HAVE you ever been caught singing “It’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home now. I’m so co-o-o-old” in the shower? 

Maybe you’ve been going about your day only to be stopped in your tracks by This Woman’s Work coming on and then needed a few minutes to compose yourself.

You might even have spent hours wondering how someone could have written The Man With The Child In His Eyes at the age of 13 when your biggest achievement by that point in your life was managing to get through your Bar Mitzvah without your voice breaking during the ceremony. 

That last one’s pretty universal, I’d imagine. 

These very wholesome pleasures are available to anyone who enjoys the music of Kate Bush, and in recent weeks that world has opened up for millions of teenagers. 

Season four of the hit Netflix series Stranger Things premiered late last month, and much of the discourse around it has centred on the use of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill in episode four. It’s unsurprising that a show revolving around the supernatural would eventually deploy one of pop’s most otherworldly performers. 

The song soundtracked pivotal moments involving a key character, and evidently made a huge impression on the show’s viewers. Bush, who had never reached the American top 10 in a 45-year music career, suddenly found herself at number four in the US Billboard chart, not to mention number two in the UK and top of the Australian, Belgian and Swedish charts among others. 

The 63-year-old, who’s not exactly prolific when it comes to public pronouncements, wrote on her website that the song “is being given a whole new lease of life by the young fans who love the show - I love it too!”, adding: “It’s all really exciting! Thanks very much to everyone who has supported the song. I wait with bated breath for the rest of the series in July.”

A national treasure has been discovered by a new generation of fans, and is evidently delighted by that fact. You would think this would be cause for celebration all round.

The internet being the internet, though, there has been plenty of eye-rolling. ‘Not Gen Z calling Kate Bush the Stranger Things woman’, that kind of thing.

The options seem pretty limited for Gen Z (ages 10-25) - either listen to new pop music and be told it’s not ‘real music’ or discover ‘real music’ and be told you’ve not discovered it correctly.

Yes, we’re gatekeeping the music of Kate Bush now. It’s that ‘Nice Ramones t-shirt. Bet you can’t name five songs’ attitude from the ‘00s all over again.

You shouldn’t have to pass some kind of purity test to be considered a legitimate fan. The Stranger Things demographic isn’t typically 54-year-old Mojo magazine subscribers.

You don’t win a prize for having been a teenager upon the release of Running Up That Hill in 1985 and being able to pull out a pristine 7” single 37 years later.

Cult act Badfinger’s 1971 release Baby Blue received a 3000% sales boost after it soundtracked the final scene of Breaking Bad 41 years later. Six years earlier, Journey’s 1981 hit Don’t Stop Believin became the most popular digital download song to have been released in the 20th century after accompanying the final moments of the Sopranos. As anyone who’s attended Cosmopol karaoke bar on Hope Street at any point in the last 15 years will tell you, that song has since taken on a life of its own. 

The right placement in a film or TV show can have a huge cultural impact, and that’s what we’ve witnessed with Kate Bush and Stranger Things. Instead of worrying about how people discover classic music, we should just be grateful that they’ve discovered it.

You’re not automatically handed a copy of her Cloudbursting album at the age of 13, so if a 13-year-old is now filming a TikTok video about making ‘a deal with God’ we should just be thankful that an iconic musician is finding new followers this far into her career. 

Besides, it’s not even the first time her music has been given an unexpected boost. As a veteran of the mid-noughties indie scene, I first became familiar with Bush’s Hounds of Love through the ‘Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh’ refrain of Sunderland post-punk band The Futureheads’ 2005 cover.

That one reached number eight in the UK charts, and pointed me towards her back catalogue just as Stranger Things has done for so many others. 

Kate Bush is a singular artist beloved by musicians as diverse as Elton John, St Vincent and rapper Big Boi of Outkast. Talking about Running Up That Hill in a 2018 Pitchfork interview, Big Boi said: “Her voice was just angelic. I hadn’t heard nobody do it like that.”

When you’re young you’re not supposed to have any interest in the music your parents listen to. The fact that teenagers have been exposed to and appreciated that angelic voice is something to celebrate. 

Anyway, these bloody youngsters should be discovering Kate Bush the appropriate way - typing ‘Alan Partridge Kate Bush medley’ into YouTube.