Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill, from Stranger Things to number one

“Running Up That Hill” entered the British singles chart on 17 August 1985. It climbed to number three on 31 August and stayed on the chart eleven weeks. Then it dropped out, the way any record does.

Thirty-seven years later it went to number one, and it took three weeks to get there.

What happens in between is the clearest view we know of what it means, now, for a song to land inside a television series.

Two returns that did not take

The track had not been sitting still. It re-entered at fifty-one in May 2012, then climbed to number six at the end of August that year, after the London Games.

Another re-entry came in September 2014, again at fifty-one, and lasted two weeks.

Both are real, measurable returns. Neither changed anything.

June 2022

On 9 June 2022 the track re-entered the chart at number eight. Five days earlier, on 4 June, Kate Bush had written on her site that the song was charting around the world thanks to the young viewers of Stranger Things.

On 23 June it was number one. It held on 30 June and 7 July: three weeks. It stayed on the chart for twenty-eight consecutive weeks, until 15 December.

Listen while you read

The three records, and what they actually measure

These are records of the calendar and the birth certificate, not of merit. That is exactly the point: the 1985 record did not change by a note. What changed is how people reach it.

What she said while it was happening

Kate Bush posted on her own site almost in real time, and the dates on the posts say how fast it went.

On 14 June she notes that the song is number one in Norway and Austria and that in the United States it has gone from eight to four: her first top ten single there in her whole career.

On 17 June, when the British number one arrives, she thanks the Duffer Brothers for using the song as a talisman for Max, one of the characters in the series.

I’m overwhelmed by the scale of affection and support the song is receiving and it’s all happening really fast, as if it’s being driven along by a kind of elemental force.

What happens to the catalogue

The least reported part is in the post of 1 July, the one about the third week at number one.

After a few lines of delight, Kate Bush turns to something practical: she keeps getting reports of a huge amount of unofficial merchandise, T-shirts and the rest, some of it very poor quality and some good enough to be mistaken for official.

She is careful to write that the only official material is what already existed, on the official sites.

That is the exact reverse of virality: when a song stops being yours and becomes a scene from a television series, whoever owns it finds out they no longer control anything around it.

On 17 June 2023, a year on, she posted about a billion streams. The image she used was of a river bursting its banks and splitting into a billion streams heading for the sea.