Kate Bush is the burn out balm we need

She ran up that hill and is now just relaxing in her garden.

She ran up that hill and is now just relaxing in her garden.

She was doing Break My Soul before Beyoncé.

And Taylor’s Version before Taylor Swift.

She doesn't do social media, only has a phone that can text and make calls, rarely emails, and now just works in her garden.

Kate Bush is back in the zeitgeist and on top of the charts with a song she wrote, recorded and released 37 years ago.

Running Up That Hill is now No 1 in the UK charts and could spend a second week at the top despite high-profile new releases from Drake and Bey hitting streaming services this week.

It is at No 5 in the US, down from a peak of No 4 last week, which made it her first US Top 10 hit.

The ditty has also spent 14 weeks in the No 1 spot on the Australian ARIA charts, trumping Harry Styles.

She was, and remains a rare commodity in music, as she quickly established her own company - Noble & Brite - back in the day which owns the recording rights to the song and many of her other bangers.

Bush is reportedly pulling in more than $1m a week right now as she wrote, produced and owns 100% of the songwriting, publishing and licensing rights to Running Up That Hill.

Things female artists have only recently started establishing, like Tay and Bey.

We're just out here waiting for Bush's style to start hitting like her music.

The song's success has made Bush the oldest woman to top the UK singles charts and the artist with the longest gap between chart topping singles after Wuthering Heights hit top spot 44 years ago.

Bush is an enigma and has been ever since she burst onto the music scene in the late 1970s.

She's shunned the spotlight and parties. Instead she preferred (and still does) spending time at home with her family, her dogs and garden. She rarely gives interviews so it was with great excitement when it was announced she'd speak to BBC Radio, for her first chat since Running Up That Hill re-emerged on Stranger Things this year.

While some things haven't really changed - she's on top of the charts, Top Gun is number one at the box office, the US may be in recession and there's no end to sight to this Cold War 2.0 with Russia - Bush's outlook continues to be refreshingly unique.

Speaking to Emma Barnett on the the Woman's Hour, Bush said the situation she was experiencing was “just extraordinary… quite shocking really, isn't it? I mean, the whole world’s gone mad.”

She described 2022 as “an incredibly exciting time … OK, so it’s an awful time on a lot of levels for people. Very difficult. But it's also a time when incredible things are happening. Technology is progressing at this incredible rate. That’s pretty overwhelming, really. But, you know, there’s so many advances in medicine and there are positive things – you just have to look a bit harder to find them at the moment, I think.”

One of the most enduring and inspirational aspects of Bush as an artist, and public persona, is that she never looks in the rearview mirror and rarely checks her side mirrors.

"I never listen to my old stuff," she said.

She literally marches to the beat of her own drum. Many of her original fans are pissed she went through Wuthering Heights, ran all that way up that hill to make a deal with God, shouted "Babooshka!" and bitched about Houdini for us to be only finding out about her now, but she is delighted. And really, that's all that matters.

The song is a key motif for Max in season four of Stranger Things and Bush is thrilled her music has been used in the series she's been watching and loving.

"What a lovely way for the song to be used in such a positive way. You know, as a kind of talisman almost really for Max," Bush said.

The original title was to be A Deal With God, but "I think they were just worried, the record company, that it wouldn’t get played on the radio. That people would feel it was a sensitive title," she added.

"I really like people to hear a song and take from it what they want. But originally it was written as the idea of a man and a woman swapping with each other. Just to feel what it was like, from the other side."

In a previous interview in 1986, she elaborated on the song's meaning, saying it was: "About the fundamental differences between men and women, I suppose trying to remove those obstacles, being in someone else's place; understanding how they see it, and hoping that would remove problems in the relationship." 

This isn't the end of the song. A promo of the upcoming Stranger Things finale features a remix.