Kate Bush

Ashley — it never ends.

I heard RUTH on the hit radio station today. They introed it with “We keep you safe from the Upside Down”

[looks around, sees no monsters] mr presidetn i would like to buy your radio station

Kate Bush couldn't save Earth - what chance to we have? She now has power - beyond measure! We thought she was dead - we killed her! She swooped into the charts like some great predatory bird - of the two-legged variety!

And so forth. Also the theme song for Transformers: The Movie was "The Touch", by Stan Bush. It's obvious that the film-makers wanted to hire Kate Bush instead, but they couldn't remember who she was. "The Touch" even sounds like a Kate Bush song title.

Oh, I give up. There isn't a formal connection between Kate Bush and the Transformers franchise. The problem with building a joke of this nature is that there needs to be something, some plausible-sounding link between the two, and there isn't any. The toy franchise's heyday happened in the gap between two of Kate Bush's albums, and although the UK Marvel comic was highly-rated it didn't have much influence over the franchise as a whole. Its creative hearts were in the US, where Kate Bush was a non-entity, and to a much lesser extent Japan, where I understand she had a small cult following. There are no photos of Kate Bush sitting in the studio with a row of Transformers toys in the background.

As a kid I always felt sorry for girls because they had such crap toys. Kate Bush grew up in that era. Who knows how she might have turned out if her parents had bought her an AT-AT or something. The other kids would have flocked to play with her AT-AT and she would have learned at an early age that people only value you for what you have, not who you are. But as a girl she probably learned that when she hit puberty. Who knows. They're unknowable.

Still, it amuses me that a thread about Kate Bush has degenerated into a mixture of half-baked jokes and a couple of posts by I REFUSE etc that are so baffling I can't tell whether they're relevant or not. It's like when Ilxor threads start going on about "Bruenig stans". I mean, what?

Just heard RUTH twice on the radio in cabs in Mexico City last week. She's saturating globally at this stage. You love to see it!

Right, that's it she's touring Mexico next year ..

sorry Ashley! i am being a nonsense and you can safely ignore me

Wait she’s doing a concert in Mexico? When? I can’t find info

I think that was a joke

Opening for Morrissey

she is not playing in Mexico, that was a joke. i do not believe Kate Bush will get on an airplane.

she's coming via Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

people have been saying that Kate Bush is touring in Mexico. It's a thing that's out there.

I mean, some of the old second-tier prog acts are doing cruises. It's a thing.

katarina arbusto's cover is blown

genuine lol @ Neanderthal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrg1UAixGaM

"sorry Ashley! i am being a nonsense and you can safely ignore me"

No, don't apologise. It worked brilliantly. Your posts were like the little air snips that hairdressers make when they cut your hair in between the actual cutting snips. They were the gaps between notes in a jazz record. They were Spike Milligan in Life of Brian suddenly appearing from nowhere. You were a brilliant little cameo appearance. And I envy you, because you possess something that I do not. Spontaneity, and sincerity. A genuine connection with the irrational subconscious.

I have struggled all my life against rationality. My subconscious is trapped in a hard outer shell. I am envious of people who are not rational, or who can tap into the irrational world. People who can break that shell. They have a completely different strategy for survival and are wired differently. I can only observe them, and mimic them, just as we can only observe Kate Bush, and mimic her - or covet her.

It's often said that we spend our whole lives trying to recapture the sensation we had when we did something for the first time. When we played Pac-Man for the first time, or saw Jennifer Connelly in Labyrinth for the first time. We spend our lives trying to recapture that but it doesn't work because our nerves get tired and wear out. We have to keep snorting bigger and bigger lines of cocaine to get the same hit until eventually we're like mosquitoes swallowing whole chunks of DDT. You managed to capture that without breaking a sweat. I could never do what you do.

And if I only could.....

Heard "Hill" on the regular radio today for the first time, on the lite FM channel. I agree a decade or so of music inspired by this strain of '80s music really set the stage for this resurgence.

Alek Manoah is an All-Star on the mound and the mic 😅@Alek_Manoah6 | #AllStarGame

(via @MLB) pic.twitter.com/SezYSMukPL

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) July 20, 2022

i do believe that is RUTH on the organ at the mlb all-star game

well that rules.

off the thread topic, but it's amazing that baseball has crossed over into interviews with players who are actively playing in the game.

i know this is the all-star game, but i saw them talking to an outfielder the other night.

Ashley, I own that Transformers issue -- I own every issue actually.

according to my last.fm, the first time i heard "running up that hill" was 13 july 2010 at 1202pm and i listened to it at least 7 more times in the next 24 hours and about 30 times in the following week. if i heard the song before that, i don't remember.

but yeah: as soon as i started paying attention to it, it was an immediate hit.

There was a remix I got from ILM maybe a decade ago that I kept on my iTunes, and it really made me hear the song with fresh ears.

In the past couple days on social media I've seen one record store offer an original picture sleeve 45 of RUTH for $50, and another shop announce they'd just gotten in a US first press Hounds of Love on vinyl which can be yours for $75.

if i only could, i'd make a deal with todd and i'd get him to slash those prices

lollll a+

running up that bill

I hope #StrangerThings keeps going to be based in 1994 @Portisheadinfo pic.twitter.com/LueqgAnYVn

— 🏴‍☠️ Geoff Barrow 🏴‍☠️ (@jetfury) August 2, 2022

Okay, "classic pop"-type radio stations are working this into their playlists as if this was really played on US mainstream radio in 1985. It was played on college radio and some album rock stations.

