Wuthering Heights

"Wuthering Heights" is a song by English singer Kate Bush, released as her debut single on 20 January 1978 through EMI Records. Inspired by the 1847 Emily Brontë novel of the same name, the song was released as the lead single from Bush's debut studio album, The Kick Inside (1978). It peaked at number one on the UK Singles Chart for four weeks, making Bush the first female artist to achieve a number-one single with an entirely self-penned song. It also reached the top of the charts in Australia, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, and Portugal. "Wuthering Heights" received widespread critical acclaim and continues to be highly regarded; in 2016, Pitchfork named it the fifth-greatest song of the 1970s, and in 2020, The Guardian ranked it as the 14th-best UK number-one single. The song has been certified Platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), for sales and streams of over 600,000 units in the United Kingdom. In addition, a remixed version of the song, featuring re-recorded vocals, was included on Bush's first compilation album, The Whole Story (1986). This version appears as the B-side to her 1986 single "Experiment IV". Writing Bush wrote the song aged 18, within a few hours late at night on 5 March 1977. She was inspired after seeing the 1967 BBC adaptation of the 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. She then read the book and also discovered that she shared her birthday with author Emily Brontë. "Wuthering Heights" is sung from the perspective of the Wuthering Heights character Catherine Earnshaw, pleading at Heathcliff's window to be allowed in. It quotes Catherine's dialogue, including the lyrics "I'm so cold", "let me in", and "bad dreams in the night". Cathy is in fact a ghost, which the listener may only realise upon reading the novel. Critic Simon Reynolds described it as "Gothic romance distilled into four-and-a-half minutes of gaseous rhapsody".