By the time Kate Bush walked out of AIR Studios late one Sunday night in 1977, everyone in the building knew something special had just been finished. Engineer Jon Kelly had started the evening thinking he might get home at a reasonable hour. Producer Andrew Powell dropped the news around 11pm that EMI needed three mixes first thing in the morning and that Wuthering Heights had to be one of them. Kate stayed in the room for the entire overnight mix, quietly but firmly encouraging every decision. By dawn they had the version that would introduce her to the world and change Kelly’s career in the process.
Wuthering Heights ended up being the first single from The Kick Inside, but it came at the end of a much longer story. Bush had already been signed to EMI for a couple of years by the time the album sessions started. David Gilmour had championed her early demos and brought her to the label on the strength of songs like The Man With The Child In His Eyes and Berlin (later The Saxophone Song), both of which Geoff Emerick had recorded during an artist test and both of which were kept for the album. EMI then did something unusually patient: they let this intense, teenage songwriter go away to study dance, mime and voice while she wrote. By early 1977 she had a notebook full of songs and was ready to make a debut record properly.
On the other side of the glass, Jon Kelly was also stepping up for the first time. He had been a tape-op and assistant at AIR’s original Oxford Street facility, learning the craft under heavyweight engineers, most notably Geoff Emerick. Kelly sat in on sessions for Gino Vannelli, Robin Trower, Gallagher & Lyle and as many jingles as he could grab, simply because the advertisement work forced him to be fast and precise. He had already done a few smaller projects with Andrew Powell when the producer asked him to take on The Kick Inside as a full engineer. Wuthering Heights was among the first tracks they tackled.
The band cut the basic track in AIR Studio Two, a large room built around a 24-channel Neve desk, a 3M M79 24-track machine and Tannoy monitoring. The live line-up on Wuthering Heights was Kate at the Bösendorfer grand, Stuart Elliott on drums, Andrew Powell initially covering bass, and Ian Bairnson on six-string acoustic guitar. Kelly approached the sound very much through the lens of what he had learnt from Emerick. Drum overheads were Coles 4038 ribbons, supplying most of the size and tone. The snare took an AKG D19, a slightly rough dynamic that Emerick loved for its punch. Tom-toms were close-miked with Sennheiser 421s, the bass drum with an AKG D12, and a Neumann KM 84 sat on the hi-hat. It was a mid-70s pop studio sound: tight, controlled, quite dry, with no separate room mics and plenty of damping.
Bass was both direct and amplified. Kelly was keen at the time on the Susan Blue DI box and teamed it with a Marshall head and cabinet captured using a Neumann FET 47. Bairnson’s acoustic guitar was recorded with a Neumann U87, and Kelly used more U87s on Kate’s piano and her live vocal. He has always had a soft spot for that microphone, despite its reputation for sounding hard when soloed. In a mix, he found its efficiency and midrange focus invaluable.
Kate sang every basic track live with the band. Even though she almost always chose to replace the vocal later, those first performances set the tone. On Wuthering Heights she had already decided to inhabit Cathy’s voice completely, treating the lyric from Emily Brontë’s novel as a sort of ghost monologue. In the studio she leaned into the character, creating the high, eerie soprano that would shock radio listeners the following year. Kelly remembers that as a brand-new engineer, it was hard to imagine asking her to do anything “better”. She simply threw herself at every take with no half measures.
Once they had a rhythm track that felt right, the arrangement was built in layers. David Paton, who played bass on much of the rest of The Kick Inside, came in to add 12-string acoustic to Wuthering Heights. Bairnson re-cut his six-string part and Kelly double-tracked both guitars, tweaking the 24-track varispeed between passes so that the combined result had a natural width and a subtle chorus-like shimmer. Andrew Powell then hired in a celeste, which he used to decorate the intro and the pre-chorus passages with bright, chime-like arpeggios that shadow the piano motif. Kelly recorded the celeste with a Coles ribbon microphone aimed at the soundboard, finding the sweet spot by walking around the back of the instrument while Powell played, with Kate at his shoulder listening for where it “felt” right.
Percussionist Morris Pert came through for a dedicated overdub day covering several album tracks. On Wuthering Heights his main contribution was a set of crotales, small metal discs tuned like a glockenspiel. Kelly again doubled their patterns with the piano figure so that the top of the arrangement glinted, particularly towards the choruses.
