FEATURE:
I Hear Him, Before I Go to Sleep
Kate Bush’s The Man with the Child in His Eyes at Forty-Four
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WHEN it comes to Kate Bush’s…
biggest songs, I try and mark their anniversaries each year. Tomorrow (26th May), The Man with the Child in His Eyes turns forty-four. Her second U.K. single, it is the fifth track from her debut album, The Kick Inside. One reason why I am concentrating on the anniverssary as, in August, it will be forty-five years since Bush finished recording The Kick Inside. After the success of her debut single, Wuthering Heights (which reached number one), Bush’s second single was always going to do well. Although it did not chart quite as highly (it reached six in the U.K. and three in Ireland), it remains one of her most-loved and covered songs. So many other artists have put their spin on a Kate Bush song that is utterly beautiful. A mesmeric vocal performance from someone who was sixteen at the time – though most of The Kick Inside was recorded in the summer of 1977, The Man with the Child in His Eyes and The Saxophone Song was recorded in June 1975 -, it is amazing to think that this song has been out in the world for forty-four years. Its anniversary, I hope, will provoke new play and interpretation. There is still debate and mystery around the song. Before providing my view, the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia collects Bush interviews where she has talked about the song’s origin. It is fascinating reading how Bush describes the song and what it means.
“The inspiration for 'The Man With the Child in His Eyes' was really just a particular thing that happened when I went to the piano. The piano just started speaking to me. 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. I, myself, am attracted to older men, I guess, but I think that's the same with every female. I think it's a very natural, basic instinct that you look continually for your father for the rest of your life, as do men continually look for their mother in the women that they meet. I don't think we're all aware of it, but I think it is basically true. You look for that security that the opposite sex in your parenthood gave you as a child. (Self Portrait, 1978)
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. (Swap Shop, 1979)”.
I am going to round up with my thoughts about The Man with the Child in His Eyes. It would be remiss to overlook an excellent essay from Dreams of Orgonon and their views and thoughts on one of Kate Bush’s finest songs! I have highlighted some parts of the essay that are particularly insightful:
“The Man with the Child in His Eyes” resembles little else Kate ever produced in its content or historical context. It’s one of only three songs in the earliest years of Kate’s career to be professionally recorded, and one of two that wound up as an album track. “Saxophone Song,” the other Kick Inside song whose recording predates 1977, has a straightforward legacy as a non-single album track—a well-liked one, but “Saxophone Song” is rarely hailed as a classic Kate Bush song. “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” is in the tricky follow-up position of being the second follow-up single to “Wuthering Heights,” (the first follow-up being “Moving”). Audiences who’d listened to the album were already familiar with the song. Having been composed much earlier than the other songs as well as already being an established album track, “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” shrugs off the role of “unheard new” single and focuses on being a quiet standalone work, deliberately working on a small, intimate scale. Releasing a polar opposite her smash hit first single was a counterintuitive yet strangely savvy move. And yet it paid off. A song that’s basically another Cathy demo won an Ivor Novello Award for its lyric, peaked at #6 on the UK charts, and spawned decades of covers. Bush is doing strange things, but they’re worth listening to.
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. It’s rare for artists to pull this off successfully so early on, which may account for the limited amount of in-depth analysis on “Child”—Ron Moy finds little to say on the song in his book Kate Bush and Hounds of Love, and Deborah M. Withers’ classic Bushology text Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory skips the song altogether (frankly the best reading of the song hails from this Tumblr post). The most useful critical take comes from Graeme Thomson’s seminal biography Under the Ivy:
“[Kate] is surely unique among female songwriters in that her canon contains not a single song that puts down, castigates, or generally gives men the brush off. She has never been feminist in the bluntest sense — she wants to preserve and embrace the differences between the sexes and understand the male of the species. Many songs display a desire to experience fully what it is to be a man; she invests them with power, beauty, and a kind of mystical attraction which is incredibly generous.”
And the singer is at that transition point where the storyteller becomes as much of a point of interest as the story. In part, “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” is about someone learning what it’s like to have a person to themselves for the first time. They’re experiencing that magical feeling of being with someone who understands and who makes sense to them. It’s not clear what their relationship is—there’s an adolescent ambiguity to the song. “Maybe he doesn’t love me/I just took a trip on my love for him,” sings an almost-certainly-stoned 16-year-old in her award-winning lyric. But despite her lack of sure-footedness, there’s no danger here, no exploitative or sexual dimension to this relationship—it’s a mature but innocent dynamic, and a genuine, human, unmanufactured one.
PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
Musically, MWCIHE is Kate’s most significant accomplishment to date. It’s easy to see why Dave Gilmour wanted it released. It’s the first Kate song to really work melodically—it’s cleanly structured, gorgeous, organic, and uncanny. She manages to balance ethereality and hummable melodies while keeping her more experimental drive. She finally develops a memorable hook, an arpeggiated E minor chord (B-G-E-E). The song continues by displaying Kate’s propensity for unorthodox key changes. The first part of the verse (“I hear him before I go to sleep” through “when I turn the light off and turn over”) in E minor with a progression of i-III-VI-III-iv (E minor-G-C-A minor). The second half of the verse moves to E minor’s dominant key, B minor, before shifting to Bb major, doing some things in G, and shifting to a chorus in C. The song is not static—it’s organic, it breathes like a person.
Andrew Powell’s often hit-or-miss production works here. Usually he’s at his best when he takes a hands-off, simple approach, and that’s what he utilizes on this song. He arranges the orchestra himself, and no instruments are heard outside it apart from Kate’s piano, which leads the way (as it does in all her best early songs). For all Kate’s admitted terror at playing with an orchestra, she shines here, sounding perfectly confident and even outshining the gentle ensemble of strings accompanying her song”.
The penultimate song on the first side of The Kick Inside, The Man with the Child in His Eyes then leads to Wuthering Heights. Such a remarkable and mature song, there is no one ‘man’ that Bush is referring to in the song – in spite of rumours that it was about her former boyfriend, Steve Blacknell (who was six years older than Bush). I think it Bush talking about a type of older man who has this child-like fascination and spirit within them. The way she discusses falling asleep with him as this spirit or thought, rather than him actually being there (“I hear him, before I go to sleep/And focus on the day that's been/I realise he's there/When I turn the light off and turn over”). There is this feeling of a man being in her thoughts and heart, but someone she is not necessarily involved with or can see. This is like a heroine in a novel, thinking about the horizon and sea. This mythical and lost man, maybe (“He's very understanding/And he's so aware of all my situations/When I stay up late/He's always waiting, but I feel him hesitate”). With lyrics that have this literary and poetic quality to them, it makes it more amazing realising she wrote the song when she was thirteen! Such a grasp on the English language, it has been fifty years or so since she wrote it. Yet The Man with the Child in His Eyes endures and continues to be played and covered. It is a shame that the track did not do slightly better as a single here, as it is definitely worthy of a top-five place. It is impossible to listen to The Man with the Child in His Eyes too much! Such a knee-buckling work of art, Kate Bush’s second U.K. single is…
A sublime and spinetingling song.