Kate Bush: Writing the Song No One Else Would Have Written

Kate Bush wrote "Wuthering Heights" in one evening, at eighteen, working from a handful of minutes of a BBC television adaptation she'd caught rather than the Emily Brontë novel itself. She hadn't even read the book yet. "I hadn't read the book, that wasn't what inspired it. It was a television series they had years ago," she said in a 1978 BBC interview, before going on to read Brontë and build the song out from there. It became the first UK number-one single written entirely by a woman performing her own song. She was nineteen when it topped the chart.

That's a strange thing to build a career on top of, a song that started as a fragment of someone else's adaptation of someone else's novel, sung in a voice nobody else would have attempted. Almost everything Bush did afterward follows the same instinct: take something unlikely, trust her own read on it completely, and refuse to let anyone talk her out of the version she heard in her head.

Winning the argument over her own first single

David Gilmour of Pink Floyd financed Bush's first professional demo when she was sixteen, which is how she ended up signed to EMI as a teenager. When it came time to choose her debut single, the label wanted "James and the Cold Gun." Bush wanted "Wuthering Heights," a song built on a soprano leap and a literary reference, not an obvious commercial bet for a debut. She held her ground against a major record company as a teenager who had never released anything, and won. It's worth sitting with how rare that is: an unproven artist overruling the label on the single most consequential decision of a debut, and being right.

Taking the studio over herself

Bush's second album undersold, and rather than let that push her toward safer material, she moved the opposite direction: she formed her own publishing and management companies and became co-producer on 1980's Never for Ever, working alongside engineer Jon Kelly. That album gave her a first UK number one and made her the first British female solo artist to top the UK albums chart. By Hounds of Love in 1985, she was sole producer, running sessions largely out of a studio she'd built in a barn behind her family's home in Kent so she could work entirely on her own schedule.

The album leaned hard on the Fairlight CMI, an early digital sampler she'd first been introduced to by Peter Gabriel. For Bush it stopped being a studio gadget and became a way of composing, replacing the piano as her starting point for a song. "Cloudbusting," with its full string-section swell, was written and arranged on the Fairlight before it was played by an orchestra. That's the through-line from the teenager who wouldn't back down on a single: given a new tool, she didn't use it the way anyone expected, she bent it into becoming the way she wrote.

The body as an instrument too

Bush studied mime and movement with Lindsay Kemp starting in 1976, paid for out of her own EMI advance, and it changed how she thought about performance entirely. "I realized there was so much potential with using movement in songs, and I wanted to get a basic technique in order to be able to express myself fully," she said. It shows up everywhere in her work afterward, the theatrical, dance-driven performance style in her videos and her rare live shows, a wide, elastic vocal instrument that moves between registers the way a dancer moves between positions. When Kemp died in 2018, her tribute captured how much he'd shaped her: "To call him a mime artist is like calling Mozart a pianist." For Bush, the voice and the body were never two separate crafts.

Twelve years of silence, then a slow return

After 1993's The Red Shoes, Bush largely disappeared from public life. She didn't release another album until Aerial in 2005, a twelve-year gap she spent mostly out of the industry entirely, raising her son and working at her own pace, away from interviews and touring. She's remained famously private since, a songwriter who treats her own privacy with the same total control she applies to a mix. Very few artists with her level of commercial success have been willing to simply stop for over a decade and let the audience wait.

A 1985 song finds an entirely new audience in 2022

Then, in 2022, "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" reached number one on the UK singles chart, thirty-seven years after it first came out, after Netflix's Stranger Things used it as a key piece of that season's storyline. It set two chart records at once: the longest span between a single's release and its first week at number one, and the longest gap between any artist's two UK number ones, forty-four years back to "Wuthering Heights." Bush posted her own reaction on her website as it climbed: "How utterly brilliant! It's hard to take in the speed at which this has all been happening." A song written on a Fairlight in a barn in Kent, about surrender and empathy, found a teenage audience that hadn't been born when it was released, on the strength of the song itself rather than any campaign behind it. The following year, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she summed up the whole arc in one line: "I'm only five foot three, but today I feel a little taller."

What's worth taking from her career

Bush's whole catalog argues against writing for the room you're in. She won an argument with her label as an unproven teenager, taught herself to produce when the industry wasn't used to women doing that job, and then stepped away entirely for over a decade without worrying whether the audience would still be there. Every one of those choices could have ended her career. None of them did, because the songs were strong enough to wait for the right moment, even a moment thirty-seven years later that nobody could have planned for.

That's the case for writing the song only you would write, not the one that's easiest to place: it might take decades to find its audience, but a song built on a real, singular vision tends to still be standing when it finally does. If you're writing something only you could have written and need someone who'll take it as seriously as you do, go find them.

Sources: Official Charts, Wikipedia, Wikipedia — Never for Ever, NME, Reverb News, The Line of Best Fit