Running Up That Hill: Why This Song Keeps Finding New Audiences

In 1985, Kate Bush released Hounds of Love, the album that many consider to be her masterpiece. Its lead single was Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), a song built around one of the most emotionally daring premises in pop music.

The song imagines a pact with God: if God would allow a man and a woman to swap bodies and minds completely, perhaps they could truly understand one another. Not just intellectually, but in the way that only lived experience allows. Bush explained that she had been thinking about the different speeds at which men and women experience things, and how that gap in understanding could be bridged if each person could inhabit the other's existence entirely.

It is a deceptively simple song. The melody is built over a pulsing electronic rhythm produced using the Fairlight CMI, a pioneering digital sampler that Bush had embraced in ways most other artists of the period had not. The Fairlight allowed her to construct and manipulate sounds with a precision that felt genuinely new in 1985. Running Up That Hill has a slightly industrial quality beneath its emotional surface: clicking, insistent drums and sustained synthesiser tones that give the track a restless, searching energy entirely appropriate to its subject.

The vocal performance is understated by Kate Bush's standards. She does not push the voice to its upper limits here. Instead she stays in a middle register for most of the track, which paradoxically gives the song more emotional weight. The restraint feels like effort, as though the narrator is working to keep enormous feeling contained, and when the melody finally opens up it is all the more powerful for the build.

Running Up That Hill reached number three in the UK charts on its original release in 1985. It was a significant hit, but nothing could have predicted what would happen to the song almost four decades later.

In 2022, the fourth series of the American drama Stranger Things used the song as a recurring motif for one of its central characters, a teenager who plays it on her personal stereo as a connection to better times. The show's enormous global audience discovered Kate Bush for the first time. Running Up That Hill returned to the UK singles chart at number one, nearly thirty-seven years after its original release, making it the song with the longest journey to number one in UK chart history. It also reached number one in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and a host of other countries, and became one of the most-streamed tracks in the world.

Bush responded with characteristic warmth and grace, releasing a statement saying she was "over the moon" about the renewed attention and thanking the Stranger Things team for using her music so beautifully. The whole episode felt like a reminder of something devoted fans have always known: this music is made to last.

What Stranger Things understood is that Running Up That Hill has something genuinely universal at its heart. The longing to be truly understood by the person you love, to somehow close the gap between two separate inner lives, is not specific to any generation or any decade. Young people in 2022 heard it and felt it as directly as audiences did in 1985. That is the mark of an extraordinary song.

When Running Up That Hill is performed live, something interesting happens. The Fairlight production of the original recording is so distinctive that audiences who know it well carry a specific expectation of how it should sound. But a piano and voice interpretation reveals the song's melodic architecture in a way the original partially conceals. You hear the chord sequence, the intervals in the melody, the bones of the song beneath the production, and it is even more beautiful than you expected.

Almost Kate Bush performs Running Up That Hill as part of a programme that honours the depth and originality of Kate Bush's songwriting across her entire career. Come and hear it live in a theatre near you.

Visit www.almostkatebush.com for show dates and booking information.