FEATURE:
All His Love Is 'til Eternity
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in March 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix
Kate Bush’s Timeless The Man with the Child in His Eyes at Forty-Seven
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IT is no surprise that…
Alexis Petridis wrote the following in 2022 about Kate Bush’s The Man with the Child in His Eyes: “Bush wrote The Man With the Child in His Eyes when she was 13, which frankly beggars belief: eerie, sexually charged and astonishingly beautiful, it would be an incredible achievement for an adult. As it was, it offered the first sign that Bush wasn’t merely a prodigiously talented writer, but an actual genius”. Released on 26th May, 1978, I am looking ahead to the forty-seventh anniversary of this exceptional song. The second single from her debut album, 1978’s The Kick Inside, it reached number six in the U.K. Bush performed The Man with the Child in His Eyes during her sole appearance on Saturday Night Live in the U.S. There is still a lot of mystery around the song. I have written about it numerous times through the years. Nobody knows for sure exactly when The Man with the Child in His Eyes was written. I have always assumed Bush wrote it at East Wickham Farm when she was thirteen. Anywhere between 30th July, 1971 and 29th July, 1972. Bush herself has said she wrote it when she was sixteen. Maybe some time during 1974. Perhaps when she was living at 44 Wickham Road. A year before she stepped into AIR Studios in London and recorded it. Although we should believe Kate Bush, I do hope it is true she wrote it when she was thirteen, as it gives extra weight to the beauty and maturity of it. However, she was still a teenager so it is a remarkable achievement! The B-side of The Man with the Child in His Eyes was Moving.
There is also debate and mystery as to who the titular ‘Man’ is in the song. Even though many feel it is a former boyfriend, Steve Blacknell, others feel it is her mentor David Gilmour. However, Kate Bush has always said it is about nobody specific and it is about men in general. Before re-evaluating the song and arguing why it still sound otherworldly and unique to this day, I want to bring in some useful background and analysis. I will come to part of an article from Dreams of Orgonon and their inspection of The Man with the Child in His Eyes. Before that, returning to something I have quoted before, here are examples of Kate Bush discussing the meaning behind one of her most loved songs:
“I just noticed that men retain a capacity to enjoy childish games throughout their lives, and women don’t seem to be able to do that.
‘Bird In The Bush’, Ritz (UK), September 1978
Oh, well it’s something that I feel about men generally. [Looks around at cameramen] Sorry about this folks. [Cameramen laugh] That a lot of men have got a child inside them, you know I think they are more or less just grown up kids. And that it’s a… [Cameramen laugh] No, no, it’s a very good quality, it’s really good, because a lot of women go out and get far too responsible. And it’s really nice to keep that delight in wonderful things that children have. And that’s what I was trying to say. That this man could communicate with a younger girl, because he’s on the same level.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Fievez/ANL/REX/Shutterstock
Prior to getting to that Dreams of Orgonon article, it is worth acknowledging how loved The Man with the Child in His Eyes is. Covered by quite a few artists, it is played widely to this day. Ranked highly when it comes to her impressive catalogue of songs. In 2018, when ranking Kate Bush’s singles, The Guardian placedThe Man with the Child in His Eyes second to Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). MOJO ranked Kate Bush’s fifty-best songs last year and put The Man with the Child in His Eyes in fifth. Even if I have sourced these quotes before, this warrants repeating. This is what they said: “The contemplative but still visionary preamble to Wuthering Heights, which it preceded on The Kick Inside. The soundtrack is assured orchestral pop – imagine an autumnal daytime analogue to Scott Walker’s Sleepwalkers Woman – and within she cross-fades the archetypes bewilderingly. Simultaneously a daughter/mother/lover, her reverie concerns an understanding father figure who’s also a child – and who, it appears, exists only in her imagination. Still wholly bewitching, though, and incredibly she wrote it when she was just 13”. Stereogum included The Man with the Child in His Eyes in their top ten Kate Bush songs feature (“Written by Bush at age 16, “The Man With the Child in His Eyes” is another example of her knack for introspective songs that validate the interior lives of women and girls. “It was a very intimate song about a young girl almost voicing her inner thoughts, not really to anyone, but rather to herself,” she said during a 1981 appearance on the TV show Razmatazz. Sparkling orchestras and her burbling piano intertwine in a gorgeous, almost fugue state, bolstering the character’s observations. “The piano just started speaking to me,” she said in a promo interview. “It was a theory that I had had for a while that I just observed in most of the men that I know: the fact that they just are little boys inside and how wonderful it is that they manage to retain this magic”). No denying the fact that this song is a work of genius.
I will come to my point and main argument. Before that, I do want to get to the Dreams of Orgonon analysis that I have teased. There are some observations made about The Man with the Child in His Eyes. One of those Kate Bush songs that stops me in my tracks every time I hear it. Something that holds that much power. It is mind-boggling how beautiful and accomplished it is:
“It’s a song that’s as striking for what it is as what it isn’t. It’s simple and incomprehensible, childlike and mature, populist and intricately niche. And it just works — “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” is as deliberate and intelligent a song as Kate Bush has recorded so far. It lingered in obscurity and exploded into the light. That’s probably as apt a metaphor for the Bush story in this era as anything.
