Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)
Kate Bush's 1985 single peaked at No. 30 in the U.S. on first release. Thirty-seven years later, a single scene in Stranger Things made it her biggest American hit ever and the slowest climb to No. 1 in UK chart history.
By Song Reviews · October 22, 2026
Greatest of All Time!Kate Bush's 1985 single peaked at No. 30 in the U.S. on first release. Thirty-seven years later, a single scene in Stranger Things made it her biggest American hit ever and the slowest climb to No. 1 in UK chart history.
Kate Bush wrote “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” for 1985’s Hounds of Love, built around a premise unusual enough that EMI reportedly asked her to drop the “A Deal with God” subtitle for fear it would provoke religious controversy and hurt sales in some markets (Bush refused outright in several territories, including the UK). The song imagines a couple swapping places with each other – bargaining with God or fate to understand the other’s experience directly – set to a driving, synth-and-Fairlight arrangement that was genuinely strange for mainstream radio in 1985. It still became a UK top-five hit and Bush’s biggest American single to that point, though “biggest” meant a modest No. 30 peak on the Hot 100 – a real hit, not a phenomenon.
It stayed a well-regarded deep catalog favorite for the next thirty-seven years, the kind of song serious Kate Bush fans would cite before casual listeners recognized the title. That changed entirely in the summer of 2022, when Netflix’s Stranger Things used the song as a pivotal, repeated musical cue across its fourth season, attached to a character fighting her way back from a supernatural trance. The sync did something sales figures alone rarely manage: it sent “Running Up That Hill” to No. 1 on the UK singles chart that June, a full 37 years after its original release – the longest gap ever between a single’s release and its first week at No. 1 in UK chart history – while in the U.S. it reached No. 4 on the Hot 100, by far outperforming its original 1985 run, and hit No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200.
The numbers alone undersell what made the moment feel significant: a 37-year-old song outperforming its own original chart peak by just about every measure, driven entirely by a four-minute scene in a streaming show rather than any new version, remix, or re-recording. Bush’s original 1985 vocal and arrangement, untouched, simply met an audience in 2022 several times larger than the one it had on arrival – proof that a song built strange enough to unsettle a record label in 1985 could still land, exactly as recorded, on a generation that had never heard it before.
Greatest of All Time. The longest gap between release and a first UK No. 1 in chart history – 37 years, closed by one scene in one television show.
Hero image: Kate Bush, 1985 EMI publicity photo, by Guido Harari. Public domain in the United States.