There was a hand coming through the window’: The surprising story behind Kate Bush’s first hit Wuthering Heights

Kate Bush wrote her chart-topping debut single when she was just 18 years old. She told the BBC about the origins of a literary love song that began a unique career in music.

Kate Bush’s debut single, Wuthering Heights, was theatrical, undeniably eccentric, and utterly unlike the punk, new wave, prog rock and disco music that dominated the UK charts when it was released 47 years ago this week. And yet the single became an unexpected number one hit in 1978 – the first song written and performed by a female artist to reach the UK top spot. What makes the single even more idiosyncratic is that its title and story are borrowed from Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel – but it was actually a television series that spurred Bush to write the song.
“Well, I hadn’t read the book, that wasn’t what inspired it. It was a television series they had years ago,” she told Michael Aspel in a BBC interview in 1978. As a teenager she had come across the end of an episode of a 1967 BBC adaptation of Brontë’s tale of doomed love. Its startling imagery had captivated her. “I just managed to catch the very last few minutes where there was a hand coming through the window and blood everywhere and glass. And I just didn’t know what was going on and someone explained the story.”