The string and horn writing was handled, as on much of the album, by Powell. These parts were recorded in AIR Studio One, a much larger orchestral space capable of holding 60 or 70 players under a high, bright ceiling. For Wuthering Heights the section comprised eight first violins, six second violins, six violas, six cellos and three French horns. Kelly tried to keep the microphone count modest in that room. The basic approach was pairs of U87s over the firsts, seconds, violas and as general overheads, with FET 47s on the cellos and another 87 or two on the horns. The room itself did a lot of the work. He had already learnt that adding more and more microphones in Studio One could give a false impression of richness while actually introducing phase cancellations and thinning the sound. The strings were mixed down to stereo on the 24-track and the horns were combined to a single track.
Back in Studio Two, Ian Bairnson’s electric guitar solo for the outro was cut in the control room. He used a Les Paul through a Marshall head and 4×12 cabinet, with a pair of U87s on the cab, one close in and one pulled back a few feet for extra air. Kelly set up the monitoring and balance while Bairnson warmed up, gradually finding the long, melodic line that now weaves through the fade. Being in the control room cost him the usual interactive feedback you get from standing in front of a loud cabinet, something the young engineer tried to compensate for by asking him to play near the main monitors instead. It was another example of Kelly learning as he went, guided by experienced musicians who were entirely focussed on making Bush’s songs work.
The final lead vocal for Wuthering Heights was recorded later, late at night, once most of the arrangement was in place. This time Kelly chose a Neumann U67, which he felt had a top end that suited vocals slightly better than the 87, particularly for diction and brightness, and ran it through a Urei 1176 for control. There was only one free track left on the reel at that point, so there was no elaborate comping. Kate did two or three complete passes and they chose one, with maybe the odd small fix, but essentially a single performance captured on a single track.
Mixing for the album moved to AIR Studio Three, which at the time housed a new custom Neve console fitted with NECAM moving-fader automation. For an engineer graduating into full responsibility, it was both exciting and slightly distracting. Fader motors happily sliding around a desk can draw the eye away from what you are actually hearing, and some artists become anxious if they see that motion. Kelly would later say that this was one reason he liked the VCA approach on SSL consoles, where the automation works without the physical faders drawing attention to themselves.
With The Kick Inside, time was tight. Over one weekend Kelly mixed a couple of album tracks, including L’Amour Looks Something Like You and Moving. Late on the Sunday night Andrew Powell reminded him that EMI’s executives were due in the next day and needed three finished mixes. Wuthering Heights had to be among them. So they started again around midnight, with Kate staying throughout, and worked into the small hours. The mix itself was not especially complex. Two EMT 140 plates provided the main ambience: one straight, the other fed via a Studer running at 15ips to give a slightly delayed plate send. Otherwise it was largely a case of balancing a beautifully arranged multitrack where every part had a purpose.
Looking back, Kelly has said that if he had his time again he might have pushed Bairnson’s solo a touch louder, and he would apologise for that to the guitarist whenever they met. In reality the balance works, with the solo just lifting above the ensemble in the closing minutes without turning the record into a guitar showcase. The real focus remains on the song and on Kate’s extraordinary vocal.
When the album was nearly complete EMI initially earmarked James And The Cold Gun as the debut single. Bush pushed back hard for Wuthering Heights instead. Given how young she was at the time, it says a lot that the label eventually listened. Released in January 1978, the record went to number one in the UK and in many other territories, though it did not immediately break America. The British press took some time to decide whether this high, strange voice belonged to a serious artist or an eccentric novelty. Subsequent singles and albums quickly answered that question. For some listeners, including a fair number of studio people, Wuthering Heights also announced the arrival of Jon Kelly as a recording engineer with a feel for performance and arrangement, not just sonics.
Bush re-sang the track in 1986 for The Whole Story, which caused the expected debate amongst fans, but it is still the original mix that gets the most airplay and that most people think of when the song’s name is mentioned. What makes it stand up is the very thing Kelly remembers most fondly: everything was built around live playing and complete performances.
There were no samplers, no sequencers and no grid to fix things to. A young singer-songwriter who already knew she wanted to control her own work walked into a studio full of seasoned players, an equally new engineer and a sympathetic producer, and everyone supported the song until it became something unmistakable. Decades on, Wuthering Heights still sounds utterly like itself.