Meet Kate Bush, the singer who resurfaced with Stranger Things

With the excitement of the second part of the fourth season of Stranger Things being launched in Netflix, the internet is once again with the name of the British singer Kate Bush on the rise — but after all, who is the interpreter of Running up that hill, music that is saving children (now teenagers) from the threat of Hawkins' new villain.

Kate Bush's Beginning

Kate Bush was born in 1958 in a region close to London, and began to embark on a musical career in the 1970s. Her journey to success, however, would begin in 1974-1975, after she met David Gilmour, the band's guitarist Pink Floyd, which would help finance the artist's first recordings.

It was with this help that the path to his debut on the big charts was built, and in 1978, at the age of 20, his first album, The Kick Inside, was released — one of the tracks, Wuthering Heights, music that brings references to literary work Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. The track would become one of the artist's top hits, topping the UK charts for four consecutive weeks.

Still in 1978, the artist would release her second album, Lionheart, which is the only material that did not reach the top 5 of the UK charts during its release. A year later, a difficult moment was experienced by the singer in her career: while she was on tour The Tour of Life, a lighting engineer who was helping to set up the stage for one of the shows fell from a height of 20 meters and died. The event made Kate Bush decide not to do any more live performances, for fear that something like that would happen again. 

Even without touring, however, his career continued to take off, with the release of the album never for ever in 1980, Bush's first work to reach number one on the British charts — as well as the first time a female artist had achieved such a feat. 

Kate Bush releases would continue to happen almost annually, with the 1982 distribution of TheDreaming, and some compilations with the artist's greatest hits in the coming years - but for fans of Stranger Things, the moment so identified by the series would only occur in 1985, with the release of hounds of love.

Running up that hill was one of the tracks on the album, becoming a hit at the time. The song had already been used in 2018 as the soundtrack for the character Angel in the first season of the series. pose, which deals with the scene of ballroom in New York in the 80s, but as we well know in 2022 the soundtrack would have an even greater impact when used in the plot that involves teenagers running away from monsters. 

Understanding Kate Bush's Success

Kate Bush, in her heyday, was popular for many reasons, but the main fact is how she used her music and her work as an artistic vector in addition to musical productions, performing real performances on stage or even in music videos, as shown in the clip of Wuthering Heights, which can be seen just above in this content.

In addition, coincidences and legends about the artist helped her to rise and achieve a cult status for the population of several generations - one of the examples of this is the fact that she was born on the exact day that Emily Bronte died, making references to the Wuthering Heights em Wuthering Heights something a little curious.

Things like her way of dressing in the 1970s and 1980s, modern and transgressive for the time, in addition to her performances that allowed her fans to live extremely unusual musical experiences at the time, made the artist popular — and even as she began to go on hiatus, going back in 2005 for the release of the album Aerial and in 2011 for 50 words for snow, she continues to become a great exponent of British music production, although not as well known as David Bowie ou The Beatles. 

Kate Bush's reaction to the success with Stranger Things

The singer's hiatus also made her disappear from the public eye for a long time, but the success of Running up that hill in the fourth season of Stranger Things caused the return of his name to the mouth of popular discussions, with the song appearing among the 200 most listened to tracks in the world and going viral as a musical background in various contents posted on TikTok — and that resulted in the artist's first interview in a long time, conducted for the BBC.

In the interview, Bush — now 63 years old — details how surprised she is that her work, which might never have been discovered by younger people without the reach of Stranger Things, is touching these new generations so much — and how happy it makes her.

It's so exciting, but shocking too — the world seems to have gone crazy! But what's fantastic is the fact, I think, that these young people are a whole new audience who, in many cases, have never heard of my work, and I love that.

Kate Bush, in an interview with the BBC.

In addition, the artist also highlights how special she thinks her song was used at such an important moment in the narrative of the fourth season - with the character Max escaping from the hands of the monster Vecna, a fact that for Bush, seems to show the track as a talisman for Sadie Sink's character:

Running up that hill was placed at a very special moment in Stranger Things. At home, we've been watching the show since the first season, so we were already familiar with the story. I found it very comforting how the song came across in a positive light – almost like a talisman for Max. It was very exciting for me 

Kate Bush, in an interview with the BBC.

With the final part of the fourth season of Stranger Things being made available by Netflix, it is very likely that Kate Bush stay at the top of the charts for a while longer. Who knows, it's not an opportunity for so many young people not to seek out other songs by the so influential British artist, is it?

What would be your Running up That Hill to escape Vecna?

As we mentioned above, the song of Kate Bush was used so that the character Max, from Stranger Things, managed to escape the clutches of the monster Vecna. The interaction generated a great buzz on social networks about which would be the trail that the navigators would use to escape the villain - and taking advantage of the release of the second volume of the fourth season of the series, the Netflix, in partnership with the Spotify, made a special playlist available.

The playlist, called Upside Down Playlist, puts some of the songs most listened to by users of the music streaming platform with the purpose of showing which are the tracks that can save them from a possible attack by Vecna. Showmetech has put the feature to the test, and it's actually quite interesting, putting some of Spotify's most recently-listened tracks at the highest positions, while forgotten gems of the platform's history farther down the list.

A Upside Down Playlist can be accessed at Spotify.

See also other features

Check out the review of the first half of fourth season of Stranger Things.

Source: Newsweek, El País, BBC Radio, The Guardian