The resurgent popularity of Kate Bush’s wondrous ballad Running Up That Hill continues as the song races yet higher up the UK charts. It reaches No 2 this week, behind Harry Styles’s As It Was, marking the highest ever position for Bush’s song.
On its original release in 1985, Running Up That Hill reached No 3 during an 11-week run in the charts. It then re-entered at No 6 in 2012 after the song was re-recorded and featured in the closing ceremony of that year’s Olympics.
Last week it appeared again, at No 8, having been used a major plot point in the fourth season of the Netflix series Stranger Things and discovered by a new generation of listeners. Earlier this week it became Bush’s first ever US Top 10 hit, reaching No 8.
It is now the most-streamed song in the world each day on Spotify, earning nearly 8m plays a day. In the UK on Spotify, it is now massively outperforming Styles’s song, earning around 750,000 plays each day versus around 500,000 for Styles. If it can maintain its momentum, it could finally top the UK singles chart next week. It is also the most played track each day on Apple Music in the UK.
Styles, whose world stadium tour kicks off this weekend in Glasgow, spends his 10th week at the top with As It Was. He could soon see a sharp drop down the charts thanks to a rule called “accelerated decline” kicking in after nine weeks. To keep the charts fresh and varied, the rule means that songs with three consecutive weeks of declining streams are penalised after they reach that nine-week point.
Someone resisting that rule with an ever-more popular song is British singer-songwriter Cat Burns, whose ballad Go spends a 13th week in the Top 10 at No 3. At No 4 is Lizzo with About Damn Time, and at No 5 is Eurovision winner Sam Ryder, after a barnstorming rendition of his song Space Man at last weekend’s platinum jubilee celebrations.
Styles also tops the album chart for a second week and becomes the first artist in 2022 to get more than one week at No 1. Post Malone’s new album Twelve Carat Toothache is the highest new entry at No 3.
Liverpudlian singer-songwriter Michael Head reaches No 6 with his album Dear Scott, backed by the Red Elastic Band. This is his highest-ever chart position in a critically acclaimed career that stretches back to the early 1980s with his band the Pale Fountains, and the 1990s with his next group Shack.
