Kate Bush released “Running Up That Hill” in August 1985, and it stopped at No. 3 on the UK singles chart. Thirty-seven years later, after one scene in the Netflix series Stranger Things, it went all the way to No. 1.
It topped the Official Singles Chart in June 2022 and held the spot for three weeks, which made Bush, then 63, the oldest woman ever to have a UK No. 1, the BBC reported.
The scene that sent it back up the chart
The fourth season of Stranger Things arrived on Netflix on 27 May 2022. In its fourth episode, “Dear Billy”, the song is what pulls Max Mayfield, played by Sadie Sink, out of the grip of the villain Vecna.
Bush rarely agrees to sync deals, and music supervisor Nora Felder told Variety the team sent her script pages and footage so she could see exactly how it would be used. Bush turned out to be a fan of the show and said yes.
Composer Rob Simonsen also recorded an orchestral version at AIR Studios in London for the series, adding a choir so the track would feel like a lullaby under Max’s scenes.
Streaming did the rest. UK listeners played it 86.6 million times between June and August 2022, more than any other song that summer, and it was also the most downloaded track of the season with 42,000 sales, according to the BBC.
“The response to Running Up That Hill is something that has had its own energy and volition,” Bush said at the time. “We’ve all been astounded to watch the track explode!”
Three chart records in one week
The new No. 1 broke three records at once. Its 37-year climb was the longest in UK chart history, and the 44 years since “Wuthering Heights” in 1978 made the longest gap between an artist’s No. 1 singles.
The third record was her age: at 63 she took the title of oldest woman with a UK No. 1 from Cher, who was 52 when “Believe” topped the chart in 1998.
In the US it went to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, far above its 1985 peak of No. 30, which had been the highest American placing of her career until then.
A Fairlight record from 1985
It was the lead single from her fifth album, Hounds of Love, and she first performed it on the BBC One chat show Wogan to an estimated nine million viewers.
The song is a synth record at heart. Bush wrote it in a single evening in a songwriting room she had set up with a piano and a Fairlight CMI, and the main riff is played on the Fairlight’s sampled cello sound.
The drums came from a LinnDrum programmed by her engineer Del Palmer after Bush sang him the pattern. The working title was “A Deal with God”, which her label EMI asked her to change for fear radio stations would not play it.
For more 80s music brought back by the screen, see our Soundtracks & Cinema section, including the story of GTA V’s electronic score and Giorgio Moroder’s TRON RUN/r soundtrack.
This was the song’s second revival. A remix played at the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics and took it back to No. 6 in the UK that August.
On 22 June 2023 it passed one billion streams on Spotify, and Bush thanked fans “for sending this song on such an impossibly astonishing journey”, NME reported.
The show brought it back once more when it featured in the fifth season in November 2025, NME reported a 153% jump in streams after the premiere, and the song was back at No. 14 on the UK singles chart in January 2026.
Lead photo: Columbia Records / Wikimedia Commons, public domain (PD-US-1978-89)