KATE BUSH’S ‘WUTHERING HEIGHTS’ + ‘THE MAN WITH THE CHILD IN HIS EYES’

I first saw Kate Bush the same way everybody else did - appearing on ‘Top Of the Pops’ in March 1978 with her debut single ‘Wuthering Heights’.

Accounts of first hearing the song normally focus on her unearthly wailing voice. Unsurprisingly so, for it was a country mile from the soothing cooing women usually went in for with pop songs. Yet most of us first saw her the time we first heard her.

In a gross and unfair maldistribution of human resources she was clearly beautiful as well as talented. And, then more than now, looks were a good commodity to trade on for a woman looking for a music career. Instead she threw her performance into evoking the nature of the song’s character. Which so closely matches that vocal they can’t really be disentangled, one just feels like a transposition of the other.

Playing a ghost, she decided to act ghostly. With her long black hair, white dress and strange angular gestures, all hands and elbows, she doesn’t look so far from Sadako in the ’Ring’ films. (Who, much like Cathy at the window, is always lurking at thresholds.) It might sound counter-intuitive to compare Bush, every young lad’s wholesome heart-throb, to the scary spectre from a horror film. Yet there is something siren-like about Sakado’s mesmerising appearances, as Murray Ewing has said she’s “horrific and beautiful at the same time.”

Despite all this subsequently becoming so iconic, the single’s cover actually depicted the b-side, ’Kite’. Which, it seems fair to assume, would have been a label decision. While Bush favoured spectral over sexy, they went for the image where she showed a bit of leg.

But if the vocals are all otherly, the string arrangement behind them is lush and romantic. A love song sung by a ghost is still a love song, after all. And this combination of romantic and sinister effectively defines the song. The luring siren may be a familiar trope. But is Cathy mouthing seductive invitations to lure her prey to his demise, or here because she couldn’t be parted from him, even in death?

The lyrics slip between both, as if she doesn’t really know herself. “Let me have it/ Let me grab your soul away” runs into “I’m coming back to his side/ To put it right.”

I’ve never seen the TV adaptation which inspired her. But the scene is normally played to show the effect Kathy’s apparition has on Heathcliffe. The narrative often starts out by showing him broken, then makes the majority of the film a flashback which slowly leads up to our finding the cause. But the song reverses this perspective. The song’s all about Cathy.

More so, in my case. From the start I knew it was based on a book. Not because I was well-read, but because my Dad told me. This added to its audacity. Top twenty pop songs, not only didn’t they sound like this they certainly weren’t based on books! But he didn’t think to tell me who Heathcliffe was, and my young ears glossed over her singing the name.

Which only worked to my advantage. It enhanced the sense that she was singing directly to me. The line blurred between Cathy at the window and Kate on the TV screen, the singer and character who virtually shared a name.

The opening lines frame Cathy in nature. The “wiley, windy moors” of Yorkshire to be precise, which would seem to match her tempestuous personality. (“Too hard, too greedy.”) So ‘Wuthering Heights’ is romantic in both senses, a love song which evokes the sublime force of nature but presents it as a lover. What you’re drawn to, where you belong, will destroy you. But that destruction will be rhapsodic. Which is pretty much the way you imagine a love affair at that young age, dramatic and utterly life-changing.



(Apologies for the ‘informative’ ’TOTP2’ captions, this was the only version the internet seemed to provide.)

I was too young to consciously think of ‘Wuthering Heights’ as a novelty hit. But it was so unique and so complete a package there was no natural lead-in for a follow-up.

But remember what I was saying about talent as a maldistributed resource? Bush wrote ‘Wuthering Heights’ at aged eighteen, and ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ at thirteen. In, legend has it, pink felt tip. She made the recording when sixteen.

Style again perfectly fits content. But by going in the opposite direction. While ‘Wuthering Heights’ was audaciously strange (particularly at the time of its release), ’Child’ is classic songwriting - only unusual in doing usual things unusually well. Both vocals and instrumentation are straightforward and direct. There’s an orchestra, but it only supplies decoration - like a book with illustrated margins. Try to recall the song, it’s the voice and piano which come to you.

Above all, there’s no sense of her playing a character. (The ethereal “he’s here” voice was added to the single version, I suspect, to add some continuity to two otherwise dissimilar numbers.)

While almost the whole of ‘Wuthering Heights’ lay in imagining it being sung to you, this time the appeal of this song is the feeling of eavesdropping. We’ve come from a classic “you” song to a classic “me” song. Bush herself described it as “a very intimate song about a young girl almost voicing her inner thoughts, not really to anyone, but rather to herself.”

As ever, those who chase literal explanations have asked who it was written about. In one case an ex-boyfriend has claimed it was him. I’m not going to link to the right wing rag he sold his story to, and wouldn’t even if the claim wasn’t blatantly absurd. If, listening to ‘Wuthering Heights’, I liked to pretend she was singing to me, at least I knew I was pretending. It’s clear enough to those with ears to listen that she’s singing to a fantasy lover, and one who is some years older than her.

As Christine Kelly has said: “What we’re given with ’Child’ is that ever-so-rare thing in pop music: a young person’s vision of the world, undiluted by executive interference.” What pop music should surely be for, it sounds the strangest thing when we actually get to hear it. She also suggests that, not only has the song rarely been covered, Bush herself needed to drop it when she got just a little older.

Other songs on her first album are quite sexual (presumably because they were written later). But at that age, at least for us sensitive kids, your fantasies weren’t particularly carnal. As you start to separate from your parents, you first invent a replacement figure for them. It’s knowing your fantasy lover is merely a fantasy but luxuriating in that, the way it allows you to stitch together an expansive if rather hazy wish list.

You imagine someone worldly, a quality you’re aware you lack. But most of all, you imagine someone who gets you, to who you don’t have to try and explain yourself. “He’s very understanding, and he’s so aware/ Of all my situations.” “He’s always with me” makes him sound almost omnipresent. Bush said herself:

“I think it's a very natural, basic instinct that you look continually for your father for the rest of your life, as do men continually look for their mother in the women that they meet. I don't think we're all aware of it, but I think it is basically true. You look for that security that the opposite sex in your parenthood gave you as a child.”

She was nineteen by the time the song was released. Now, of course, my brain boggles at what she could do when so young. But when I first heard it I was eleven, and that age seemed impossibly mature. So inevitably a kind of flipping occurred, in singing about someone else to me she articulated the way I imagined her. Things shifted from a song you couldn’t help but pretend she was singing to you, to one you couldn’t help but imagine you were singing to her.

Kate Bush was the poster girl who got you in the heart.