“Repulsed”: The controversial song Kate Bush struggles to perform live
Throughout music, there will be songs that artists struggle to perform. A lot of the time, this is because they are too close to home. Songs that people tend to write about loved ones who are no longer with us, or about difficult periods that they have no interest in revisiting, are often retired from live sets because artists feel it is too hard to perform them, especially in front of a room full of quiet people. Eric Clapton had this problem with the track ‘Tears In Heaven’.
‘Tears In Heaven’ was written by Clapton shortly after his son’s passing. It captures the moment of grief, and because of its rawness, Clapton didn’t want to revisit it live and bring back those emotions.
“I didn’t feel the loss anymore, which is so much a part of performing those songs,” he said, “I really have to connect with the feelings that were there when I wrote them. They’re kind of gone, and I really don’t want them to come back, particularly. My life is a different life now.”
Kate Bush’s rationale for one of her toughest songs to perform is slightly different, though. Bush has admitted previously that she doesn’t often sing from a place of pure fact, and instead, she takes fictional elements or ideas and puts herself in the situation of the song. This means that the possibilities are endless when it comes to what Bush can write about, even if those topics are somewhat controversial.
“Whenever I base something on a book or a film I don’t take a direct copy,” she explained, “I don’t steal it. I’ll put it through my personal experiences, and in some cases, it becomes a very strange mixture of complete fiction and very, very personal fears within me.”
One film she was influenced by was The Innocents, which was released in 1961. The film is inspired by Henry James’s novel The Turn Of The Screw. The story’s theme is complicated, as it follows a woman appointed as the governess for a young girl and her older brother. Strange things begin to happen once the woman takes the job, particularly with the young boy, and she starts to believe that he has been possessed by a strange man that she keeps seeing occasionally.
It is revealed that the boy has been possessed during a particularly disturbing scene when she is putting him to bed and he asks for a goodnight kiss, after which, he throws his arms around her and kisses her passionately. This isn’t supposed to represent an inappropriate relationship, instead, it shows that the boy has been possessed and has the mind of somebody much older than him. While the kiss is used as a storytelling device, it’s unsurprising that many people view it as controversial.
Despite the controversy, Bush decided to write a song from the woman’s perspective, which she admits she found difficult, hence why she continues to struggle to perform the track. “’The Infant Kiss’ had to be done on a very intimate basis, it be a woman singing about her own fear, because it makes her so much more vulnerable. If it had just been an observation, saying ’She’s really frightened; she’s worried’, you could never really tell what she was feeling. So I put it as coming through myself,” explained Bush,
“I’m not actually thinking of myself falling in love with the little boy, I was putting myself in her place,” she added. “Feeling what I do for children – I love children – and then suddenly seeing something in their eyes you don’t want to see.”
