It was November 1986, and in record shops across Britain, a new Kate Bush album was appearing on the shelves — except that it was not really a new album at all.
There were no new songs on the cover, or almost none. The twelve tracks inside were songs that millions of people already knew: a ghost on the moors, a boy and his father making it rain, a woman bargaining with God to swap places with the man she loves. What was new was the shape of it. For the first time, the whole story of Kate Bush — eight years of singles, from a nineteen-year-old’s debut to the most ambitious album of her career — was gathered in one place, in one running order, chosen by the artist herself.
The album was called The Whole Story. It was released on November 10, 1986. It went to No. 1 in Britain, became the best-selling record of her career, and then did something nobody expected: it kept coming back. It returned to the charts in 2014, when Bush finally returned to the stage after thirty-five years away. It returned again in 2022, when a television show introduced her music to a generation that had not been born when the album was made.
This is the story of a compilation that turned out to be much more than a compilation — and of the artist it summed up.
A First in More Ways Than One
The Whole Story was Kate Bush’s first compilation album and her first greatest-hits album anywhere in the world. It was released on November 10, 1986, by EMI, and it earned Bush her third UK number-one album. It went on to become her best-selling release, certified four-times platinum in the United Kingdom for 1.2 million copies shipped, and it also went gold in Canada, Germany, Belgium and New Zealand. In the United States it reached No. 76 on the Billboard 200.
The album contains eleven of Bush’s singles, recorded between 1975 and 1986, plus one new song. Its total running time is 48:53, and all twelve tracks were written by Bush herself. She produced the album alongside Jon Kelly and Andrew Powell, the two producers who had worked on her earliest records. Her next studio album, The Sensual World, would not arrive until 1989.
Twelve Songs, Eight Years
The track listing of The Whole Story reads like a map of Bush’s career so far. Side one opens with “Wuthering Heights,” “Cloudbusting,” “The Man with the Child in His Eyes,” “Breathing,” “Wow” and “Hounds of Love.” Side two continues with “Running Up That Hill,” “Army Dreamers,” “Sat in Your Lap,” “Experiment IV,” “The Dreaming” and “Babooshka.”
Each song comes from a different corner of her catalogue. “Wuthering Heights,” “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” and “Wow” come from her first two albums, The Kick Inside (1978) and Lionheart (1978). “Breathing,” “Army Dreamers” and “Babooshka” come from Never for Ever (1980). “Sat in Your Lap” and “The Dreaming” come from The Dreaming (1982). “Cloudbusting,” “Hounds of Love” and “Running Up That Hill” come from Hounds of Love (1985). And “Experiment IV” was brand new, recorded for the compilation.
There are two small but telling details in the track listing. The album opens with a new version of “Wuthering Heights,” with freshly re-recorded vocals — Bush revisiting the song that had made her famous, eight years on, and singing it again as an adult. And “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” appears in its album mix, rather than the single version. This was not a record company throwing old tracks together. It was the artist herself, choosing how her story should be told.
Critics approved. AllMusic gave the album four and a half stars out of five. Robert Christgau awarded it an A−. Sounds magazine gave it five stars, Spin magazine’s alternative guide rated it 9 out of 10, and The Great Rock Discography also gave it 9 out of 10.
“Wuthering Heights,” Sung Again
The decision to re-record the vocal on “Wuthering Heights” says a lot about Kate Bush. The original had been her debut single, released in 1978 when she was nineteen, and it had topped the UK Singles Chart for four weeks, making her the first female artist to achieve a UK number one with a fully self-written song.
The song was inspired by Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, and Bush sang it as Cathy, the novel’s heroine, calling out across the moors to Heathcliff. Two music videos were made for it: one in a dark room filled with mist, Bush in a white dress, suggesting Cathy’s ghost; the other outside on Salisbury Plain, Bush dancing in a red dress against the open landscape. She appeared on Top of the Pops with the song five times in 1978, and the performance — wide eyes, floaty fabrics, wild choreography — became her public image, still fondly mimicked and parodied today.
“Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)”
If one song on The Whole Story has had a second life bigger than its first, it is “Running Up That Hill.” It was the lead single from Hounds of Love, released in the UK on August 5, 1985, and it reached No. 3 in Britain and No. 30 in the United States — Bush’s greatest success in America up to that point, and the single that finally gave her heavy rotation on MTV.
The song’s history carries a small compromise that Bush never forgot. She originally titled it “A Deal with God,” imagining a deal with God that would let a man and a woman swap places, so each could truly understand the other. Her record label, EMI, felt the title was sensitive and could limit the song’s radio play, particularly in religious countries. Bush agreed to change it, as she had not had a hit song in some time and wanted to “give the album a chance.” On the album, the full title was kept: “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God).” In 2022, Bush said she still thought of the song with its original title.
EMI had also wanted to release “Cloudbusting” as the lead single from Hounds of Love. Bush insisted on “Running Up That Hill” first, because it was the first song written for the album and she felt it best represented the record as a whole. She was right. It became her most successful single of the 1980s, and — thirty-seven years later — her biggest hit of all.
“Cloudbusting”
“Cloudbusting,” the second track on The Whole Story, is one of the strangest and most moving songs ever to reach the charts. It was inspired by A Book of Dreams, the 1973 memoir by Peter Reich, which Bush had read and found deeply moving. The book tells the story of Peter’s childhood with his father, the psychiatrist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich, on their family farm in Maine, called Orgonon, where the two spent time with Reich’s invention, the cloudbuster — a machine he believed could make it rain.
The song is told from the point of view of the adult Peter, remembering his father, and it opens with a man waking from a dream of a childhood that is gone. The music video, directed by Julian Doyle and conceived by Terry Gilliam and Bush as a short film, starred the Canadian actor Donald Sutherland as Wilhelm Reich, with Bush herself playing the young Peter. In the video, Bush pulls a copy of A Book of Dreams from Sutherland’s coat — a direct reference to the book that inspired the song. Bush later sent Peter Reich a copy of the video; he was, by his own account, entranced by it.
“Experiment IV”: The One New Song
The only entirely new song on The Whole Story was “Experiment IV,” released as a single on October 27, 1986, three weeks before the album, to promote it. The single peaked at No. 23 in the UK Singles Chart and spent four weeks on the chart. It charted at the same time as “Don’t Give Up,” Bush’s duet with Peter Gabriel from his album So — the first time a British woman had charted two simultaneous Top 40 hits in the UK.
The song tells a story about a secret military plan to create a sound so horrific that it can kill people. It was a subject that suited Bush perfectly: science, secrecy, and a terrible idea escaping from the laboratory. The music video was directed by Bush herself, and it adapts the song’s storyline, following the destruction of a secret military installation by a creature made of sound. It featured the comedians Dawn French and Hugh Laurie among its cast, and Bush performed the song on the BBC television programme Wogan on October 31, 1986, with violinist Nigel Kennedy.
“Experiment IV” is the odd one out on The Whole Story — the only song that was not already a hit, and the only one that pointed forward rather than back. It showed that Bush, even while looking back over eight years of work, was still writing songs that nobody else would have written.
The Video Album
The Whole Story was released simultaneously as a home video compilation of the same name, containing the promotional videos for each song on the album, plus the video for “The Big Sky” from Hounds of Love. In the days before streaming, this was how fans collected an artist’s videos: on VHS, Betamax and LaserDisc. The video was nominated for Best Concept Music Video at the 1988 Grammy Awards.
Why It Still Matters
The Whole Story has had an unusually long afterlife for a greatest-hits album. In 2014, during Bush’s Before the Dawn residency at the Hammersmith Apollo — her first live shows since the Tour of Life in 1979 — the album returned to the UK Top 10. In 2022, after “Running Up That Hill” appeared in the Netflix series Stranger Things, the song became Bush’s second UK number-one single, thirty-seven years after its first release, and her highest entry on the US Billboard Hot 100, at number three, topping charts around the world. The Whole Story itself climbed back into the UK Top 20, peaking at No. 17, and Hounds of Love topped two Billboard charts and reached No. 12 on the Billboard 200.
