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Her strengths and weaknesses are on full display.
“The Kick Inside” is as much a summation of the album’s themes as its famous lead single. Long-term engagements with bodily experience, intertextuality, and the liberating power of female sexuality that stretch throughout Bush’s work first manifest themselves here. It closes out Bush’s first album and serves as its thesis statement.
This is all integral to The Kick Inside the album, as the song is of course the title’s track. The singer’s brother still experiences no repercussions for his sister’s pregnancy and she’ll take the fall (in this regard it differs from incestuous narratives, like, the Lannisters). And let’s not ignore that the lack of homicide in “The Kick Inside” is another instance of Bush’s bizarre need to absolve men of blame. Indeed, making a selfless song about suicide is a harmful move on Bush’s part. There’s a danger of beautifying suicide here. “She doesn’t want him to be hurt, she doesn’t want to be ashamed or disgusted, so she kills herself,” as Bush clarified in a 1978 interview. In a revisionist twist, she is the agent of her own death while ultimately surrendering what she has for her brother. Lucy doesn’t admonish her brother but speaks lovingly to him (“didn’t know you had the face of a genius”). “Lucy Wan” is a murder ballad while “The Kick Inside” is a suicide note. To do that, she took the song’s scenario and rewrote it to make her death a suicide. It seems Kate Bush must have heard this song and decided to give Lucy some much-needed interiority. Billy merely leaves the story to stew in his guilt, and their mother presumably spends the rest of her life grieving. Despite Lucy Wan providing the title of the song, she only bemoans her fate and dies. It’s a shockingly grim song that doesn’t redeem its characters.
Its eponymous character is decapitated and bisected by her brother Billy when he finds out she’s pregnant with his child, and Billy spends the next few verses denying the murder to their mother before ultimately confessing the crime and leaving the land forever. Like many of the other Child Ballads, “Lucy Wan” is bleak and violent. Lloyd, heard about it from her brother Paddy, or listened to Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger perform it. It’s possible she read about it in a book by her hero A. (It’s unclear how Bush discovered the ballad. “Lucy Wan” (variously called Lizie Wan or Fair Lucy, but we’ll call her Lucy) is one of the Child Ballads, a collection of Scottish and English folk songs compiled by folklorist Francis James Child in the 19 th century. Bush will engage in this sort of intertextual play throughout her career, giving interiority to characters from a preexisting work. It’s one of a handful of Bush’s songs to be an adaptation of another work: in this case, another piece of music. It’s dark and sad, and it’s laced with memorable and delicate lyrics: “I’ve pulled down my lace and the chintz,” “you must lose me like an arrow/shot into the killer storm,” “I will come home again/but not until the sun and moon meet on yon hill.” “The Kick Inside” is a tragedy, but it presents itself as an elated final will and testament. Its odder melodic turns are subdued and without fanfare and it lacks an obvious glam influence What’s immediately noticeable about “The Kick Inside” is its writing and subject matter. In doing so, she showcases a particular eschewing of ostentatiousness. In it she deals with taboo subjects like suicide and incest. “The Kick Inside” presents a tonal swerve in Kate Bush’s music.
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