Kate Bush – Running Up That Hill

In 2022, a 37-year-old song jumped 8,700% in streams, hit No. 1 in Britain, and broke three Guinness World Records — because a grieving teenager played it on a Walkman in Stranger Things.

In the summer of 2022, streams of “Running Up That Hill” rose by more than 8,700 percent. The song was 37 years old. It returned to No. 1 in Britain — Kate Bush’s first chart-topper since 1978 — reached the top five in America for the first time in her career, and set three Guinness World Records along the way, including the longest gap between UK No. 1 singles. None of it happened because of a reissue or a remix. It happened because a teenage character in Stranger Things played the song on a cassette Walkman to keep herself alive.

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Bush wrote and produced “Running Up That Hill” herself, the first song completed for her fifth album, Hounds of Love. She built it around a circular, tom-heavy groove programmed on a LinnDrum by her partner and engineer Del Palmer, then added the song’s strange, keening instrumental hook using a cello patch on her Fairlight CMI, the sampling synthesizer that shaped the whole record. The lyric is often misheard as being about exertion or effort. It is really about a bargain: Bush imagines a man and a woman asking God to let them swap places, so that each could feel what the other feels and clear away the misunderstandings between them. The running, and the hill, are metaphors for that impossible exchange.

The title she was made to give up

When Bush wrote the song, she called it “A Deal with God.” That was the title she wanted, and in her mind it still is. Her label, EMI, disagreed — executives feared that a single with “God” in its name would be refused airplay or banned outright in more religious countries such as Italy, Ireland, and France, and that it would blunt the launch of an album she had spent years making. After resisting, Bush relented and let the single go out as “Running Up That Hill,” a rare creative compromise she later regretted. The album version restored the full name, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God),” which is how it has been listed ever since. Released on August 5, 1985, it became her highest-charting UK single since “Wuthering Heights,” reaching No. 3 at home and No. 30 in America.

The video sharpened the song’s meaning rather than illustrating it. Directed by David Garfath and choreographed by Diane Gray, it pairs Bush with the dancer Michael Hervieu in a spare, serious two-person routine — no lip-syncing, no spectacle. Bush had grown frustrated with how dance was used in pop videos, treated as decoration, and wanted instead a single sustained piece of movement. The recurring gesture, Bush miming an archer drawing a bow, became the image she used for the single’s cover. When she debuted the song on the BBC’s Wogan before an audience estimated at nine million, the performance carried a deliberately ritual air, the backing musicians robed like a procession.

A second life, thirty-seven years later

The song never disappeared — it surfaced in The O.C. in 2006 and in other shows across the years — but nothing prepared anyone for 2022. In the fourth season of Stranger Things, the character Max Mayfield, grieving and cornered by a supernatural predator, uses “Running Up That Hill” as a lifeline, the song that literally pulls her back from death in the episode “Dear Billy.” Millions of viewers, most of them born decades after 1985, heard it for the first time. Within weeks it was the most-streamed track on Earth, averaging around six million Spotify plays a day and twice topping Billboard’s Global 200. Bush, who almost never speaks publicly, wrote that she felt deeply honored the song had become part of Max’s journey.

What the revival revealed is how completely the song had been built to last. Its emotional logic — the wish to trade places with someone you love, to finally understand them — needed no updating to speak to a new generation. Kate Bush, born July 30, 1958, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023, the year after a show about the 1980s returned one of the decade’s strangest and most durable records to the top of the charts. The compromise title stuck. The deal with God, it turned out, was the part that endured.