That is the real test of a greatest-hits album: whether the songs still work when the moment that made them has passed. The Whole Story passed it twice — once in 2014, and once in 2022, when a generation of listeners who had never heard of Kate Bush discovered her through a television show and found, waiting for them, a single album that told the whole story.
Kate Bush: The Girl Who Wrote Her Own Rules
To understand The Whole Story, you have to understand the artist it sums up — a singer who arrived fully formed at nineteen, refused to be told what to do, and then spent the next decade making records that sounded like nobody else’s.
A Childhood of Music
Catherine Bush was born on July 30, 1958, at a maternity hospital in Bexleyheath, Kent, to an English doctor, general practitioner Robert Bush, and Hannah Patricia Daly, an Irish staff nurse, daughter of a farmer in County Waterford. She grew up with her elder brothers, John and Paddy, in a former farmhouse at East Wickham near Welling that was more than 350 years old. It was an artistic household: her mother was an amateur traditional Irish dancer, her father an amateur pianist, Paddy worked as a musical instrument maker, and John was a poet and photographer. Both brothers were involved in the local folk music scene.
Bush taught herself the piano at the age of eleven. She also played the organ in a barn behind her parents’ house and studied the violin, and she soon began composing songs, eventually adding her own lyrics. By her mid-teens, her family had produced a demonstration tape with over fifty of her compositions, which was turned down by record labels.
Discovered by a Pink Floyd
The tape found its way to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, through Ricky Hopper, a mutual friend of Gilmour and the Bush family. Gilmour was impressed, and financed the sixteen-year-old Bush’s recording of a more professional demo tape, produced by his friend Andrew Powell with the sound engineer Geoff Emerick, who had worked with the Beatles. The tape was sent to the EMI executive Terry Slater, who signed Bush in July 1976.
EMI put Bush on retainer for two years. The label’s managing director, Bob Mercer, believed her material was good enough to release, but also thought that if the album failed it would be demoralising, and that if it succeeded she was too young to handle it. Bush used the advance to enrol in interpretive dance classes taught by Lindsay Kemp, a former teacher of David Bowie, and mime training with Adam Darius. She wrote and recorded demos of almost two hundred songs, and from March to August 1977 she fronted the KT Bush Band at pubs in London, with Del Palmer on bass, Brian Bath on guitar and Vic King on drums. She began recording her first album in August 1977.
“Wuthering Heights”
Her debut album, The Kick Inside, was released in February 1978, when Bush was nineteen, and reached No. 3 on the UK Albums Chart. It included some songs written when she was as young as thirteen. EMI had originally wanted the more rock-oriented track “James and the Cold Gun” to be her debut single, but Bush, who already had a reputation for asserting herself in decisions about her work, insisted that it should be “Wuthering Heights.”
She was right. The song topped the UK and Australian charts and became an international hit. In the UK alone, The Kick Inside sold over a million copies. “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” reached No. 85 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in early 1979 and won her an Ivor Novello Award in 1979 for Outstanding British Lyric. According to Guinness World Records, Bush was the first female artist in pop history to have written every track on a million-selling debut album.
EMI capitalised on Bush’s appearance by promoting the album with a poster of her in a tight pink top. In a 1982 interview with NME, Bush criticised the choice: people were not even generally aware that she wrote her own songs or played the piano — the media just promoted her as a female body. It was a complaint she would return to throughout her career, and it helps explain why she guarded her independence so fiercely.
Late in 1978, EMI persuaded Bush to quickly record a follow-up album, Lionheart, to take advantage of the success of The Kick Inside. Produced by Andrew Powell and assisted by Bush, it spawned the hit single “Wow” and reached No. 6 in the UK, but Bush later expressed dissatisfaction with it, feeling it had needed more time.
