happy to be running up that hill with Kate Bush for ever
f Fleetwood Mac can be introduced to a new audience because someone posted a clip of themselves on a skateboard drinking juice half-lip-syncing to Dreams – a whole group of people who hadn’t just heard of it because of the Corrs! – then of course Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) will end up being the sound of summer 2022.
Her 1985 single/stone-cold classic is leaping up the charts and, according to the number of search-engine-friendly headlines I’ve seen, a new generation is tapping “who is Kate Bush?” into the search bar. Which means an older generation is inevitably tutting about them needing to ask who Kate Bush is in the first place. Let’s see how that works when you’ve got a question about the TikkyTok, grandma.
Running Up That Hill came to prominence again because it features in a crucial scene in the new season of Stranger Things, though to say it features is to underplay its role. It is part of the action and drives the story. According to the show’s music supervisor, Nora Felder, getting permission to use it was no easy task. (You might say they had to run up... actually, let’s leave it, it’s been a long bank holiday for everyone.) Bush does not often allow her songs to be used in films or on TV and was given full descriptions of the scene and context before she made her decision, though it turned out she was a fan of the show anyway.
Stranger Things is not the only nod to the power of Running Up That Hill that has appeared in recent years – Fiona Apple refers to it in her song Fetch the Bolt Cutters as a metaphor for an industry that constrained her – but it is remarkable at harnessing its potency. Television and film are full of moments that reach for glory in music, but it is rarer than you’d think for it to end up being truly memorable. The ones that work end up changing the way the song is heard, potentially for a long time to come, which has its pros and cons, though it is never set in stone. Think of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, a masterful end note for The Sopranos, before it was dunked in cheese by Glee.
If any song can steel itself against over familiarity, it’s Running Up That Hill. Whether it is for the first time or the 500th time, you still hear it now and think, what the hell was that? And then you play it again.
The fact that The Good Fight got as far as six seasons is astonishing. Maybe the television executives who kept saying yes to more episodes were microdosing as much psilocybin as Diane Lockhart, played by the fabulous Christine Baranski. (That’s the woman who gave Elon Musk the evils, for those who prefer memes.) The series, ostensibly about a legal firm in Chicago, ended up being a madcap interpretation of the rampant and incessant real-life news cycle, which, you might reasonably argue, has enough madness to it as it is. Yet it has been utterly brilliant, and criminally underwatched, and Baranski’s performance is one of the all-time greats.
Sadly, all fine television must come to an end and its forthcoming sixth season will be its last. Its creators, Michelle and Robert King, told the Hollywood Reporter that they realised they were “tired” and that an ending was near. Still, for a show that has worked in Weinstein, Epstein, Russian kompromat and a musical skit about censorship in China that was actually censored in the US, it promises to go out swinging.