“The Man with the Child in His Eyes” resembles little else Kate ever produced in its content or historical context
We’re in the era where Kate is a precocious unknown, venturing into the recording studio for the first time and staking her claim to it. The most commonly remarked-upon aspect of “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” is Kate’s age when it was written. The song’s recording date and release date are spaced out by about three years, putting the creation and publication of the song in entirely different worlds. I’m not going to quibble with exactly how old she was at the time (13 or 14 according to popular accounts, and 16 by Kate’s own memory, which would dates its composition some time before the ’75 AIR London session), but there’s a point to be made here: discourse around on this song tends to point out Kate’s age at the time and leave it at that. And it’s hard to fault that—it’s unheard of for someone in their early-to-mid teens to write pop songs this good. The song stuck out to everyone during production—everyone from ubiquitous beneficiary Dave Gilmour to EMI manager Bob Mercer knew they were hearing something special. But plenty of artists record hits at a young age. What makes “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” stand out?
The answer presents itself immediately—most young artists in the Seventies didn’t write their own hits, and their hits were rarely so good. The only other UK hit single written by an under-18 female artist by the time of “Child” that I can find is “Terry,” an a lugubrious piece of grimdark pop from 1964 by 16-year-old Twinkle. Apart than that, young singers didn’t (and probably weren’t permitted to) write their own songs. The lack of songwriting royalties certainly didn’t hurt precocious young stars—Helen Shapiro recorded hits without writing them, and Little Jimmy Osmond hit number 1 at the age of nine with the agonizing “Long Haired Lover from Liverpool.” Picking on these young artists who sang some micromanaged mediocre hits four to five decades ago would be petty at best and mean-spirited at worst, so we’ll eschew that, but all this shows just how odd “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” was. It was as far from micromanaged as possible. Its inception and recording predate its public release by about three years, and Kate was mostly left to her own devices while creating it (her family helped her procure business deals that would basically allow her to do whatever she wanted creatively).
So what we’re given with “Child” is that ever-so-rare thing in pop music: a young person’s vision of the world, undiluted by executive interference. In it Kate sings about a strange, wonderful man, older than herself but with an adolescent spirit that’s not unlike hers. The song is somewhat impenetrable, like any artistic work by a young person beginning to navigate the world, and it’s accessible and applicable and gorgeous.
We find eyes romantic and beautiful—there’s an aesthetic thrill to them as well as the excitement of seeing someone’s emotional state reflected in them. The old adage about eyes being the window to the soul is a tedious aphorism because of its obviousness, not because it’s not true. The singer of “Child” is discussing their point of view, but also finding joy in the perspective and experiences of someone else. It’s a straightforward dynamic, expressed obscurely. Few details are imparted about the titular Man at all—the singer is interested in capturing their spiritual essence. There’s an implication of the picaresque to the song, particularly in how the singer refers to the object of their attention as someone “telling me about the sea,” suggesting someone who’s embarked on adventures, probably imagined ones. Reality isn’t what counts when you’re young—it’s the inner landscapes you’ve traveled.
There’s a nice lack of dependence to the song as well. Kate leans on no one here—the song’s protagonist places themselves at a safe distance from the Man, and Kate herself has even more control of the affair than she’s probably aware of. She doesn’t lean on male-pioneered rock or ballads—she offers her spin on the genre by discussing her experiences as a woman. As we’ll see, Kate Bush isn’t above gender essentialism—she’s written countless songs about the supposed central human dynamic of relationships between men and women”.
Nothing really exists like this. In terms of the themes and ideas behind the song, has another artist talked about the child-like wonder and playfulness of men? The fact that a part of them never grows up. I Can’t really think of a track like it. There are female artists who write songs in their teens, though I have not discovered a song like The Man with the Child in His Eyes. The blend of the piano and orchestra. Again, there has been nothing like Kate Bush’s masterpiece since. The effect it has on the senses. That production sound and Bush’s vocal. That combination still has not been bettered for my money. There are Kate Bush songs where you can hear comparable efforts. Maybe tracks that have not aged that well. However, The Man with the Child in His Eyes is ageless. Like its central hero, the track has something inside that remains child-like. It sounds spine-tingling now because it is not overloaded with technology that is dated. It is a pure and from the heart. Not a bid for commercial success or trying to fit into what was around in 1978. A song that sounds classic and modern. Like nothing else but somehow relatable and universal. A set of lyrics that could only come from Kate Bush but could also be seen as poetry. Many artists have been compared to Kate Bush but none have written a song like this. One of the reasons why it is seen as one of Bush’s best and is going to be impossible to equal. I don’t think an artist today could write a song like it. They would get it wrong or it would sound insincere somehow. Whether she wrote it aged thirteen or sixteen, you can imagine her sitting in her room with a pink felt tip pen and composing these lyrics. Picture Kate Bush at AIR Studios in June 1975 backed by an orchestra and delivering this sublime and faultless vocal. As it turns forty-seven on 26th May, I felt it was important to mark that anniversary. Hard to believe it turns fifty in three years! Alexis Petridis wrote how the song showed that Bush was a genius. When you listen to The Man with the Child in His Eyes, it is…
HARD to disagree with.