FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside at Forty-Five
The Exquisite and Heartbreaking Title Track: A Perfect Ending
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BECAUSE Kate Bush’s…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978 in Japan/PHOTO CREDIT: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images
debut album, The Kick Inside, was recorded in August 1977, I am marking its forty-fifth anniversary with a series of features. I could not continue the series without mentioning its remarkable title track. The Kick Inside is one of the album tracks that I think could have been released as a single. It is also a track that could not appear anywhere else on The Kick Inside but the very end. The song is heartbreaking and tragic. Bush reads the lyrics almost like a suicide note. At the end, there is this ellipsis where her voice hangs in the air and the listener fears the worse. Based on a traditional Folk ballad, Lucy Wan, Kate Bush’s brother Paddy said there were experiments in the recording where they were using actual sections from the song. They were deploying it in quite an unusual way. It would have been interesting to hear that version on the album! Before continuing on, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia collected interviews where Bush discussed the origins of The Kick Inside:
“The song The Kick Inside, the title track, was inspired by a traditional folk song and it was an area that I wanted to explore because it's one that is really untouched and that is one of incest. There are so many songs about love, but they are always on such an obvious level. This song is about a brother and a sister who are in love, and the sister becomes pregnant by her brother. And because it is so taboo and unheard of, she kills herself in order to preserve her brother's name in the family. The actual song is in fact the suicide note. The sister is saying 'I'm doing it for you' and 'Don't worry, I'll come back to you someday.' (Self Portrait, 1978)
That's inspired by an old traditional song called 'Lucy Wan.' It's about a young girl and her brother who fall desperately in love. It's an incredibly taboo thing. She becomes pregnant by her brother and it's completely against all morals. She doesn't want him to be hurt, she doesn't want her family to be ashamed or disgusted, so she kills herself. The song is a suicide note. She says to her brother, 'Don't worry. I'm doing it for you.' (Jon Young, Kate Bush gets her kicks. Trouser Press, July 1978)”.
I wonder whether Bush thought of the album title before writing the song, or whether she wrote the title track and then used it as the album name. A few tracks on The Kick Inside discuss childbirth and procreation. As a teenager, it would have been unusual for an artist to write about that in 1978. The Kick Inside is an album that explores themes that other musicians were not at the time. Mature, bold, honest, deeply feminine but also (an album) that has a lot of sympathy and empathy for men, I think the title track is among the very strongest cuts. Incredibly beautiful and sad at the same time, I feel it could have been a success if it had been released as a single. Like every song on The Kick Inside, the lyrics are wonderfully idiosyncratic and original. My favourite passage from the title track is this: “You and me on the bobbing knee/Didn't we cry at that old mythology he'd read!/I will come home again, but not until/The sun and the moon meet on yon hill”. Bush’s performance is so tender and powerful throughout. A stirring and memorable song that lingers in the mind when the album has ended, go and listen to the song if you have never heard it. In my view, The Kick Inside is a perfect ending to…
A deeply impressive debut album.