Wuthering Heights (song)
| "Wuthering Heights" | ||||||||
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| Single by Kate Bush | ||||||||
| from the album The Kick Inside | ||||||||
| B-side | "Kite" | |||||||
| Released | 5 January 1978 | |||||||
| Format | 7" vinyl | |||||||
| Recorded | Summer 1977, AIR Studios, London | |||||||
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| Length | 4:28 | |||||||
| Label | EMI | |||||||
| Writer(s) | Kate Bush | |||||||
| Producer(s) | Andrew Powell | |||||||
| Kate Bush singles chronology | ||||||||
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"Wuthering Heights" is a song by Kate Bush, released as her debut single in January 1978. It became a #1 hit on the UK Singles Chart, and stayed at the position for four weeks. The song is Bush's biggest hit to date, and appears on her 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside. The B-side of the single was another song by Bush, named "Kite" - hence the kite imagery on the record sleeve. "Wuthering Heights" came 32nd in Q magazine's Top 100 Singles of All Time as voted by readers. It is also No. 16 on Rate Your Music's "Top Singles of All Time" and No. 5 on Pitchfork's "Top 200 Tracks of the 1970s".
The guitar solo is played by Ian Bairnson, best known for his work with Alan Parsons. It is placed rather unobtrusively in the mix, and later engineer Jon Kelly would regret not making the solo a little louder in the mix. The song was significantly re-mixed and given a new lead vocal in 1986 for Bush's greatest-hits album The Whole Story. This version also appeared as the B-side to her 1986 hit "Experiment IV".
Written by Bush when she was 18, the song is based on the novel of the same name. Bush was inspired to write the song by the last ten minutes of a 1967 BBC mini-series based on Wuthering Heights. She then read the book and discovered that she shared her birthday (30 July) with Emily Brontë. Bush reportedly wrote the song, for her album The Kick Inside, within the space of just a few hours late at night.
Lyrically, "Wuthering Heights" uses several quotations from Catherine Earnshaw, most notably in the chorus - "Let me in! I'm so cold!" - as well as in the verses, with Catherine's confession to her servant of "bad dreams in the night". It is sung from Catherine's point of view, as she pleads at Heathcliff's window to be allowed in. This romantic scene takes a melancholic turn if one has read Chapter 3 of the original book, as Catherine is in fact a ghost, calling lovingly to Heathcliff from beyond the grave. Catherine's "icy" ghost grabs the hand of the narrator, Mr Lockwood, through the bedroom window, asking him to let her in, so she can be forgiven by her lover Heathcliff, and freed from her own personal purgatory. Critic Simon Reynolds described it as "Gothic romance".
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