“Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush

"Wuthering Heights" was Kate Bush's first single and the lead-off from her debut album, The Kick Inside, issued on EMI in 1978. She wrote it in a single evening at 18, taking her cue from Emily Brontë's 1847 novel, and sang it in a keening, spectral voice that sounded like nothing else on the radio.

Andrew Powell produced and arranged it, Jon Kelly engineered, Stuart Elliott played drums and Bush herself sat at the piano. The arrangement swoops and swirls like a draught through an old house, art rock and pop tangled together, and Bush's voice climbs to places most singers wouldn't dare.

Britain surrendered: four weeks at number one in March 1978, which made Bush the first woman to top the UK chart with a song she'd written entirely herself. It went to number one in Australia, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand and Portugal too. Pitchfork named it the fifth-greatest song of the 1970s in 2016, and she later recut the vocals for a remix on her first compilation, The Whole Story, in 1986.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.