Kate Bush’s Uphill Journey at Radio

If there’s any artist who typifies, for me, the difference between music discovery in my adolescence and how songs are found now, it’s Kate Bush.

I first read about Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” in Winter ’78 in Billboard. It was probably first just an anonymous chart listing in “Hits of the World,” but then there was pre-U.S. release industry buzz about the album, The Kick Inside. Learning about songs from the trades might be typical of nobody else’s childhood, but the same sort of excitement was happening in any music paper that a certain type of teen might have read.

I saw a lot of songs written about on the UK charts that I never got to read about. Some I would come across while record-hunting in Canada, where all things British were more likely to have been hits, and more likely to have at least been released. (That’s how I found the pop/reggae “If I Had Words” by Scott Fitzgerald & Yvonne Keeley, but most people heard it years later in Babe, where it flew past most Americans.) There were at least a few songs from that era I didn’t hear until I could stream UK radio to hear them as gold in the late ’90s.

I hung out in a lot of record stores in 1978. The Kick Inside seems as if it would have been a record-clerk favorite. I can’t believe I never heard it played all the way through, but the No. 1 in-store favorite in that era would have easily been Blondie’s Parallel Lines. I finally got to see Kate Bush on Saturday Night Live in 1978, but she performed the next single, “Man With the Child in His Eyes.” I’m not sure when I finally heard “Wuthering,” but in my college dorm a year later, I heard the Pat Benatar version a lot more.

The first Kate Bush song I heard on the radio was 1980’s “Babooshka.” By then, I’d learned to find Radio Luxembourg for the 90 minutes or so per day that you could hear it in the Northeast on shortwave radio. “Babooshka” was exactly what I was looking for from UK radio, something way hipper than “Steal Away” and “Sailing.” Again, no claim is made toward these being more normal music fan hacks. They would have just gone to an import store, and I finally found that single at Chicago’s Wax Trax. Same with her holiday single, “December Will Be Magic Again.”

I was working at Radio & Records in 1985 when “Running Up That Hill” was released. In the halls, there was a lot of excitement about Bush finally having her American hit. “Running” was No. 3 in the UK, but only No. 30 in America. It was the kind of song that I remember hearing on Top 40 KKHR Los Angeles, faster on rock songs than KIIS. At that moment, it felt like Bush had made her radio record, but not her hit.

I  knew of, but don’t think I heard the UK follow-up, “Cloudbusting.” I knew it much better six years later as the sample in “Something Good” by the Utah Saints. Her guest appearance on Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up” was No. 9 UK, but only top-70 here and upstaged by the other singles from So.

I was working at Alternative WDRE Long Island (the once and future WLIR) when the She’s Having a Baby soundtrack came out, and that’s how I knew “This Woman’s Work,” more than a year before it finally became a UK hit. I also remember hearing “Love and Anger” on WDRE and thinking that was what a hit single by Kate Bush would sound like. But it wasn’t even a big UK hit, and in the U.S., there were a lot of Alternative songs that should have been pop hits in 1990.

“Rubberband Girl” also sounded like Bush was trying to construct a hit single, at a time when Top 40 in the U.S. could have used one. Mostly I heard it on WKQX (Q101) Chicago, then at the height of its “new rock alternative” excitement. But I also seem to remember suburban WBUS, the closest thing available to a Mainstream Top 40 at the time, playing it as well. In the UK, it was her next-to-last Top 20 song (and last real radio hit) until this week, when “Hill” returned to No. 8 on the official chart but debuted a few days later at No. 2 on the syndicated Big Top 40 countdown.

When Meg Myers brought her version of “Running Up That Hill” to No. 1 at Alternative two years ago, it was a perfect example of a song that was “kind of known” to some listeners. In retrospect, it was a song that Top 40 should have dealt with then. If it had the combo of “known nugget” plus “established artist” (e.g., if Toto had chosen that song instead of “Africa”), it probably would have crossed over.

My initial thought after the Stranger Things spike in activity was that Top 40 and Hot AC should go back and play Meg Myers. Since then, Warners has serviced the Bush version to pop, and the original is the one on those stations that still seek out secret weapons, such as WXSS (Kiss 103.7) Milwaukee and WDJQ (Q92) Canton, Ohio. (Crosstown WHBC is among the Hot ACs playing the song.)

When I first wrote this earlier this week, there was renewed activity for both Myers and Bush at Alternative. Now the song is being officially worked at Alternative thanks to airplay at KROQ Los Angeles and other Audacy stations, along with WWDC-FM (DC101) Washington, D.C.

Bush’s original “Running” has plenty “ahead-of-its-time” currency — the EDM pop of the late ’10s and early ’20s has spent a lot of time trying to recreate Bush’s sound with manipulated vocal samples. Bush’s “Running” is officially on Rhino/Warner, meaning that 36 years after “At This Moment,” we have the possibility of Rhino getting a second No. 1 from a TV show placement. We also have the odd “only-in-2022” specter of a song breaking at contemporary formats and going into Classic Hits libraries at the same time.

As radio ponders “Running Up That Hill,” please understand that the excitement is in dealing with it now, not waiting to see if it tests in six weeks (although my prediction is that, with the help of TV’s big footprint, it almost certainly will). The best-case scenario for pop radio is still “more traditional radio records” plus “more outliers” — that would get us to 30 viable records instead of hovering in the high teens/low 20s.

Music writers and the music industry were happy enough that Kate Bush had her moment in 1985, so they must be ecstatic for her now. It’s fun to imagine what the next step could be. She did record other songs that sounded like hits, all ripe now to return in (slightly) remixed form. That Utah Saints record still sounds amazing (and anticipates today’s reliance on “flipped” and interpolated older songs). It’s also not hard to imagine her back with some sort of Elton John/Dua Lipa-style collaboration. (Coincidentally, when Bush recorded a song for an Elton John/Bernie Taupin tribute album, it was “Rocket Man.”)

The resurgence of “Running Up That Hill” is certainly a likely “exhibit A” for fans of the ’80s who have since checked out of paying attention to current pop music. The time when their kids were turning them on to Katy Perry and Usher has passed, and it’s easy to be cynical about a 1986 Kate Bush record being more potent than current music. I’m on the record as still finding plenty of recent music that I like. But if we had the sort of programmer enterprise we saw in the late ’80s, we’d have both. (I share some additional thoughts as part of a Billboard article on that topic.)