KATE BUSH - KING OF THE MOUNTAIN

Released: October 24, 2005

Charts:  UK: #4 

Kate Bush returned in 2005 after a 12-year silence with “King of the Mountain”, the lone single from her double album “Aerial”. It arrived on October 24 as an atmospheric meditation on fame, mythmaking, and the ghosts that both create and consume icons. The track climbed to No. 4 on the UK Singles Chart, her highest-charting single since the 1980s.

Originally written a decade before most of “Aerial”, the song orbits around a question lodged deep in popular culture: What if Elvis Presley never really died? Bush imagines the King hidden away somewhere snowy and remote, looking like a happy man and playing with “Rosebud,” the symbolic sled from “Citizen Kane”. The juxtaposition of these two American legends—Elvis and Charles Foster Kane—allows Bush to probe the crushing weight of celebrity, the ways in which wealth and adoration distort the human being at their center. “I don’t think human beings are really built to withstand that kind of fame,” she told BBC Four in 2005.

Bush leans into the mythic with a subtle, slurred vocal delivery that hints at Elvis without descending into parody. The production—handled by Bush herself—is dense, cold, and windswept, built on a pulsing rhythm and enveloping synth textures that mirror the song’s snow-shrouded imagery. Much of the vocal heard on the final track comes from an early demo recorded two years into her hiatus; Bush reportedly preferred the raw emotion of that early take to anything she attempted later.

Visually, “King of the Mountain” was introduced through an evocative animated music video directed by Jimmy Murakami. The clip premiered on Channel 4 on October 15, 2005, showcasing a dreamlike, almost surreal interpretation of the song’s themes. The single’s cover art added another personal touch: a drawing by Bush’s eight-year-old son, Bertie, whose presence and influence loom warmly throughout Aerial.

Although not as theatrically experimental as some of Bush’s earlier hits, “King of the Mountain” is a masterclass in restraint and atmosphere. It marks the beginning of her late-career renaissance—quiet, controlled, and confident—and reaffirms Bush as a singular storyteller, unbound by time, trends, or the expectations that fame once tried to impose on her.