Kate Bush inside The Haunted castle, Efteling (Dutch Theme Park) 1978. Created to promote her debut album The "Kick Inxide"featuring Wuthering Heights.
Today we are doing things a little bit differently. I woke up to a text from my best friend, telling me that she was listening to a song and thought of me. More specifically, she thought of Litcest. My first observation was that the song was by Kate Bush, whom I recognized because she wrote a song based on Wuthering Heights (the status of which as a novel about incest is a debate for another day). Then, the more the lyrics played, the more I understood why my friend had sent it to me.
The Kick Inside is the title track from Kate Bush's debut album, released in 1978. According to Kate, the song was inspired by the popular English ballad Lizie Wan, which I have talked about when I looked into the collection Child Ballads. The lyrics also contain distinct elements of the ballads Sheath and Knife and The Bonny Hind. Since these popular ballads are often considered to be variations of one another within the Child canon, it becomes difficult to discern if the version of "Lizie Wan" that Bush based the song on had already absorbed those details, or if Bush drew inspiration from multiple ballads to construct her lyrics.
When Bush released the album, the English music scene was dominated by punk and rock; consequently, her piano-driven ballads and gothic romanticism represented a violent aesthetic rupture. Bush’s work seemed to bypass the contemporary mood entirely, reaching back instead to the oral traditions of the British Isles.
The song opens with the narrator recalling how she has undressed for her beloved, "pulling down the lace and the chintz." She then addresses her lover, telling him she will "send your love to Zeus," since she will be in contact with him shortly. While Zeus was not a deity typically associated with the dead, he was famously married to his sister, Hera, and had relations with his other sister, Demeter. This explicit invocation serves to remind the listener that incest was frequent among the gods in classical mythology.
Consequently, she insinuates that her relationship is akin to that of the gods and legitimizes the incestuous bond by aligning it with mythological traditions in which such unions found among divinity. However, it's important to mention that the Greeks did frown upon incest committed by mortals, with many stories demonizing those unions. Thus, it's also possible to interpret the reference as highlighting the tragic gap between the divine romance that the narrator imagines and the mortal reality she faces.
The narrator then explains that "this kicking here inside makes me leave you behind", referring to the fact that she's pregnant and due to the shame and possible consequences that might arise from it, she's choosing to kill herself, and although she will miss him, she sees no other possible choice.
"No more under the quilt to keep you warm
Your sister, I was born
You must lose me like an arrow shot into the killer storm"
Those verses tie back to the ballad Sheath and Knife, in which a woman, pregnant by her own brother, begs him to kill her to spare her from the disgrace of their union being known. He obliges with much grief, shooting her with an arrow. By invoking this imagery, Bush connects her protagonist to a lineage of tragic ballad heroines who choose death to resolve an impossible social bind.
The narrator then recalls her childhood, when she and her brother would sit on (presumably) their father's lap and listen to old myths. It's perhaps from those tales that the seed of incest was planted in the sibling's minds. In the demo version, instead of saying they used to "cry at that old mythology", she says they got "welling eyes from identifying with Lizie Wan's story", insinuating that since a young age the siblings were involved in a incestuous relationship.
Bush directly echoes Lizie Wan when she sings that she will come home when "the sun and the moon meet on yon hill". In the original ballad, this line was instead said by the brother, who goes to travel the world after finding his sister's body, telling their mother that he'll return home only when the sun and the moon rise over the hill.
The last verse parallels the first, but is left unfinished, implying that the narrator has successfully killed herself. The suicide of the heroine is the theme of the ballad The Bonny Hindi, although in this one, the incest was unwitting, as the characters didn't know they were siblings.
In the album's promotional tape, Bush explained that she was moved to write the song because the topic of incest is "really untouched" and it's a "area that I wanted to explore." The Kick Inside and Wuthering Heights, which is from the same album as the former, remain the only songs in which the subject of incest is explicitely explored, but, as I told my friend, maybe we can consider Bush "80's version of Nicole Dollanganger".
References:
Moy, R. Kate Bush and Hounds of Love. Routledge, 2007.
Naisbett, S. The Whole Story: The Role of Narrative in the Work of Kate Bush. 2024. Newcastle University, PhD dissertation. Newcastle University eTheses, theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/6268.
Vaughan Williams, Ralph, and A. L. Lloyd, editors. The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. Penguin Books, 1959.
