This woman’s world

Kate Bush wrote “This Woman’s Work” to picture. John Hughes needed a song for the climax of She’s Having a Baby (1988) — Kevin Bacon in a hospital corridor, learning that his wife’s delivery has gone dangerously wrong — and Bush fitted her words to footage that had already been shot, singing from the husband’s point of view: all the things he should have said and never did, arriving at once, too late to be useful.

She then re-recorded it for her own album, The Sensual World, and released it as a single in late 1989. The video keeps the film’s setup — Tim McInnerny as the man waiting under hospital light, the happier past flickering through in fragments — while Bush hovers at the piano like the voice in his head.

It has since been borrowed for a hundred other emergencies, on screens and off, but the original still cuts deepest at its simplest line: “give me these moments back.”