In 1978, the UK music charts were extraordinarily eclectic. When Kate Bush’s debut single, “Wuthering Heights”, entered at Number 27 on February 18, she rubbed shoulders with Donna Summer, The Stranglers, Bob Marley and Bill Withers. In a Top of the Pops appearance in March she appeared alongside Suzi Quatro, Manhattan Transfer, The Vibrators and Earth, Wind and Fire.
Even in these diverse contexts, however, no one who heard and saw Bush perform would easily forget the magnificent weirdness – that swooping, soaring voice, flowing from little-girl lisp to operatic bombast, from a confident eroticism to a trembling vulnerability. That, and her expressive dancing, much parodied (wonderfully by Pamela Stephenson in “England, My Leotard”), and perhaps affirming the link between Romanticism and embarrassment discerned by Christopher Ricks a few years earlier.
The song divided people. The NME opined that Bush had “a voice not unlike that of a newly-neutered cat letting the world know of its predicament”; Melody Maker wrote of “extraordinary vocals skating in and out, over and above”. It remains her greatest hit single, and established a peculiar and mildly literary Englishness central to her oeuvre; for, although the settings of her songs range from Russia to Australia, Berlin to Baghdad, across centuries and societies, there is always the unmistakable sense that an English Rose is still rummaging happily in the dressing-up box of her family home.
What inspired her? A TV mini-series from 1967, of which Bush caught ten crucial minutes when it was repeated, sent her to the text. Known as “Cathy” as a child, Kate discovered that she was born on the same day as Emily Brontë. And the compelling coincidences did not stop there; as Bush later noted, with a proper sense of perspective, “When Emily Brontë wrote the book she was in the terminal stages of consumption, and I had a bad cold when I wrote the song”.
But the book must always have been “in the air”, so to speak: in December 1976, little more than a year earlier, the progressive rock band Genesis had produced their album Wind and Wuthering, soaked in windswept desolate Englishness, with dashes of mock-heroic and strokes of romantic bathos, and two instrumental tracks entitled respectively “Unquiet Slumbers for the sleepers . . . ” and “ . . . In that Quiet Earth”. Wuthering Heights would have been a regular fixture on exam syllabuses, too: it was a set text in 1978, and Bush later stated that “lots of people have written to say how the song helped them. I’m really happy about that”.
Bush’s song essentially renders Cathy’s ghostly appearance to Lockwood in Chapter Three of the novel, but from her point of view. (Given the narrative removes through which Cathy is filtered in the book, Bush triumphantly incarnates her passion: she would later say that “There’s no half measures. When I sing that song I am Cathy”, unconsciously echoing Cathy’s own passionate cry: “I am Heathcliff”.) Its memorable touches mostly do not come from the text – “wily”, though a fine word for the treacherous landscape, is not in Brontë. One oddity is the line “How could you leave me?”, given that it is she who abandons Heathcliff, though, in the book, Cathy’s rehearsal of the various forms of separation is thorough, to say the least. One academic Bush enthusiast, Ron Moy, points out how effective the phrase “let me grab your soul away” is: juxtaposing the palpable, demotic “grab” with the ethereal and poetic “soul”, and reemphasizing the unsettling materiality of the wraith.