When Stranger Things made Running Up That Hill a pivotal part of its fourth series, the song became the most-streamed track of Kate Bush’s long career. But before she was synonymous with the Netflix sci-fi blockbuster, the singer had a connection with a very different TV show…
In 1979, Wow was released as the second single from Kate Bush’s album Lionheart. She revealed in a fan club interview that it was a song ‘about show business’, partly focusing on a struggling actor. The lines ‘He’ll never make the screen/He’ll never make The Sweeney’ namechecked ITV’s hard-hitting police drama, which had ended a year earlier after four series. Then as now – to borrow from the title of the show that brought her a whole new generation of fans – there were few things stranger than the disparate worlds of Kate Bush and The Sweeney converging.
At the time of Wow, the singer’s look rarely deviated from satin leotards, leg warmers or dresses that Morticia Addams would’ve killed for. She regularly employed mime and theatrical elements in her videos. As for her music, if Bush owned the copyright on the adjectives ‘ethereal’, ‘haunting’ and ‘enigmatic’ she’d be even wealthier than the Netflix royalties have made her. She was like a soul-baring, 19th Century Romantic heroine who’d somehow been transported, via a music-hall conjuring trick, to a Seventies dance studio. She seemed to be from a bygone age.
The Sweeney, on the other hand, were all about flooring the pedal of a Ford Consul and accelerating into the future. Before the show debuted there had already been significant erosion of the established dramatic tradition that saw the police portrayed as kindly, noble upholders of the law. Dixon Of Dock Green, which reached the thin blue finishing line in 1976, had been the exemplar of that outmoded concept – its eponymous lead character was an avuncular, firm-but-fair chap who solved most problems with a few wise words or a clip round the ear, depending on the circumstances. The arrival of The Sweeney was the tipping point that collapsed the entire edifice.
Named after the slang term for the Metropolitan Police’s Flying Squad, the show depicted a London where sweary, beery, fag-breathed men beat people up on deserted waste ground and in cavernous warehouses, kicked down people’s doors without warning and drove around the city with a glove compartment filled with handguns and out-of-date Wine Gums. And they were the good guys.
Kate Bush’s lyrics have been endlessly deconstructed for their meaning by fans and critics alike. She wrote a song listing 50 words for snow. By contrast, The Sweeney featured two unreconstructed male leads, DI Jack Regan (played by John Thaw) and DS George Carter (Dennis Waterman), who had 50 words for women – all of them derogatory.
In the present day, Kate Bush and The Sweeney are viewed very differently than they were in 1979. They’re still worlds apart, but now Bush is rightly regarded as the one who kicked down doors. Bjork, Tori Amos, Alison Goldfrapp, St Vincent, FKA Twigs and countless other women have been influenced by her music, as well as her determination to do everything on her own terms. Her debut single Wuthering Heights was the first song to be self-penned by a female artist and top the UK charts. In Wow itself, she sings about the actor in the song ‘hitting the Vaseline’ (lest the pre-watershed Top Of The Pops audience failed to get her meaning, in Wow’s accompanying video she patted her bum for extra clarity). The idea of her being an old-fashioned, out-of-time dreamer has been well and truly quashed. ‘She embodied the punk spirit by just being completely herself,’ Boy George has said. John Lydon is a confessed Bush superfan.
While Kate Bush’s star has never shone so brightly, The Sweeney now tends to be glimpsed through the parodic lens of a drama like Life On Mars. Also, ongoing revelations about the behaviour of many real-life Met officers cast a harsh light on certain aspects of the show’s characters. What passed for roguish charm in the Seventies hasn’t aged well. That doesn’t the lessen the impact The Sweeney had in its day, but its cultural collision with Kate Bush does feel stranger than ever.
Only in the alternate dimension of The Upside Down is it possible to imagine a further conflation of the two, with musical genius Bush and ‘feem toon’ enthusiast Dennis Waterman pooling their respective talents. Whatever the outcome of this fanciful venture, the recording session would almost certainly be interrupted at some point by DI Jack Regan barging into the studio and barking: ‘You, get your leg warmers on! You’re nicked!’
‘He’ll never make the screen/He’ll never make The Sweeney,’ she sang, referring to the hard-hitting ITV police drama that ran for four series from 1975 to 1978.
