How old was Kate Bush when she wrote ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’?
Kate Bush is a talent on a whole other level. While it’s been a few years since the world saw or heard from her, her career and discography as endured as a legendary one, constantly inspiring new classes of artists and encouraging musicians to strive for something more theatrical and more eccentric. But for Bush, that bold streak started at a young age as one of her earliest tracks, ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ was mature well beyond her years.
Released in 1978 when Bush was only 19, The Kick Inside is already an absolute triumph for an artist so young. Across all 13 tracks, the music videos attached, and the general visual world connected to the release, the musician displays a level of control over her own artistry that some take a whole lifetime to manage. It seemed that from the very start, she knew what she wanted to do. When she received her first advance paycheque from her first record label, she went out and spent it on interpretive dance classes, using what she learnt there to inspire the track ‘Moving’ and her entire performance career from then on. She kept the team involved in making the album incredibly tight, deciding to keep working with family members and friends that she trusted to ensure her vision was exactly as she wanted. Still only just an adult, anyone would say that her debut album is a finished produce that goes far beyond her young age.
But in reality, the Bush heard on The Kick Inside isn’t 19, she’s much younger. As a true testament to her early talent and the potential spotted in the young musician, some of the tracks on the record kept the same vocal take as was recorded for an early demo mix when she was only a teenager. More impressive than that still is the fact that some of the songs this younger version of herself is singing came from even years before that.
‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ is the ultimate example of that. When people hit play on the fifth track of her debut album, the voice singing this song is Kate Bush at age 16. It’s the same vocal first recorded and produced by David Gilmour when the Pink Floyd musician agreed to help a friend’s younger sister make a demo tape to send to labels. Both the singer and the musicians gathered around to help her, knowing that the old vocal take capture back then would forever be the best and most honest version of the song, so it was kept.
The song itself dates back even further. Kate Bush wrote ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ when she was only 13, displaying a staggering amount of talent for a mere teenager.
When was Kate Bush signed to a record label?
Kate Bush had been writing and making music from a very young age. As the daughter and sister of a musical family, her home had always been full of music, encouraging her to experiment and perform from being only a kid. But in her teenage years, she began to take it seriously.
When she was 15, David Gilmour heard her perform and agreed to help her create a demo tape of her songs. ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ was on that tape, along with ‘Saxophone Song’ and ‘Maybe’, selected out of a hoard of around 20 songs they recorded. Gilmour then passed the finished mix along to people he knew at EMI, where executive Terry Slater was wowed and signed the young star in 1976.
Who was the man she was writing about?
Ever since ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ was released in 1977, it’s been a mystery who or what the song is about. Despite being written by a teenager, the lyrics are mature and mysterious, laced with the kind of metaphors and abstract storytelling that Bush would nail throughout her career. But in reality, no one knows who the man is, not even the singer herself.
“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,” she said about the inspiration for the song in 1978, with it stemming more from a broad observation rather than any specific man. But mostly, the track seemed to just land in her lap like a random strike of inspiration with no real influence. She said, “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,” adding, |The piano just started speaking to me.”
