 Tell me something, when you're standing at the bottom of a large incline that you know you need to get to the top of, what's the first thing that pops into your mind? I mean outside of wishing you are about to do anything else that is. For a lot of us, I'd guess that it's Kate Bush's 80s hit running up that hill. And today I'm positive that number has grown immensely. How come? Because thanks to its placement throughout season four of Netflix's Stranger Things, this nearly 40 year old song has now jumped back into the very top of the charts in countries all around the world. Since releasing that track at what many would probably call the top of her career, Kate Bush has led a strange and very private life about as far away from the public eye as she could possibly get. What created this desire to hide herself away and how has Kate and her life changed since then? Hey guys, it's Kara the Vampire Slayer. Welcome back to Famous Entertainment. This series is titled Before and After. And today we're going to check out the transformation of Kate Bush over the years, but more specifically where she's at now. Please hit that subscribe button and follow me on Instagram to chat. And now let's get into this video. Kate Bush was born into a pleasant if not bohemian middle class upbringing in the English county known as Kent. While most of her childhood friends wrote practicing ballet or gymnastics after school, Kate did something a little different. She wrote songs. With the help of a mutual family friend, Kate would record a demo of more than 50 songs as a teen and get it in front of Pink Floyd's David Gilmore. This led to her very first record deal with EMI at the age of 16. By 1978 she would shoot to the top of the charts with the release of her hit single Wuthering Heights off of her debut album The Kick Inside. In fact, it was such a hit that EMI pushed Kate to record a follow-up project later that year titled Lionheart. She was then persuaded to immediately embark upon a grueling promotional and performance tour known ironically enough as The Tour of Life. The Guardian would describe her performances as an extraordinary hydro-headed beast combining music, dance, poetry, mind, burlesque, magic and theater. Bush was involved in every part of production from choreography to set and costume design to hiring as well. The show involved somewhere around 17 costume changes per show and when it was all said and done, Kate was exhausted. At the age of just 20 years old, Kate made the decision to retire from touring. It would be the first taste that her fans had of her hesitation to stay in the public eye and it probably also had a lot to do with the death of her lighting engineer Bill Duffield. Died in a horrific 20-foot fall immediately following the opening show of the tour. That being said, it's not like Kate gave up on making music, not at all. In fact, she took a more hands-on approach than ever from that point forward and with her 1980s album Never Forever, she began producing her own stuff. Never Forever was also the first project of Kate's to feature as synthesizer, something that would become a main state of her work. Next, she followed that up with the spectacularly weird The Dreaming, in which she further refined her creative control by self-producing the entire project. At this point, no one had any idea what Kate would do next but considering her track record for musical oddities, the last thing people were expecting was a radio-friendly smash hit and yet that's exactly what they got. When Hounds of Love dropped in 1985, it would become the UK's fourth biggest-selling album of the year thanks to hit singles like Cloudbusting, The Big Sky, and most notably Running Up That Hill. Originally called a deal with God, this song spoke of Kate's desire to swap places with her lover so each could understand the other better and Kate's new sonic sounds struck a massive chord with the peak 80s popularity of synthesizers and drum machines. Prior to this record, Kate was a huge deal in the UK but a marginal cult artist in the United States, probably because she hadn't been there since her original tour. But in the hopes of broadening her audience, Kate finally returned to the US for a promotional tour in November of 1985 which helped Running Up That Hill reach the Billboard top 30. Bush's prolonged absence during this period had led to rumors of weight gain, nervous breakdowns, plastic surgery, drug addiction, and rehab. But this new album would put the majority of that to rest as the media returned their attention back to her musical skills. On the back of that album and its four top 40 singles, Kate would become the biggest female artist in Britain. Had she so decided, she could have embraced the opportunity to become a global pop phenomenon. But this is Kate Bush we're talking about here and that just simply wasn't something that ever really interested her. Instead she followed a more remote path, having amassed the kind of sales that allowed for total creative freedom, Kate lost herself in her work. Then in the 90s, Kate Bush disappeared. A year prior in 1989, Kate suffered a massive personal loss