If you want to look at this through one end of the telescope, then Kate and her creepy squeak could be dismissed as a novelty hit on par with The Wurzels. After all, both are telling a story that's inherently reliant on funny voices to get their point across. In Kate's case, it was a voice that caused no small amount of amusement in 1978. Contemporary reporting usually prefaced her name with 'helium voiced' or some suchlike to the point that most commentators seemed to think there was nothing else worthy of focussing on (The Not The Nine O'Clock News team were still taking the piss as late as 1980). Such was the interest I think it's fair to say that, had she had fallen under the wheels of a bus (or perhaps, to be more charitable, had retired) in April 1978, then like as not then that's how she would now be remembered - as a one hit wonder with a hard wired gimmick no better and no worse than Aneka and her 'Japanese Boy', a summation that would have been sealed by Kate's own wildly over the top performances of the song using a mime/dance routine that even Pan's People may have rejected as being too literal. That's one way of looking at it all anyway, but to turn that telescope 'round the right way then 'Wuthering Heights' by itself can be seen as a stand alone single that can only be dismissed as novelty by lazy folk with their ears half cocked. And by 'stand alone', I don't mean just through its own inherent strangeness; by one definition, 'Wuthering Heights' can be regarded as the first and last recording by Kate Bush Mark 1, and 'The Man With The Child In His Eyes' being the first release proper by the Kate Bush we've all come to know. And that's because 'Wuthering Heights' barely seems sung by 'Kate Bush' at all - far from a simple third party précis of Bronte's novel, this tale is told from the viewpoint of Catherine Earnshaw's ghost, and Bush adopts this persona of 'Cathy' as completely as if she were acting as a medium for the latter's voice.
Bush doesn't normally sing in that register, in fact she rarely did again (she in re-recorded the song in 1986 for her 'The Whole Story' compilation in her more conventional range and it loses far, far more than it gains), but on 'Wuthering Heights' there's method in her madness, and that method is madness. The vocal keens and swoops throughout the song, adopting and then discarding emotions at the turn of every word conveying the idea of a woman who no longer knows what to feel - "How could you leave me? When I needed to possess you? I hated you, I loved you too".
Bush's gothic treatment is soaked through with a helpless tragedy of a woman who can't find peace even in death*, a lost soul still pining for a happy ending that can't possibly come; "Too long I roam in the night. I'm coming back to his side to put it right". Throughout the song, her delivery is pitched at such a self absorbed and unhinged level that the "Oh it gets dark, it gets lonely, on the other side from you" suggests even all the other ghosts are too sacred to talk to the mad woman with the Heatcliffe obsession and leave her well alone.
The brittle persona of Cathy is further carried over into the music with the dominant high key piano runs sparkling like shards of broken glass, giving the song it's own 'Twilight Zone' aura and so it's a shame (to me at least) when a conventional rock guitar solo on the outro brings the whole thing crashing back to reality. But no matter - 'Wuthering Heights' is a startlingly evocative debut, a song as rich and deep as the novel it's based on. Off the wall yes, but there's a lot more to it than simply surface kookiness and in an arena somewhere in my imagination Kate herself is forever doomed to slug it out with Donna Summer as part of a tag team against 'Dancing Queen' for the title of 'Best Number One Of The Seventies'.
* As an aside, this reminds me of Bob Dylan's 'Death Is Not The End'
"When you're sad and when you're lonely
And you haven't got a friend
Just remember that death is not the end"
Dylan presents it as a song of hope, a message that no matter how shit things are here on earth, it's not the be all and end all and that there's better to come. The song was covered by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds on their 'Murder Ballads' album where Cave and his merry men skewed Dylan's meaning 180 degrees until he's telling you that no matter how shit things are here on earth, there's an eternity of it to come after you're dead. Perhaps the most chilling example of this kind of reasoning comes in Tom Waits' 'Poor Edward', an allegedly true story of Victorian era Edward Mordrake, a man born with a second, female face on the back of his head. According to the story, the extra face could neither eat nor speak, but it could laugh and cry, but in Waits' telling "at night she spoke to him of things heard only in hell". With operating not an option, Edward sought peace through suicide, only to find that the face followed him to hell:
"Some still believe he was freed from her:
But I knew her too well
I say she drove him to suicide
And took Poor Edward to Hell"
Makes you realise that Cathy got off lightly!
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