Which is bullshit everywhere except Hollywood's mind.

It peaked at 30 but people weren't bopping to it with Cyndi Lauper and Huey Lewis.

Although the track’s streaming numbers have recently declined – down 12.5% in official U.S. streams since last week, according to Luminate – copious radio airplay has more than compensated for the dip, making “Running Up That Hill” an even bigger hit than it was during the peak of Stranger Things hype in May and June. For the Aug. 6 charts, the track held at No. 3 for a second week on the Hot 100, and climbed from No. 10 to No. 7 on Billboard‘s Radio Songs listing, an increase of 17%, to 48.4 million impressions. The crossover to massive radio success is a rarity for recent viral catalog hits – from Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” on TikTok in 2020 to Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” from The Batman earlier this year to Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” in the same Stranger Things season last month, none of which have made it to Radio Songs this decade – making “Running Up That Hill” a sort of unicorn.

“Somehow we’ve been able to traverse that Stranger Things moment,” Chester says. “It’s transcended and bridged to passive audiences.” Adds Michael Martin, Audacy’s senior vp of programming, as well as program director for pop station Alice@97.3 in San Francisco, which has played the track 1,100 times — more than any other station, according to Luminate — “This is a rarity. This happens few and far between.”

Also:

Between the latest season debut of Stranger Things on May 27 and the end of June, Bush earned an estimated $2.3 million in streaming royalties, Luminate, an independent company that provides data for Billboard’s charts, told Fortune, and Quartz originally reported.

A spokesperson for Luminate said the company calculated the $2.3 million figure by using a standard formula to convert streams into projected revenue.

“We can’t speak to who actually earns the money, as that involves taking a deeper dive into individual contracts/publishing/master ownership, and we don’t track that with our data,” the spokesperson said.

But in a rarity for the music industry, Bush owns the entire copyright to original recordings of her songs—including “Running Up That Hill”—through her independent record label Noble & Brite, Quartz reported. As a result, Music Business Worldwide, a global music industry news site, estimates the singer retains the majority, possibly up to 80%, of royalties generated from her biggest hits. Many major artists do not own their original recordings, giving their labels the rights to distribution and therefore giving up a significant cut of any royalties.

https://fortune.com/2022/07/07/kate-bush-running-up-that-hill-stranger-things/

It still amuses me every time I hear this on the radio sandwiched between Doja Cat and Jack Harlow.

I heard it on the radio last Monday after "Levitating."

“Somehow we’ve been able to traverse that Stranger Things moment,” Chester says. “It’s transcended and bridged to passive audiences.” Adds Michael Martin, Audacy’s senior vp of programming, as well as program director for pop station Alice@97.3 in San Francisco, which has played the track 1,100 times — more than any other station, according to Luminate — “This is a rarity. This happens few and far between.”

hahahaha

But in a rarity for the music industry, Bush owns the entire copyright to original recordings of her songs—including “Running Up That Hill”—through her independent record label Noble & Brite

this keeps getting better and better

I'm going to remember this and Alex Jones as the interregnum high point

Seems like someone adding "Hounds of Love" or "Cloudbusting" to a playlist would do something with this momentum.

Okay, "classic pop"-type radio stations are working this into their playlists as if this was really played on US mainstream radio in 1985. It was played on college radio and some album rock stations.

KROQ here in LA always being the odd exception. ROTH was in semi-heavy rotation - enough to get into the station's top songs of 1985 (in between "A View To A Kill" and Arcadia's "Election Day").

yeah alternative (or rather, 'modern rock') stations of the period clearly the outliers. I'm frankly rather surprised it ever got as high on regular charts in 1986 in the US as it appeared to; I can assure you I never heard it once on the radio here until sometime in 1987 when I lived in the bay area and had a modern rock station to listen to. even then I didn't hear it very regularly.

My kids have always been fans of "Stranger Things," and I remember the first season getting them to play "Should I Stay Or Should I Go," and the second season "Every Breath You Take." But of course neither of those songs took off (again) in the mainstream, I suspect because Tik Tok wasn't quite a thing yet (right?). Tik Tok appeared around 2017, the same year as the second season of "Stranger Things." (As my kids noted, there was no big breakout song moment of Season 3.) Curious what others songs will benefit from this new way of consuming/discovering music going forward. Saw someone post this well-edited fan movie giving a taste of things to come:

The Future of Marvel

Song: Running Up That Hill
*Headphones On*
pic.twitter.com/vLVSojwkXY

— Aaron (@ShangChiTheGOAT) August 5, 2022

that was fan made, certainly?

oh duh as noted I should like actually read

I'm frankly rather surprised it ever got as high on regular charts in 1986 in the US as it appeared to; I can assure you I never heard it once on the radio here until sometime in 1987 when I lived in the bay area and had a modern rock station to listen to. even then I didn't hear it very regularly.

The crazy story I have is that I first heard "Big Sky" when the video was in semi-heavy rotation on MTV. There was somewhat of a promo push behind The Whole Story comp - I think the video for "Experiment IV" was on the first episode of 120 Minutes.

i hear the song pretty much every time i put the radio on now. once after the adult contemporary station played it the on-air guy said that he hates the song, hated it back in the 80s, and doesn't like any of kate bush's music, but "we know you all like it so we're playing it anyway". rude! but i appreciate the honesty regardless since it's abundantly clear that most ppl who work for radio now couldn't give less of a shit about any of the music they play

haha wow I can't believe there are still DJs on normal radio TBH. I haven't listened to anything but NPR in several years.

yeah and with inferior banter like that, they should be phased out by award season i would hope.