Sunday 6^th September 2026. At lunchtime I walk to the beach at St Leonards to watch a massed gathering of Kate Bush impersonators.

This is now a regular organised event known as  ‘The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever’. There have been versions staged all over the world for the past ten years. One in Melbourne, Australia, had about four thousand participants.

The idea is to recreate Ms Bush’s performance in one of the promotional videos for her 1978 hit ‘Wuthering Heights’. Specifically the video in which she dances outdoors on a cold grassy hill, wearing a floaty poppy-red dress and a flower in her hair.

Today’s event is part of the Hastings art festival Coastal Currents. For all the frivolity and dressing-up, this association with the festival gives the occasion just the right amount of tastefulness for the people of St Leonards to get involved. The song ‘Wuthering Heights’ is, after all, a tribute to that literary icon, Emily Bronte.

(Am I the kind of writer who needs to note the fact that Kate Bush has the same birthday as Emily Bronte? Yes, I appear to be. 30^th July. )

Today, the location is Bottle Alley, the 1930s covered promenade that links Warrior Square to Hastings Pier. No grassiness in sight, nor heights – this is literally at sea level. Last year there was an attempt to hold the event up on Hastings West Hill, but it had to be cancelled at the last minute due to mud. Instead, a guerilla gathering of dancers took to the beach near the Goat Ledge cafe and did it there.

This year, the beach setting is official and properly organised. And modernist concrete tunnels go, Bottle Alley is at least a little more colourful than others. It is a contender for the phrase ‘camp modernism’, as with Marine Court nearby, that 1930s apartment block in permanent drag as the Queen Mary ocean liner.

Bottle Alley’s walls are made up of fragments of polished coloured glass from old bottles, hence the name. Then at night the lighting  panels that run along the top of the walls are programmed to create multi-coloured moving light shows. This not only adds to the unique aesthetic of the passageway, but also helps to keep it free from crime. Presumably muggers find it difficult to operate in a space where the lights constantly dance around and change colours. If in doubt, add camp.

The Kate Bush song plays on speakers, while a choreographer, Joanna Boulton, directs from a special stage on the beach. She has a radio mic and is aided by two assistant dancers at her side. Such is the popularity of the event that there actually is a second stage further along the beach towards the pier, where more assistants relay the instructions. There is a dress rehearsal, then a proper performance, then a repeat by way of an encore.

Some of Ms Bush’s dance moves are a kind of melodramatic semaphore. Others are rather good jokes: for the line ‘bad dreams in the night’, one must hold one’s arms out stiffly in front, in the style of Frankenstein’s monster.

I stand on a small hill of shingle on the beach to get a good view of the dancers. There are hundreds of them along Bottle Alley, a sea of red dresses, arms flailing in waves togather, a neat mirror to the sea waves behind me. All ages, though mostly female. Little girls dance along with older women who lean on their walking frames.

I am so charmed by the event that after it’s over, I talk to some of the strangers around me, wanting to share the delight. One is a woman who gives her name as Kaarina. She tells me she has brought her dad along to watch, and she introduces him to me.

He turns out to be the director of photography from the original ‘Wuthering Heights’ video, Michael Miles.

I get out my pocket notebook and immediately go into interview mode, remembering how a strong look makes for stylish journalism, never mind music videos. People open up to journalists with strong looks. Capote, Wolfe, Didion, Hunter S Thompson. Gay Talese, who is in the same book of dandies as me, I Am Dandy, and whose report on the Playboy Mansion influenced Jon Ronson’s new book The Castle.

Michael tells me how the original ‘Wuthering Heights’ film was made on Salisbury Plain, on a cold day in October 1977. It was shot on 16mmm film, rather than video. Michael was working for the director Nick Abson, and they had a day off from a larger project, a documentary about the Stiff Records tour, featuring Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and Wreckless Eric.

They had one morning and afternoon to do the Kate Bush shoot, before driving to Cardiff, where the Stiff Records tour was calling that evening. So the location needed to be a suitable field or hill within three hours’ drive from Cardiff. They chose Salisbury Plain, and more specifically, Baden’s Clump, which has a distinctive row of trees. In preparation, Mike listened to the track by ‘this new girl’, before it was released. ‘I didn’t know what to make of the song… I thought it was a bit squealy’.

In an account he wrote for a Kate Bush fansite in 2018, the word Mike used was ‘squeaky’. But ‘squealy’ is definitely the word he uses today, when speaking to me on the beach. And indeed ‘squealy’ is, I would say, a bit more accurate.

When Kate Bush met up with the crew in Salisbury, she was by herself. No assistant or chaperone. She was 19, and unknown: ‘Wuthering Heights’ was her debut record.

The shoot was rushed and tense. The smoke machine failed to work properly. The crew van became stuck in the mud, and they had to ask a local farmer to pull them out with a tractor. There was no time to do close-ups. This was an accident, but it means that one can now study the dance moves more easily, because of all the longshots.

On the day, Kate had asked Mike whether she should wear the flower in her hair that she had brought. His practical mind thought ‘no’, because of the risks to continuity should it fall out, but his artistic mind thought ‘yes’. Art won. During filming, the flower indeed did fall out, and was nearly cut from the final film as a result.

But his instinct to keep the flower proved to be right. Today, I look around at all the woman in Hastings in the red dresses with flowers in their hair. I see them at bus stops and in the streets of the Old Town, still in costume. I think of how that momentary decision by Mike Miles in a cold English field in 1977 influenced the lives of all these women in sunny Hastings in 2026, not to say anyone who has ever dressed up as Kate Bush and added the flower.  

Later I visit Ella Guru’s art show in the Maslow community cafe, in downtown Hastings. Sharon, the spiky-haired older woman who works in the cafe, is dashing home to change into a red dress of her own. She wants to attend a Kate Bush karaoke event in one of the pubs on the seafront.

Sharon has the proper Hastings accent: a mixture of South London and Essex, buffeted with a saltwater burr. Salted Cockney. In older women it is an accent that particularly lends itself to camp innuendo:

 ‘I hope I’m not late for the karoake. I’ve been practicising specially. I was up all night doing “The Man With The Child In His Eyes”.’

**

Notes:

Mike Miles’s full account of the ‘Wuthering Heights’ film shoot is on the fan website katebushnews.com

Tags: coastal currents, Dandyism, hastings, jon ronson, kate bush, michael miles, mike miles, new journalism, st leonards, wuthering heights