It did not need a reappearance in Stranger Things to confirm the genius of Kate Bush’s timeless Running Up That Hill. Five albums into her career, the lead single from Hounds of Love (1985) sees Bush moving far beyond her earlier work. While fan club members were assured by Bush on release that the song was “very much about two people who are in love, and how the power of love is almost too big for them”, subsequent interviews revealed an artist seeking to capture the essence of human relationships and the complexities of emotional exchange.
Kate explained at the time, “It’s about a relationship between a man and a woman. They love each other very much, and the power of the relationship is something that gets in the way. It creates insecurities. It’s saying if the man could be the woman and the woman the man, if they could make a deal with God, to change places, that they’d understand what it’s like to be the other person and perhaps it would clear up”.
She added: “If we could actually swap each other’s roles… I think it would lead to a greater understanding. And really the only way I could think it could be done was either… you know, I thought a deal with the devil, you know. And I thought, ‘well, no, why not a deal with God!’ You know, because in a way it’s so much more powerful the whole idea of asking God to make a deal with you.”
Written in a single night in summer 1983, it was demoed in October of that year with Bush singing and playing Fairlight synthesiser and her partner and bassist Del Palmer adding Linn drums. For the full recordings, made between November 4 and December 6, Alan Murphy added guitar and Stuart Elliott live drums, while Bush’s older brother Paddy added balalaika.
Producer David Lord emphasised the importance of breaking barriers: “We wanted the song to be sonically unique, evoking a sense of intensity and raw emotion that mirrors the song’s sentiment.”
Bush wanted to call the track A Deal With God but divine intervention only goes so far. was talked out of it by her record company, EMI. She said: “We were told that if we kept this title that it would not be played in any of the religious countries, Italy wouldn’t play it, France wouldn’t play it, and Australia wouldn’t play it! Ireland wouldn’t play it, and that generally we might get it blacked purely because it had God in the title.” Though the single was released as Running Up That Hill, the album version and subsequent reissues title put A Deal With God in brackets at the end.
Ultimately, none of that mattered. Running Up That Hill emerged as a beacon of musical innovation and emotional depth, a testament to the collaborative spirit of Bush and her creative team.
Though the track was a substantial hit on release, its greatness is really demonstrated by its second wind – it was used in the 2012 London Olympic opening ceremony, in the TV shows Pose and Glow and then, in May 2022, in Netflix’s Stranger Things. It subsequently went to No.1 in the UK, selling over a million units in Britain alone, and reached No.3 in America, Bush’s biggest hit there.
On June 22 2023, after the track reached one billion streams on Spotify, Bush wrote a message on her official website, stating, “I have an image of a river that suddenly floods and becomes many, many tributaries — a billion streams — on their way to the sea. Each one of these streams is one of you. Thank you so much for sending this song on such an impossibly astonishing journey. I’m blown away.”