Kate Bush, first romance, and ‘The Man With the Child in His Eyes’
Guided by sharp creative instinct and an intuitive aversion to business orthodoxy, singer-songwriter Kate Bush was challenging the big labels before a single had even been released.
Having been signed to EMI with the help of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour in her mid-teens off the back of an impressive collection of demos, the precocious Bush insisted on her baroque pop ode to Emily Brontë’s classic novel leading her debut album The Kick Inside over the campier ‘James and the Cold Gun’. Bush got her way, and 1978’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ shot to number one in the UK Singles Chart, the first female artist to do so with a self-penned song.
Keen to confound expectations and avoid musical pigeonholing, Bush again resisted EMI’s conventional wisdom and followed up her chart-topping sweeping art-rock drama with ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes, ‘ a delicate piano wander of romantic awakening and wide-eyed embrace of buried innocence, written when she was only 13.
Speaking on her Self Portrait radio promo that year, Bush revealed the genesis of her haunting piece: “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.”
She added: “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.”
For years, the subject of Bush’s Electra complex fancy was long a mystery. Speaking to The Daily Mail in 2010, TV and radio personality Steve Blacknell made the bold claim that the tender single was inspired by their young romance before both their respective careers took off: “By the spring of 1975, she had become my first true love. All I really knew about her was that she wrote songs, played the piano and lived in a lovely house with an equally lovely family.”
Aware of her musical gifts but unprepared for how masterful her songwriting was at such a young age, Blacknell recalled the moment he first heard her compositions: “I went round to her house, and she led me to the room where the piano was. I thought, ‘Oh my God’. What I heard made my soul stand on end. I realised there and then that I was in love with a genius.”
Further proof was provided with the handwritten lyrics he’d kept for over 30 years, ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’ young poetry scrawled in hot pink felt tip with little circles in place of dots over the ‘I’s. It’s certainly a compelling answer to the song’s mystery, but Bush’s gorgeous second single is probably best enjoyed swirling in the sensual air of mystique that she intended before stardom was even a twinkle in fate’s eye.