when her good friend and guitarist, Alan Murphy, died of AIDS just as her sixth album, The Sensual World, was being released. The next year a dancer she worked closely with also died of AIDS. Two years after that, her mother would succumb to cancer. During this tragic time, Kate had been working on her sixth studio album, The Red Shoes. But with everything that was happening in her personal life, it would take her four years to record before finally dropping it in 1993. It's what happened next where things really began to go wrong. While working on a 15 minute conceptual film titled The Line the Cross and the Curve, Kate hit a downward spiral. She was thrown into a state of severe exhaustion by the film's poor reception, even though it's a criticism she herself would agree with saying about the project. I shouldn't have done it, I'm very pleased with four minutes of it but I'm very disappointed with the rest. But more than anything, it was clear that Kate hadn't given herself the necessary time to properly grieve the loss of her close friends and mom. So she bought a home in central London and slept all day long with breaks to watch some trashy daytime TV. During this period, she wasn't able to write music or even sing. She'd stayed in a later interview. Basically, the batteries were completely run out and I needed to re-stimulate again. Four years after her collapse, her son Albert was born in 1998 and he would change her life around completely. He became her top priority and she sought to keep everything about him a secret from the rest of the world. In fact, it was only when singer Peter Gabriel blurted it out that she was a mom now during an interview that anyone even knew what was going on with her. This was five years after Albert had been born. A few years later, Kate would return with her album Ariel in 2005, while critically acclaimed it would become the last of her projects to go platinum. But Kate had now become sensitive about something else, her weight. So after dropping new music, Kate disappeared once again. From 2005 to 2011, many myths circulated over what had happened to Kate Bush. Some claimed she had mental health problems, others that she was a compulsive overeater. More simply believed that she was a recluse, but in truth, Kate was really just enjoying a burst of domestic stability. Spending time with her husband, Danny McIntosh, a guitarist who she met in 1992 and watching their son grow up. She dropped two albums that year, Directors Cut and 50 Words for Snow, the first of which was reworked versions of her former hits, while the latter featured all new compositions. She also made a rare public appearance to accept a Southbank Arts Award and reminded everyone in attendance that despite all the rumors, she's really nothing more than a charming, if not nervous woman, who has simply chosen to live the majority of her life away from the spotlight. Then in March of 2014, Kate finally worked up the nerve for her first live concert series in decades. Before the dawn became a 22-night residency in London, in which tickets sold out in only 15 minutes and each performance received universal acclaim. Afterwards, she disappeared once again, which at this point I hope we were all expecting. And yet here we are nearly a decade later, and once again, Kate Bush is having herself a moment, thanks to the use of running up that hill as a musical motif in Season 4 of Stranger Things. In fact, the single became the most streamed song on Spotify in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and probably about half a dozen other countries I'm forgetting to name. On June 10th, 2022, it charted at number two on the UK Singles Chart, which surpassed its original peak of number three from 1985. Kate's response was, to be honest, somewhat uncharacteristic, because she seems extremely happy about what's happening, writing on her website. It's also exciting. I've never experienced anything quite like this before. I just want to say a really big thank you to everyone in the US who has supported the song. It's the first time I've had a top 10 single over there, and now it's in the top five. To be honest, has she written that statement on Instagram or Twitter, running up that hill could very well be at the top of the charts? But there's something charming about the fact that a woman who goes to such great length to shy away from the public eye, still operating her own website, which looks like it hasn't been updated since the early 2000s. As for where Kate Bush is now versus where she was before, well, I think we can all agree that she hasn't changed all that much. And considering the kind of artistic output she's always been capable of, there's nothing wrong with that. Here's hoping that this unexpected success will lead to her releasing her first album in nearly a dozen years, and we get another hit single that's just as big. Be sure to let me know what you thought of Kate Bush's transformation, and before you head out, take a second to like, subscribe, and ring that bell to show your support. Thanks for tuning in. Follow me on Instagram to chat, and I'll see you all in another video. Bye.