‘There was a hand coming through the window’: The surprising story behind Kate Bush’s first hit Wuthering Heights
Kate Bush’s debut single, Wuthering Heights, was theatrical, undeniably eccentric, and utterly unlike the punk, new wave, prog rock and disco music that dominated the UK charts when it was released 47 years ago this week. And yet the single became an unexpected number one hit in 1978 – the first song written and performed by a female artist to reach the UK top spot. What makes the single even more idiosyncratic is that its title and story are borrowed from Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel – but it was actually a television series that spurred Bush to write the song.
“Well, I hadn’t read the book, that wasn’t what inspired it. It was a television series they had years ago,” she told Michael Aspel in a BBC interview in 1978. As a teenager she had come across the end of an episode of a 1967 BBC adaptation of Brontë’s tale of doomed love. Its startling imagery had captivated her. “I just managed to catch the very last few minutes where there was a hand coming through the window and blood everywhere and glass. And I just didn’t know what was going on and someone explained the story.”
Bush was just 19 years old when the single was released. Although she may have seemed precocious to the public, she had been writing songs for years. Born in June 1958, the youngest of three children, she grew up in an artistic household in Kent, England. Her father, a doctor, and her mother, a nurse, surrounded their children with music, and encouraged them to learn instruments from an early age. Both of her older brothers were heavily involved in music and poetry, and she would join them performing Irish and English folk songs at home. “My brothers are very musical, yes. They were really responsible for turning me onto it in the first place. They were always playing music when I was a kid,” she told Aspel.
Bush began to compose her own songs in her early teens, recording them on homemade demo tapes. One of these tapes found its way via a family friend into the hands of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, who recognised the promise in her songwriting and was particularly taken with the otherworldly quality of her voice. “I was intrigued by this strange voice,” he told BBC podcast Profile in 2022. “I went to her house, met her parents down in Kent, and she played me, God, it must have been 40 or 50 songs.”
Gilmour re-recorded three of Bush’s songs with her in his studio for a new demo, and then encouraged Pink Floyd’s record label, EMI, to sign her at the age of 16. As Bush was still at school, she spent the first two years of her contract continuing with her studies, while using the record company’s advance to enrol in interpretive dance classes with mime artist and choreographer Lindsay Kemp, who had previously taught a young David Bowie.
