FEATURE:
“Ooh, How He Frightens Me/When They Whisper Privately”
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush captured in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
Kate Bush’s The Infant Kiss from Never for Ever
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THERE are plenty of songs from Kate Bush….
that people misconstrue or they just reads too deeply into. Two of her songs relate to a child or children. Many think that The Man with the Child in His Eyes relates to some sort of weird attraction to a child, or that Bush sees a man as a child. Even though there is no specific inspiration behind the song in terms of a person, Bush has said that it is the way that men can enjoy childish games and have a sense of being young, whereas many women can’t – Bush said in interviews how she was attracted to older men. One of Never for Ever’s best tracks, The Infant Kiss, is not about Kate Bush falling for a little boy. Those lyrics are pretty much said in the song, but one needs to know the inspiration behind the track to get a clearer understanding. This article from the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia provides some insight and information:
“Song written by Kate Bush. It was inspired by the gothic horror movie The Innocents, which in turn was inspired by Henry James' novel 'The Turn Of The Screw'. The story is about a governess who believes the ghost of her predecessor's dead lover is trying to possess the bodies of the children she is looking after.
The Infant Kiss' is about a governess. She is torn between the love of an adult man and child who are within the same body. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, September 1980)”.
I have written before how Never for Ever is an album – like The Dreaming (1982) – ripe with potential singles! Her third album (released in 1980), did spawn some great singles: Breathing (released: 14th April, 1980), Babooshka (released: 27th June, 1980), and Army Dreamers (released: 22nd September, 1980). I think The Infant Kiss is a song that would have made for a very interesting single. Even though there is not an official video for the song, a fan, Chris Williams, made a video for the song using scenes from the movie, The Innocents. According to Bush, who contacted him after she saw the video, he'd chosen the exact scenes that were in her head upon writing the song. It is a gorgeous song, and it boasts one of Bush’s most tremulous, haunting vocals. I think it works well where it is positioned on the album: after the faster and harder The Wedding List, and Violin, it offers some chance for breath and this beguiling, tremendous song. The Infant Kiss then leads into the equally stunning and spine-tingling Night Scented Stock, which then hands over to two epic final tracks: Army Dreamers, and Breathing. One cannot release every great track as a single, but I do feel The Infant Kiss is one of Bush’s strongest songs – and it is one that you do not hear played on the radio much! I think I have pretty much covered every song from Never for Ever, but I have done so as it is an album that remains hugely underrated.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Phillips/Cover Images
What I love about The Infant Kiss is that it is risqué and, if one did not know the story behind the song, then they might get the wrong impression. In the first pre-chorus, there are some very interesting lines: “Just a kid and just at school/Back home they'd call me dirty/His little hand is on my heart/He's got me where it hurts me/Knock, knock - who's there in this baby?/You know how to work me”. Of course, as we know the background to the song, one knows what Bush was writing about. There is plenty of resistance and horror coming from Bush. Rather than romanticising the attraction and situation, there is that quiver of the voice and realisation that the situation is strange. For anyone who has heard songs like Wuthering Heights (The Kick Inside), and Hammer Horror (Lionheart), there is that sense of Bush (or the heroine) as unstable and wrestling with something quite dark. Her lyrics, whilst haunted and evocative, are utterly unique: “I cannot sit and let/Something happen I'll regret/Ooh, he scares me/There's a man behind those eyes/I catch him when I'm bending/Ooh, how he frightens me/When they whisper privately/Poor, stupid girl/Windy-wailey blows me”. As she walks ever deeper into this murky and disturbing, the lyrics provoke real emotion and tension: “Words of caress on their lips/That speak of adult love/I want to smack but I hold back/I only want to touch/But I must stay and find a way/To stop before it gets too much”.
IN THIS PHOTO: A still from the 1961 film, The Innocents
I want to finish off by borrowing from the excellent Dreams of Orgonon, where there is a detailed and fascinating study into The Infant Kiss; from its origins and what inspired the song, through to psychological concerns – and why the song is one of Kate Bush’s most difficult moments:
“Not so much raiding the classic 60s horror film The Innocents as copy-pasting its plot, “The Infant Kiss” of the title refers to a passionate kiss a female caretaker (or in The Innocents, a governess) receives from the adolescent boy in her care. In the film, the governess Ms. Giddens (played with spectacular abandon by Deborah Kerr) becomes obsessed with the eerie maturity of the boy, Miles, and his sister Flora (but chiefly Miles), and becomes convinced the children are possessed by the ghosts of lascivious, unstable deceased employees of their father (who were major parts of their lives), or whether the ghosts are mere hallucinations. Adapting Henry James’ Gothic novella The Turn of the Screw with perhaps more ambiguity than James’ book (the idea that Giddens is purely mad was introduced to literary discourse by critic Edmund Wilson decades after the book’s publication, although James doesn’t commit to a conclusion either way), The Innocents never concludes whether Giddens is bonkers, the children are actually possessed, or both, rigidly centering itself on the ghostly uncertainty of its characters’ lives and the way Giddens’ fixation on Miles unravels, leading to his eventual death (either from stress or exorcism — the movie abstains from clarifying the exact nature of his sudden death).
What’s visible is Giddens’ novitiate maturity and sexuality, the children’s traumatized and premature introduction to adulthood, and the disastrous collision of those failure modes. At the end of The Innocents, Giddens not only fails to exorcise Miles (or perhaps she does?), but witnesses his death. A paean to lost innocence recognizes that innocence was never real to begin with — a fantasy conjured up by adult pathologies and accordingly suffocated by them.
The disunity at play here is suited to Bush’s obsession with cognitive dissonance between internal perception and external reality. She zeroes in on Giddens’ sexual repression, expressed through her infatuation with Miles: “back home they’d call me dirty” and “words of caress on their lips that only speak of love” feel like lines out of The Innocents. Giddens is the daughter of a vicar whose first interaction with high society is her assignment to these children (see Wuthering Heights for another iteration of bucolic isolation as bourgeois pathology). Her fixation on the children has as much to do with her own immaturity as repression. She projects onto a place far from home, offering maturity and sexual liberation in the only form she’s familiar with — adolescent and constrained by high society. In a move most commonly found in the political ideologies of bourgeois misers and right-wing pundits, Giddens overlooks real societal problems by projecting onto them.
The song likely haunted Bush herself, enough that in 1982 she recorded a French-language remake called “Un Baiser d’Enfant” as a B-side. The remake is idiosyncratically pleasing— generally having a strong grasp of French pronunciation and a poor understanding of French rhythm, Bush can’t stop singing like an Englishwoman, emphasizing phrases and beats in ways that would make a French singer blink incredulously (French leans on an even tonality throughout a sentence, punctuated by an inflexion at the end). It’s not as haunting as its progenitor, but few Bush songs are.
I don’t think we take a deep dive into tracks that much regarding the story and wider issues. That is another reason why Never for Ever is an album that warrants more attention and focus. There are other songs as intriguing and engrossing as The Infant Kiss, but here is one of those minor songs that is not talked about in the same breath as Bush’s best songs – I very much think that it should be! Whilst The Infant Kiss, on the surface, might be easy to misinterpret, there are some fascinating themes explored. It raises questions. Such a lot of layers for a track that was never released as a single! Although, as Kate Bush is a tremendous song that does not follow the ordinary, would we…
EXPECT anything less?!