In the Warm Room
In Lionheart, 1978 listeners were shown more of Kate Bush’s failure modes than they had previously witnessed. There are various explanations for Lionheart’s inferiority to The Kick Inside, from the limited preparation time Bush was granted, the fact she was unable to work with the KT Bush Band on the album, and getting hoisted with Andrew Powell on production duties again. Lionheart feels like Bush is growing away from it, like being a veteran-produced touring artist had less and less to do with her songwriting. This mode of making music is breaking down for Bush, and soon enough her creative process will come to resemble that of her early years than that of The Kick Inside and The Lionheart.
Yet for all that Lionheart is positioned in the shadow of The Kick Inside, it diverges from its predecessor in significant ways. The Kick Inside is more or less an art rock album — a much quirkier art rock album than something like The Wall or Low, but nonetheless in a tradition that houses Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, and Genesis. There are certainly strands of art rock in Lionheart (which are most prominent in “Wow,” “Hammer Horror,” and “Symphony in Blue,” all the singles), but it’s more frayed at the edges and pulls in varying directions. There’s an edge of darkness to Lionheart which wasn’t prominent in Bush’s debut. It’s almost a Gothic album with a healthy dose of the pastoral thrown in. There’s also a folk touch to it, with its increased use of acoustic instruments (always down to the influence of Paddy Bush). One can imagine Bush playing these songs alone in a dark room. Lionheart is lonely, and its singer is left in France to ruminate on cultural fragments of England.
One of the quietest songs on the album is “In the Warm Room,” also one of the album’s acoustic songs. It fills the “Feel It” spot on the album, the one exclusively-piano song. “Feel It” used its slot on the album to explore sexual desire and seeking pleasure in ambiguous circumstances. “In the Warm Room” is just a dead end — a treacly, inept dirge of a love song. Bush’s worst instincts are on full display. It actually is what male rock critics (a tautological phrase, to be sure) said her other songs were. It’s the nadir of the album, and a self-evident career low for Bush.
“In the Warm Room” is that ever so ubiquitous and banal staple of popular music, a song where a man is encouraged to think about an offstage woman dying to sleep with him. The woman is typically voluptuous and seductive, a femme fatale of the highest pedigree: “she’ll tell you that she’ll stay/so you’d better barricade the way out,” “she’ll touch you with your mama’s hand” (which… ew). Women become a way to keep score, and the lady in the warm room is the ultimate conquest. It’s creepy and below Bush in ways we haven’t seen very often.
If this song sounds male gazey, it is intentional. Bush claimed she often wrote songs for men, giving them what they want, specifically citing “In the Warm Room.” Bush is willfully writing a male gaze song. Such a decision is backwards for Bush, who’s always been a tad conservative in her outlook but usually hides it behind radically conceptual songwriting. And it’s just banal — someone who once wrote a musical suicide note for an incestuous woman settling for writing a song about a dude who likes to get laid with spooky dames is depressing. Bush plays it with such poefacedness too: the song crawls, shapelessly wandering in various modes of A (switching between major and minor) as Bush croons the lyrics in a warmed over Billie Holiday impression. It’s terribly lumpy too — it’s difficult to outline a verse-and-chorus structure for this because there’s no tension or reward. “In the Warm Room” is trying incredibly hard to do nothing at all while coming across as extremely self-serious.
This is what tips it over into the sublimely ridiculous. I mean, who can sing these lyrics with a straight face? How can you make “you’ll fall into her like a pillow/her thighs as soft as marshmallows/say hello to the warm musk of her hollows” work? That is a patently awful lyric and the best singer in the world couldn’t make it work. It doesn’t help that the rest of the lyrics are nonsense like “but when you do/it’ll feel like kicking a habit.” “In the Warm Room” crawls, but it’s gobsmackingly silly too.
The most spot-on diagnosis of the song’s failure comes from a friend of mine who’s described the essential problem with “In the Warm Room” being that Kate Bush is so straight she has no idea what it’s like to desire a woman. “Warm Room” is a direct inversion of the usual Bush dynamic, in which a man tends to be the object of desire. So what we have here is a woman emulating the male gaze. Is that better or worse than a man doing it? Hard to say. But it’s not enough to salvage “In the Warm Room,” which is more fun to mock than listen to. This is a rough patch on the album, and I’m looking forward to better fare from Bush.
Recorded July-September 1978 at Super Bear Studios in Nice. Performed live on the Tour of Life in 1979. Personnel: Kate Bush — piano, vocals.