Running Up That Hill

In 1983 Kate Bush left London for rural Sevenoaks and set up a writing room with a piano, a Fairlight CMI synthesiser and an eight-track recorder. Running Up That Hill was the first song she wrote for Hounds of Love, finished in a single evening. By her account it grew out of the Fairlight riff, played with a sampled cello sound after an earlier harp sound proved too noisy, while her partner and engineer Del Palmer programmed the drum pattern she sang to him. Her brother Paddy added balalaika. The lyric imagines a man and a woman striking a deal with God to swap places, so that each could finally understand the other. That was also its original title, but EMI worried the word God would limit radio play. Bush agreed to the change because she had not had a hit for a while and wanted to give the album a chance, though she said in 2022 that she still thought of it by the first name. Released in August 1985, it reached number three in the UK, her best placing since Wuthering Heights. Its second life came in 2022, when the fourth season of Stranger Things used it. Winona Ryder, a lifelong fan, pushed for its inclusion, and Bush, who rarely licenses her music, agreed because she liked the show. The 37-year-old song topped the charts in eight countries and became her second UK number one. A record about two people unable to understand each other turned out to speak just as clearly to a generation born long after it.