FEATURE:
Kate Bush: Something Like a Song
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Lichfield
The Infant Kiss (Never for Ever)
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I have not discussed this song…
for a while, and it is one I am keen to now. I think its title alone would mean it would not get played on the radio. People instantly misunderstanding the meaning or feeling people would complain if they heard the song. This idea of Bush singing as a woman and suggesting she is kissing this young boy. The complexities, implications and connotations. Maybe it would be too controversial and create a backlash. However, this track from 1980’s Never for Ever is one of her best. Certainly one of her most underrated tracks. Not released as a single and never performed live, I am also not sure whether it has been played on the radio. I think the last time I approached this track was back in 2022. I am going to bring in sections of an article I used back then. However, for people who do not know the backstory of this song, it might all seem a bit confusing. In fact, and as was quite common with Kate Bush, this is a song inspired by film. There are a couple of 1980 interviews, where Kate Bush discussed the song. In the first, she explains how The Innocents was influential when it came to the creation of this song. The Infant Kiss could have easily been misconstrued. In the second interview, Bush was keen to dispel any misreading of the title and the lyrics:
“It was based on the film, The Innocents. I saw it years ago, when I was very young, and it scared me, and when films scare you as a kid, I think they really hang there. It’s a beautiful film, quite extraordinary. This governess is supposed to look after these children, a little boy and a girl, and they are actually possessed by the spirits of the people who were in the house before. And they keep appearing to the children. It’s really scary – as scary on some levels as the idea of The Exorcist, and that terrified me. The idea of this young girl, speaking and behaving like she did was very disturbing, very distorted. But I quite like that song.
The thing that worries me is the way people have started interpreting that song. They love the long word–paedophilia. It’s not about that at all. It’s not the woman actually fancying the young kid. It’s the woman being attracted by a man inside the child. It just worries me that there were some people catching on to the idea of there being paedophilia, rather than just a distortion of a situation where there’s a perfectly normal, innocent boy with the spirit of a man inside, who’s extremely experienced and lusty. The woman can’t cope with the distortion. She can see that there’s some energy in the child that is not normal, but she can’t place it. Yet she has a very pure maternal love for the child, and it’s only little things like when she goes to give him a kiss at night, that she realizes there is a distortion, and it’s really freaking her out. She doesn’t fancy little boys, she’s got a normal, straight sexual life, yet this thing is happening to her. I really like the distortedness of the situation.
Kris Needs, ‘Fire In The Bush’. Zigzag (UK), 1980”.
There is that feeling of taboo around a track like this. People jumping to wrong conclusions. However, The Infant Kiss is one of Kate Bush’s most beautiful and interesting tracks. I love her vocal performance on it. A mix of confusion, fear, desire and caution. She produced Never for Ever with Jon Kelly, so Bush would have had a lot of say in regards to how The Infant Kiss sounded. What I love about The Infant Kiss is the musicians she played with. Unlike many other song where there is a familiar crew, this was a bit less familiar. Well, Alan Murphy on electric guitar is no shock! However, Adam Sceaping played the viol and Jo Sceaping. They arranged strings. The lyrics, “There’s a man behind those eyes/I catch him when I’m bending/Ooh, how he frightens me/When they whisper privately/(“Don’t Let Go!”)/Windy-wailey blows me/Words of caress on their lips/That speak of adult love” put you inside the mind and psyche of the heroine. The fact Kate Bush watched The Innocents and then connected it with a song that breed up. Only an artist like her could do that! Although there was no official music video, Chris Williams, an American fan of Kate Bush, made one. She saw the video and told him that the scenes from The Innocents that he included were the exact ones in her head when she was creating the song! I will include it in here, but a French version of the song, Un Baiser d’Enfant, was released. Un Baiser d’Enfant has French lyrics by François Cahan. Recorded in one day by Kate Bush, Del Palmer and Paul Hardiman on 16th October, 1982, it was released as the B-side of Ne T’enfuis Pas and on the Canadian/U.S. mini-L.P., Kate Bush.
I will round up soon. However, I want to come to an article from Dreams of Orgonon from 2020. It is clear that, whilst The Infant Kiss is extraordinary and one of the most original tracks produced at that time, it will always be the victim of misinterpretation. A shame that such a beautiful song that provokes genuine discussion will never be played:
“The inaugural track of the album’s rear-guard, “The Infant Kiss,” is in some ways its most conventional, as it fits squarely into the “Wuthering Heights” and ”Hammer Horror” mold of baroque piano songs with intricate relationships to texts featuring psychologically unstable protagonists (once again, Bush’s source material is cinematic — the BBC’s 1967 Wuthering Heights serial is a greater influence on Bush’s song than Brontë’s novel). Yet “The Infant Kiss” drifts more than the rock inclinations of those two tracks would allow them to go, with its apprehensive minor-key piano machinations providing the song’s musical backbone (“The Infant Kiss” is only tenuously in D# minor — it starts with the III chord [F#] and often returns to the VII chord [C#], but inverts the key by playing the VI as B minor, and even forces in F# minor). pensively underlined by stalwart Alan Murphy’s electric guitar and the string accompaniment (viol and lirone) of brothers Adam and Jo Sceaping, sounding rather like a 1950s’ horror film’s soundtrack. Bush’s vocal is a triumph of her singing career, as she lifts her voice to a pointed F#5 (“noo-OO con-TROL,” a character description and virtually a self-assessment). Bush’s vocal shifts from eerie to spectral; as her songwriting slowly removes the lines between internal processing and external reality, Bush pushes her voice towards pitches of fear and nausea. Utilizing the higher end of her range, Bush’s vocal for “The Infant Kiss” is throaty, and she sounds like she’s choking her cries of “I cannot sit and let/something happen I’ll regret” and “I only want to touch.”
This source material is enough to make “The Infant Kiss” one of Bush’s most difficult songs. It’s by no means an endorsement of pedophilia (nor specifically about it — Bush’s comments about wanting to strike the child or being terrified of the child suggest more pathologizing and narcissistic manipulation than sexual attraction), but it fundamentally centers an adult woman’s obsession with a prepubescent boy. “What is this?/an infant kiss/that sends my body tingling” has clear implications. Instead of a man with a child in his eyes, this boy has “a man behind those eyes.” The song doesn’t treat this as a positive point — it views it as a source of disorienting horror (albeit more for the voyeur than the child, whose perspective is absent). In interviews, Bush expounded on the way in which “the whole idea of looking at a little innocent boy and that distortion” was “absolutely terrifying.” Her fixation on the disunity between mind and external situation has gone beyond herself – it now applies to other people. The song lacks any element of sexual abuse (although not physical abuse, i.e. “I want to smack but I hold back”), but its narrative of an incipient narcissist’s fixation on adolescence and obsession with a child is as unsettling as Bush gets. Never for Ever contains sundry portraits of failed motherhood, of which “The Infant Kiss” is the most spectral. Of course the boy is a ghost. So is every child who gets raised by a narcissist.
Even the healthiest relationships are complicated in many ways, and relationships’ healthier aspects often illuminate points of stress. Even wanting to help someone can be fundamentally harmful if one’s intentions are in the wrong place. Bush sees that with perfect clarity: a child possessed by a ghost is far less frightening than the mind of a person who perceives that”.
One of the best and also most complicated songs in Kate Bush’s cannon, I wonder if the English original of the song can ever be played or discussed. If Bush re-recorded it in French perhaps to reapproach the song that plagued her to a degree, there is no denying the intent behind the song. That film connection to The Innocents. I did feel that the haunting The Infant Kiss…
DESERVED discussion and investigation.