only been 11 years. A quick extrapolation suggests 2024
I feel like Dougal in Father Ted when, at the end of the Pat Mustard episode, he declares:
“She was in the nuddy!”
There’s a pop chart?!!!!
Who knew?
Draw us a map!
No offence to the Wuthering Heights hit-maker, but it is all a bit all EFL Cup.
But then she ain’t The Beatles, so fair dos, and I suppose Tottenham would love to win the EFL Cup.
Tricky business, dodgers, always have been.
Eh?
I like to think there should be an Afterworders award for dd’s better half. As he sagely makes his deep, daily pronouncements about “Dodgers, no hits Clash, Tottenham, Fat B etc”, I am sure she smiles winningly and says “of course, dear, you are so right” before returning to her book
You’ll take that award out of Mrs Moose’s cold dead hands.
10+ years of trying to get me referred to Ear Nose and Throat because I’m going HURRR all the time.
I’ll say to my other half guess what that Deram fella’s saying now? And she says OK let me see, must have been a dodger, the sainted Dave, the dire 80s. Wha? I ask have you been reading the blog? I think I’ve got the measure of it she replies. I may have got my own username in fact. Begins with D… A chill runs through me. I wake up, screaming.
Just so I understand, @deramdaze: it’s only music that has to obey the 60’s rule? Not TV or books or films?
I’ve just checked my *extensive collection and see that Kate has released 11 albums. Could this be padded out to 12? Might be more interesting than Macca?
*Spotify
To make things more interesting you could include the “extras” discs from the This Woman’s Work set – one-offs like Experiment IV and b-sides etc. They are really good.
2 doubles (Aerial and 50 Words for Snow), and 2 live albums (if you look hard enough) and as Moose says non album stuff also released differently on The Other Sides (box set)
So..
The Kick Inside
Lionheart
Never Forever
The Dreaming
Hounds Of Love
The Sensual World
The Red Shoes
Aerial
Directors Cut
50 Words For Snow
Selection From The Other Sides
Then either live at Hammersmith or Before The Dawn makes 12
A middle aged white woman’s back catalogue would take me further out of my comfort zone than an octogenarian white man.
But she wasn’t middle aged when she made most of that, think she was white though
I think the HoL 12″ mixes would be very much in your comfort zone Dave… Hardcore eighties, Fairlights on code red.
Apropos the middle-aged thing, The Man With The Child In His Eyes was cut when the Katester was 16.
From the WP page: In 2010, former radio and television presenter Steve Blacknell, Bush’s first boyfriend, offered the original hand-written lyrics for the song for sale through music memorabilia website 991.com. The lyrics were written “in hot pink felt tip, complete with Kate Bush’s own little pink circles in place of dots over the “I”‘s.”…. that’s no woman’s work.
Written when she was 13 I think, when she also did the original demo
Have those demos ever surfaced?
I have a bootleg CD “Cathy’s Home Demos”…..
https://www.discogs.com/release/2632394-Kate-Bush-Cathys-Home-Demos
Is it this one? “One for the hardcore diehard fans only. The sound quality is appalling”
It is very poor sound quality
I tried googling Cathy’s Home Demos but…
…oh never mind
I have The Phoenix Demos from 76, doesn’t contain The Man … though, but many songs from 1st 2 albums,. Also Shrubberies (77) these with a band
Dai – I didn’t know 50 Words for Snow was a double – I never got around to buying it. Only seven tracks – are they very long?
Average about 8-9 minutes each I think. It’s a decent album, worth buying. Maybe a bit flat and featureless : it sort of mopes on with lots of piano and never really kicks into high gear. Nowhere near as good as Aerial.
A Snowflake 9:47
A Lake Tahoe 11:08
B Misty 13:32
C Wild Man 7:16
C Snowed In At Wheeler Street 8:05
D 50 Words For Snow 8:30
D Among Angels 6:48
Presumably it’s on one CD but I only have vinyl. I think it’s patchy but good. Not my first choice if I want to listen to some Kate. Not a huge fan of the Elton duet (Snowed in …) and the title track (featuring Stephen Fry) is er … interesting. Everything else is fine but as Art above says can feel a little flat, you need to be in the right mood. Very jazzy especially on the long tracks
Thanks, both.
I don’t know why I didn’t buy it when it came out, I normally would…
I remember thinking that about Aerial, then I bought it about five years after it was released, and it’s now probably (sometimes, depends when you ask, etc) my favourite album of hers!
How about doing a 12 album run on AC/DC? You could start… anywhere, really
The fragrant La Bush is on the wireless tomorrow, being interviewed by the less-than-divine Emma Barnett.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0018gqv
You have an issue with La Barnett?
She’s no Jenni Murray, but she’s getting better.
The Afterword Woman’s Hour sub-group – arf!
That’s an HMHB song title waiting to happen.
Hopefully she will announce a new album\/world tour 😉
Well, if we’re hoping… that she finally sees sense and elopes to Gretna Green with me.
I’m 52, can play the bass (a bit), and have a soundproofed garage. What more could a woman possibly want?
I am not sure you should open with “I have a soundproofed garage,” Steve
Arf!
…or should I say “Mmfffl!”