[Yes, I'm back to finish this series off from last year!]
Refamiliarising myself with Michael Jackson’s 'Thriller' music video has had me thinking about how I engaged with adjacent music and musical imagery before then. True, in the Seventies the concept of a music video was an unusual one – particularly in the US, which was slower to adopt the form than its European neighbours (including the UK, who dominated the literal first days of MTV simply because they had the content ready-made and looking slick). What we had instead were the mainstays of a vinyl audio culture – record sleeves, ‘live’ videos and perhaps most potently, the longer tail of TV magazine shows and playground gossip; the social media of our generation.
I have three examples and a scar or two to share. The first is, believe it or not, ‘You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)' by Jim Steinman, rendered vocally and memorably by none but the meatiest of loaves, Meat Loaf.
But first, that album cover. Oh, that album cover. I
remember it being a thing, and being THE thing on its release – incongruously
waiting for my sister to get her hair done at a local hairdresser (’The
Chopping Block, obligatory light figure drawing of long-haired and not much else
attired couple on the sign) when a friend of the follicular artistes entered,
clutching her new purchase excitedly. There it was – lurid burned orange
outrage. You could have told me the memorable art was by Boris Vallejo or Frank
Frazetta and I wouldn’t have checked, but no – I learned only very recently
that it’s by none other than Richard Corben, an artist I wasn’t aware of at the
time, but who would have a long career in comics and weird fiction art,
including the Hellboy comic of ‘The Crooked Man’. Those ingredients –
a tangerine sunset, bare biceps, graveyard, white hot motorbike erupting from
the earth like a you-know-what, horse skull head ornament and mighty bat wings.
Every centimetre an adolescent male wish, and good enough it got a sequel
nearly twenty five years later.
There is no video to match it - even
now, but who needs pictured when you have an album cover like this? And who
needs a story when you have Jim Steinman’s opening oratory
“On a hot summer night will you give your throat to the wolf of the red roses?”
“Will he offer me his… hunger?”
“Yes”
Et cetera
As single-digit aged kids me and my friends spent days debating the meaning of
this passage, meticulously backing up our arguments with ever more elaborate and imaginative drawings of what this wolf might look like, if we
actually was a werewolf, if Meat Loaf was a werewolf, and just what he was
doing with all of those roses. We never found out, but it sounded very
exciting, even for single-digit aged kids. The whole album is of course a paen
to Fifties rock and roll doom ballads – your Leaders of the Pack, your whole
Spectral (as in Phil) sound. Already hokey by the Seventies, but irresistible
at the same time.
Exhibit 2 m’lud and it’s a SCAR. Kids these days will know Kate Bush as that
groundbreaking artiste they just discovered on a TicTo-, er, in Stranger Things, but
for me it was Top of the Pops and a ‘live’ recording of 'Wuthering Heights'. We didn't actually get TotP down here in the Seventies, so I imagine this was reused for the local variant Ready to Roll. I
didn’t know the long red dress version for a good couple of decades thence, but
this one, with its creepy video feedback ghostly and misty affairs gave me the
actual abdabs on seeing (and hearing) it for the first time. Bush looked and
sounded like a banshee. I was mortified. I didn’t even know it was based on a
ghost story at the time – I doubt if it would have helped, really. [Warning for video above - includes Dave Lee Travers]
Exhibit Three actually has a music video – Warren Zevon’s 'Werewolves of London'. Tongue in cheek, deliberately silly and novelty, the music video at least follows the idea with its hirsute Lothario prowling the happening scene of the time, but like BooH’s cover art, this song had an afterlife with a picture disc (I think an image of the video wolf, but my memory had it looking more like this pic of Ollie Reed’s Hammerwolf) and it also became the subject of a competition prize pack through an after school TV programme – too early for Shazam, or even Tracey 80, and too late for Nice One, Stu, so was it… Fun Factory? That’ll do. I could picture the caped and caned canine for weeks afterwards. Loved the song, too.
Finally, a tip toe into the Eighties for some Australian gothic balladry courtesy of Jon English. You still get old fogeys mentioning his 'Six Ribbons' single from the Before the Storm album, but fewer his nod to Sheridan LeFanu’s sapphic bloodsucker Carmilla. Once more, the Forgotten Big Orange Book of Monster Movies primed me for the story, but I wasn’t sure at the time whether the lyrics matched the tale (pre-internet, see?) I don’t remember the video, either – but I’d say there’s a match for sure.
And so…
Halloweenometer. These songs would variously make for some of a pretty fun Halloween playlist. Sure, maybe only the spoken bits from Mister Loaf, and you might lose some punters explaining the Jon English one, but it’s can’t be all 'Monster Mashes' and 'Purple People Eaters' or Ghostbusters themes (and it definitely shouldn’t be any Cranberries songs – do some research, people!) They’re old and creaky like a crypt door, but then so am I, and you can’t say that the songs of your tender years don’t cast a longer shadow than the more recent ones. They just do.
