Taika Waititi has said the recent Kate Bush renaissance after her music was featured heavily in the latest season of Stranger Things has “ruined” the legendary artist for him.
The New Zealand-born director and actor helmed the latest Marvel film Thor: Love And Thunder, which makes use of a whopping four songs by Guns N’ Roses.
However, when asked by NME whether his new film could potentially “do for GNR what Stranger Things did for Kate Bush”, Taika revealed this was a subject he felt particularly strongly about.
“You mean how they ruined Kate Bush?” he commented. “I love that show, but as someone who feels a real ownership of Kate Bush music… I’m really annoyed!
“I’ve become one of those old arseholes who’s like: ‘These kids never listened to Kate Bush, they’ve heard one song on a TV show! They don’t know Kate Bush! I know Kate Bush!’.”
However, it turns out Taika has his own personal grievance about Kate Bush’s music becoming synonymous with Stranger Things – as he’d hoped to include a sequence set to one of her songs in Thor: Love And Thunder.
“There were a bunch of Kate Bush songs I wanted to have in there,” he admitted. “We were gonna have This Woman’s Work, which was gonna be great for [a scene with] Natalie Portman’s character.
“There was actually gonna be a lot of ABBA in the film as well… I got one [ABBA song] in there, but I wanted more of an ABBA theme throughout.
“I thought it’d be funny if Thor’s favourite music was what he perceived to be a ‘Viking band’. He’d be like, ‘They’re a real tough Viking band called ABBA!’.”
Season four of Stranger Things prominently features Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill in a number of key scenes, which led to the track topping the UK singles chart almost 40 years after its initial release.
In a rare interview about her song’s new-found popularity, Kate said last month: “What’s really wonderful I think is this is a whole new audience who, in a lot of cases, they’ve never heard of me and I love that.
“The thought of all these really young people hearing the song for the first time and discovering it is, well, I think it’s very special.”