The Tour of Life and the Headset
Following Lionheart, Bush was required by EMI to undertake heavy promotional work and an exhausting tour. The Tour of Life began in April 1979 and lasted six weeks. The Guardian described it as “an extraordinary, hydra-headed beast, combining music, dance, poetry, mime, burlesque, magic and theatre.” Bush was involved in every aspect of the production — choreography, set design, costume design and hiring — and the shows were noted for her dancing, complex lighting and seventeen costume changes per show. Because she needed to dance as she sang, sound engineers used a wire coat hanger and a radio microphone to fashion a headset microphone — the first use of a wireless headset by a rock performer. Her first experience as a producer was on her live On Stage EP, released in August 1979.
She would not tour again for thirty-five years.
Never for Ever and The Dreaming
Released in September 1980, Never for Ever was Bush’s second foray into production, co-producing with Jon Kelly. It was her first album to feature synthesisers and drum machines, in particular the Fairlight CMI, a technology she had been introduced to while providing backing vocals on Peter Gabriel’s third album in early 1980. It was her first record to reach the top of the UK Albums Chart, making her the first British solo female artist to achieve that status, and the first female artist ever to enter the album chart at No. 1. The top-selling single from the album was “Babooshka,” which reached No. 5 in the UK.
September 1982 saw the release of The Dreaming, the first album Bush produced by herself. With her new-found freedom, she experimented with production techniques, creating an album known for its near-exhaustive use of the Fairlight CMI and its dense, layered soundscapes. It received a mixed reception in the UK, and critics were baffled by how much less accessible it seemed. In a 1993 interview with Q magazine, Bush called it “my ‘She’s gone mad’ album.” It entered the UK Albums Chart at No. 3, but it remains her lowest-selling album, earning only a silver disc. It was, however, her first album to enter the US Billboard 200, reaching No. 157.
Hounds of Love
After The Dreaming, Bush took her time. She built a home studio, and throughout 1984 she recorded Hounds of Love, released in September 1985. It became her second UK No. 1 album, knocking Madonna’s Like a Virgin from the top of the chart, and by far her greatest success in America, reaching No. 30 on the Billboard 200.
The album takes advantage of the vinyl format with two very different sides. The first side contains five accessible pop songs, including the four singles “Running Up That Hill,” “Cloudbusting,” “Hounds of Love” and “The Big Sky.” The second side, The Ninth Wave, is a suite of seven connected songs about a woman lost at sea. It was the album that made Bush’s reputation as an artist without limits — and it was the album that supplied three of the twelve tracks on The Whole Story.
In 1986, the year of The Whole Story, Bush was nominated for four BRIT Awards, duetted with Peter Gabriel on “Don’t Give Up” from his album So — the duet reached the UK Top 10 after Gabriel’s original choice for the female vocal, Dolly Parton, turned the offer down — and won the BRIT Award for British Female Solo Artist in 1987.
The Long Quiet — and the Return
After The Whole Story came The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993), and then a long silence. Bush took a hiatus between her seventh and eighth albums, returning with Aerial in 2005, followed by Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow, both released in 2011 on her own label, Fish People. Since The Dreaming in 1982, she has produced all of her studio albums herself.
In 2014, she returned to the stage with Before the Dawn, a concert residency at the Hammersmith Apollo — her first shows since the Tour of Life in 1979 — which received widespread acclaim. In 2022, “Running Up That Hill” found a vast new audience through Stranger Things, and Bush, who had always been a cult figure in America, suddenly had a US Top 3 hit at the age of sixty-three.
Her honours include fourteen BRIT Award nominations, seven Grammy nominations, the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music in 2002 and an Ivor Novello fellowship in 2020. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to music, and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023.
The Story, Whole
Kate Bush has always resisted being summed up. She writes her own songs, produces her own records, directs her own videos, and disappears for years at a time. A greatest-hits album should have been the last thing she needed. But The Whole Story works precisely because it does what Bush herself does: it trusts the songs to speak for themselves.
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