Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)

Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) — Kate Bush's Act of Creative Courage

The Riskiest Opening Move

Five years had passed between The Dreaming and whatever Kate Bush was going to do next, and the music world had changed enormously. Synth-pop had been mainstreamed and partially exhausted; post-punk had splintered into dozens of genre sub-categories; and the artist herself had retreated from public life with a completeness unusual even for someone known for guarding her privacy. The Dreaming itself had been commercially disappointing in some markets, its experimental density alienating listeners who had responded to the more melodic work on Never for Ever. Bush had used the intervening time to build a studio in her parents' home, giving herself complete creative autonomy for the first time at the cost of the external scrutiny that normally accelerates the creative process. When she emerged, she chose as her opening statement a song about wanting to swap places with another person, to trade psychological positions with a loved one in order to understand them completely, the opening statement of Hounds of Love in 1985. She was betting everything on an unusual concept executed in an unusual way.

The Sound That Made the Bet Pay Off

What strikes you immediately about Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) is its propulsive, almost martial rhythm section, a programmed beat that drives the track with mechanical insistence while Bush's voice weaves through and above it with the expressive warmth that no machine could replicate. The track's producer was Bush herself, demonstrating the full realisation of the creative control she had been negotiating toward since the early part of her career. The synth arrangement crests and retreats in waves, giving the song a sense of enormous emotional scale that its relatively spare instrumentation shouldn't logically generate. This is a record that sounds bigger than it should, and that paradox is at the heart of its power.

Thirty Weeks in the American Market

The song's American chart performance was a slow accumulation of momentum that eventually became remarkable in its scope. It debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on September 7, 1985, entering at number 95. Week after week it climbed, reaching its peak of number 30 on November 30, 1985, and ultimately spending 20 weeks on the Hot 100. For an artist whose relationship with American radio had always been complicated by her refusal to compromise her aesthetic for the mainstream, this represented a genuine breakthrough. Critically, the UK performance was even stronger; the song reached number 3 on the British Singles Chart and became a defining cultural moment of 1985 in her home country.

The Title Controversy and Its Resolution

The song was initially released with its full title, Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God), but some radio markets, concerned about the theological implications, broadcast it simply as Running Up That Hill. The UK and US both had pockets of resistance to the title's directness about bargaining with the divine, which said something about the cultural climate of 1985 that Bush herself found somewhat bewildering in later discussions of the period. The title's full form has since been restored in most commercial contexts, and the subtitle is now understood as essential to the lyric's meaning.

The 2022 Renaissance and Its Aftermath

The song's reappearance in the television series Stranger Things in 2022 gave it a second commercial life almost four decades after its initial release, taking it to number one in multiple countries and generating hundreds of millions of new streams. That renaissance demonstrated something the original 1985 chart run had suggested: this is music that operates outside its era. At 48 million YouTube views for this version, the original recording continues accumulating an audience that crosses every generational boundary.

Press play. Feel the beat establish itself, wait for the voice to arrive, and understand why this song refuses to age.

“Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” — Kate Bush's singular moment on the 1980s charts.