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Post by tannis on Mar 31, 2009 22:27:11 GMT
Hammer Horror and Dalí's Spellbound
The black masked figures in the Bat For Lashes 'Daniel' video bring to mind KaTe's Hammer Horror performance, and also the "man in the mask" Dalí sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).Bat For Lashes - Daniel www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_gyv2ZuGPE Today, though, there's a host of British female pop stars, like Little Boots and La Roux, rivalling her in the glammed-up stakes - even if they may not rival her for musical ambition. "I will outsparkle them all!" she laughs, leaning into the microphone and cackling. "Obviously, other people like to be glittery and sparkly too, we should all be allowed to be glittery and sparkly together. "England's always had that slight veer towards the theatrical, visual side of music, with Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel and David Bowie and all of those, and I think that to carry on that tradition is cool." Bat For Lashes' glittering returnnews.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/music/newsid_7972000/7972862.stmKate Bush - Hammer Horror (Festival San Remo 1979)www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsR5rTV4KdkDreams designed by Dalí in Spellbound (1945) www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzxlbgPkxHE The Dalí sequence ran for almost 20 minutes before it was cut by Selznick.
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Post by tannis on Oct 25, 2009 20:27:33 GMT
Bush’s songs are often conceived as complex little stories that are conceived as their own dramatic world and the final song on the album, ‘Hammer Horror’, is no different. The song opens with opens with an extended hold on one note, a wall of noise that builds the anticipation and intrigue before a cymbal crashes, and a piano comes in and is struck up and down the scale. Again, a synthesizer flourishes in the background before the singing begins and the focus is placed on the voice, bass guitar and piano. It is appropriate to talk of this song and ‘Coffee’ as elaborate and orchestral because of the care that has gone into perfecting each particular part of the song. ‘Hammer Horror,’ despite its elegance and beautiful melodrama, is quite an odd pop song because of the number of structural changes and mutations it undergoes along its journey. Again, like ‘Coffee,’ it is theatrical and is more akin to a mini play or musical, and all the instruments and use of Bush’s voice contribute to the atmosphere. Bush’s low voice is used to deliver the main story, while her high pitched voice is used to echo, emphasise and build the melodrama of the song, so that her voices come at you from a number of different places and positions all at once. ‘Hammer Horror’ ends with the sound of large gong cymbal that signifies the closing of the curtains on the play and indeed, the whole album.
The song lends itself to this treatment because it is also based in the world of theatre. As Bush commented: ‘The song is not about, as many think, Hammer Horror films. It is about an actor and his friend.’ The friend dies just as he is about to have the main part in the play – The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The speaker of the song has to take his place and is haunted by the ghost, and this is where the energy of the song emerges. Like the song ‘Kashka from Baghdad,’ discussed elsewhere in this chapter, there connection between male homosexual love and death is being alluded to:
Who calls me from the other side, Of the street? And who taps me on the shoulder? I turn around, but you’re gone. I’ve got a hunch that you’re following, To get your own back on me So all I want to do is forget you, friend.
It is interesting that the speaker of the song is supposed to be a man, but again in the video for the song, there is no attempt by Bush to ‘perform’ at this gendered role in the clothes that she wears, even if she does engage in some macho posturing of her fists as the routine intensifies. The video is based on a dance routine with an anonymous, male, blindfolded partner who comes up behind Bush and grapples with her, the movement is (deliberately) not spontaneous, but scripted, so that they both resemble poets, not live actors. The cross dressing and camp performance of the song occurs within the musical text – within the narrative of the story and through the use of voices and instruments. Does this make it more or less subversive given the fact that we may not be totally conscious or aware of what Bush is doing, as we are swept into a lush play of fantasy, reality and artifice, not confounded by the visible shifting of gender? Is she even performing a type of camp masculinity or femininity, or is it that she is creating a position from which to speak from, that integrates the two and moves beyond the binary?
I would argue that Bush deploys camp performance, posture, literary and musical devices in Lionheart as a means of negotiating the narrow position that she, as a woman singer, was confined to. It was a resistant strategy and one that occurred within the body of the musical texts she created and the album contains a number of instances of musical and vocal transvestism that have been explored above. Having the flexibility to imagine herself speak and project her persona from a ‘male’ position – no matter how much this deviated from normative masculinity – widened the possibilities of what she could sing about. Undoubtedly she utilises performance as a vehicle to explore the possibility of transformation even if this metamorphosis is not permanent, but can be used as a tool to negotiate the restrictions of living in a particular sexed body. Admittedly, this change ends when the play or song does, but it still has the potential to be repeated, lived and experienced again (for the listener) because of its recorded form. The fact that the presence of ‘high camp’ can be detected in more subtle manifestations on the musical text of Lionheart – through the use of voices, themes, instruments, humour and parody detailed above - display a cunning use of this strategy to expose and ultimately to explore, the artifice of fantasy, reality and all that poses as natural within culture.
from: Debi Withers (2006), 'Kate Bush: Performing and Creating Queer Subjectivities on Lionheart.'www.iiav.nl/ezines//web/Nebula/2009/No1/nobleworld/Withers.pdf
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Post by gothicaljordan on Jul 17, 2010 20:30:29 GMT
This is the song that got one of my close friends into Kate Bush. Stupid story: We were at a resteraunt and as we were talking, I was absentmindedly drawing various animals holding hammers on my napkin. After awhile my friend asked why they had hammers, and I said something stupid about them killing people. Then I said "Hammer Horror". It didn't really relate, I just made the hammer connection in my mind. Well my friend asked what Hammer Horror was, and I said it was a song by Kate Bush. That night she ended up watching the music video, and she's absolutely loved Kate's music ever since I love spreading the Kate love!
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