The Infant Kiss (Patreon)

The Infant KissChris Williams videoUn Baiser d’Enfant

Thanks to Sam Maleski of Downtime for their insights on “Un Baiser d’Enfant.”

CW: pedophilia, child abuse.

As Never for Ever progresses towards an ending, its experimental ambitions become heightened, coalescing into a sequence of unified but idiosyncratic meditations on the vulnerability of people. On three of Side Two’s last four tracks, Bush utilizes Fairlight CMI or does a 52-second, non-lexical, mostly a cappella interlude. She’s patiently laying the groundwork for the rest of her career — “Babooshka” and this final quartet are Never for Ever’s most influential songs on her later career. The psychological tension and formal trump cards of “The Infant Kiss,” “Army Dreamers,” and “Breathing” play the role of progenitor to the likes of “Sat In Your Lap,” “Get Out of My House,” and “Running Up That Hill.” While much of Never for Ever is Bush finally nailing the pop rock formula of her previous LP efforts, the album truly soars when she breaks free from that mold and embraces the tensions of the 80s.

The inaugural track of the album’s closing tetrad, “The Infant Kiss,” is in some ways its most conventional unit. It fits squarely into the “Wuthering Heights”/”Hammer Horror” mold of slightly baroque and piano-driven songs in conversation with outside texts and psychologically unstable protagonists. Yet “The Infant Kiss” feels like an anomaly even in its context, as it has little in common stylistically with the rest of Never for Ever, with its apprehensive minor-key piano machinations providing the song’s musical backbone, pensively accompanied by stalwart Alan Murphy’s electric guitar musings and the string accompaniment (viol and lirone) of brothers Adam and Jo Sceaping. Bush’s vocal is the musical triumph of the song, as she lifts her voice to a pointed F#5 (“noo-OO con-TROL,” a character description as much as a self-assessment of her own singing). Bush’s vocal shifts from eerie to spectral here; as the line between internal processing and external reality becomes occluded and unrecognizable, she pushes her voice into new realms. While she’s still pushing in the higher end of her vocal range, Bush’s singing in “The Infant Kiss” is throaty, as if she’s choking back her cries of “I cannot sit and let/something happen I’ll regret” and “I only want to touch.” 

Not so much raiding the classic 60s horror film The Innocents as copy-pasting its plot, “The Infant Kiss” of the title refers to a passionate kiss a female caretaker (or in The Innocents, a governess) receives from the adolescent boy she’s looking after. The central tension of the film rapidly becomes whether the eerie maturity of the boy, Miles, and his sister Flora (but chiefly Miles) are signs of possession by the ghosts of lascivious, unstable adults they’d previously known, or if they’re simply the hallucinations of lead actress Deborah Kerr’s character Miss Giddens. Adapting Henry James’ Gothic novella The Turn of the Screw with a perhaps more liberal sense of ambiguity than James intended (the idea that Giddens is purely mad was introduced to literary criticism by Harold Wilson decades after the book’s publication), The Innocents never concludes whether Giddens is bonkers, the children are actually possessed, or both, rigidly centering itself on the ghostly uncertainty of its characters’ lives and the way Giddens’ fixation on Miles unravels, leading to his eventual death (either from stress or exorcism — the movie abstains from clarifying the exact nature of his sudden death). The film’s resolute ambiguity is a mixed bag — on the one hand, it injects some pleasurable disjunct into Miss Giddens’ internal battles. At the same time, it feels like one level of occlusion too many — Henry James seemed to intend that his governess had these struggles while also facing ghosts. Given the metaphorical role that ghosts often play in Gothic fiction anyway, the added occlusion of The Innocents comes off as a bit cowardly. 

Yet the disunity at play here clearly works for Bush, who’s long been fascinated by the cognitive dissonance between internal perception and external reality. Lyrically, she zeroes in on Miss Giddens’ sexual repression, a subtext of The Innocents on which Bush centers “The Infant Kiss.” Her infatuation with the boy she’s watching (let’s call him Miles, like the character in the film — Bush is straight-up adapting The Innocents here) is an manifestation of her sexual repression: “back home they’d call me dirty,” “words of caress on their lips that only speak of love.” Giddens is the daughter of a vicar whose first interaction with high society is her assignment to these children (see Wuthering Heights for another iteration of bucolic isolation as bourgeois pathology). Her fixation on the children has as much to do with her own immaturity as repression. To a large extent, she’s seeing what she wants to see — a place far from home, offering maturity and sexual liberation in the only form she’s familiar with.

This is enough to make “The Infant Kiss” the most difficult song on the record. While the details clarify that it’s neither an endorsement of pedophilia, nor especially about it, the fact is we have Kate Bush singing a creepy (not a derogatory adjective here — it’s a genuinely eerie piece of music) tune about a grown woman who’s obsessed with a prepubescent boy. “What is this?/an infant kiss/that sends my body tingling” is clear in its implications. Instead of a man with a child in his eyes, Bush is faced with a boy who has “a man behind those eyes.” She doesn’t interpret this as a positive force in any way — she treats it as a source of horror. The song revolves around the uncertainty of the governess’ perspective and her inability to restrain her imagination. Her ideas of desire have been warped by her life experiences. Additionally, she never clarifies if the boy is possessed or not. She could be seeing exactly what she wants to see, or she might have some genuine insight into the possession of the manor (or, perhaps, how Miles’ behavior was corruptively influenced by toxic adults). 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.” The song lacks any element of sexual abuse (although not physical abuse, as she restrains herself from psychotic violence against the boy: “I want to smack but I hold back”), dwelling instead on grey areas, which disturb and unsettle in their own right. 

Apparently, the song haunted Bush enough that she re-recorded it in 1982, releasing a French version called “Un Baiser d’Enfant” as a B-side to her standalone single “Ne T’Enfuis Pas.” The remake is pleasing enough — for anglophones, the song retains its eerie power while shedding some of the original’s discomfort. Generally having a strong grasp on French pronunciation, Bush can’t stop singing like an Englishwoman, emphasizing phrases and beats in ways a French singer wouldn’t (French leans on an even tonality throughout a sentence, punctuated by an inflexion at the end). This lends the song a tonal ambiguity not present in the original, but beneficial to the track in its own way. Whatever “The Infant Kiss” gets wrong, it hardly fails to be compelling and complicated. That it’s the least of the last three full-length songs on Never for Ever speaks only to the album’s quality. 

“The Infant Kiss” recorded in spring of 1980 at Abbey Road. Released on Never for Ever on 7 September 1980; never performed live. Kate Bush — vocals, piano, production. Adam & Jo Sceaping — viol, lirone, string arrangement. Alan Murphy — electric guitar. Jon Kelly — engineering, production. 

“Un Baiser d’Enfant” recorded on 16 October 1982; released as B-side of “Ne T’Enfuis Pas” in July 1983 in France and Canada only. Same personnel as “The Infant Kiss,” with additional engineering and mixing by Paul Hardiman and unspecified work by Del Palmer.