Wuthering Heights

Bush wrote it at eighteen, in a few hours late at night on 5 March 1977. It is sung by Catherine Earnshaw as a ghost pleading at Heathcliff's window, after Emily Bronte's 1847 novel. As a child Bush had seen the last minutes of the 1967 BBC adaptation, and she later found that she shared a birthday, 30 July, with Bronte.

Andrew Powell produced it. Bush sang the vocal in a single take, and Ian Bairnson played the guitar solo with a broken arm. Powell arranged and played celesta, Duncan Mackay played Hammond organ, David Paton played twelve-string guitar and bass, Stuart Elliott played drums and Morris Pert crotales. EMI wanted James and the Cold Gun as the first single, but Bush insisted on this one, and release was delayed from November 1977 after copies leaked to Capital Radio.

It entered the UK chart at number 42, rose to 27 after her first Top of the Pops appearance, and then spent four weeks at number one in March 1978, displacing ABBA's Take a Chance on Me. It also topped the charts in Australia, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand and Portugal. Two videos exist with similar choreography: a studio version in a white dress and an outdoor one in a red dress, filmed on 26 October 1977 on Salisbury Plain. Pitchfork named it the fifth-greatest song of the 1970s in 2016.

Live and covers

She performed it on the 1979 Tour of Life, and a recording of the Manchester Apollo show of 10 April 1979 is on the Internet Archive. She sang a new vocal for the 1986 compilation The Whole Story. Pat Benatar covered it in 1980, and Laura Bunting's version on The Voice Australia in 2012 returned it to the Australian top 40. Fans hold an annual Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever, and a 2026 film of the novel lifted the song to number 49 on the UK downloads chart.