FEATURE:
Kate Bush: Something Like a Song
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
Hammer Horror (Lionheart)
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I am tying this in with…
the anniversary of the first track from Kate Bush’s second studio album, Lionheart. I am going to do an anniversary feature about the album ahead of 10th November. On 3rd November, it will be forty-seven years since Hammer Horror was released. As I have stated in previous features about the song, it might have seemed like an unusual choice as lead single. With Wow as one of the options – that was the second single released -, Bush and EMI went in with something perhaps a little less commercial. However, Hammer Horror was internationally. However, it only reached forty-four in the U.K. Perhaps the public were expecting something similar to the singles from her 1978 debut, The Kick Inside. An adjustment was required. However, this temporary chart blip was corrected when Wow was released and reached fourteen in the U.K. Lionheart was an album that reached six in the U.K. It gained mostly mixed reviews. After releasing The Kick Incise in February, most artists would have needed a year or so to work on new material and perhaps tour the album before rather than create a new one. EMI felt that a quick follow-up to The Kick Inside was best. Bush would tour both of those albums in 1979 for The Tour of Life. However, in spite of its rushed nature, Lionheart has many gems. Hammer Horror among them. It is a shame reviews for Hammer Horror were lukewarm. Kate Bush Encyclopedia provide some resources:
“Radio 1’s Round Table on October 27, 1978 the single was reviewed by DJ’s John Peel (“I didn’t like the album at all and I’m not too enthused with this either”) and Paul Gambaccini (“It doesn’t grab me immediately as The Man With The Child In His Eyes“).
“Kate keeps up the formula and doesn’t upset the fans… sounds like Joni Mitchell popping tabs with the LSO. Offbeat, quirky and all that stuff…
Ronnie Gurr, Record Mirror, 11 November 1978
Ominous post ELO orchestration with the unrequited lust of a broken affair viewed as living dead love-bites-back as in classic 50’s British celluloid, a real nail biter, hypnotic and disconcerting.
Tony Parsons, NME, 11 November 1978”.
I am going to repeat something I brought in for previous features about Hammer Horror. It is important to provide context for this song. A hugely important moment. The first single after The Kick Inside was released. It is back to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for some interview archive:
“The song is not about, as many think, Hammer Horror films. It is about an actor and his friend. His friend is playing the lead in a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a part he’s been reading all his life, waiting for the chance to play it. He’s finally got the big break he’s always wanted, and he is the star. After many rehearsals he dies accidentally, and the friend is asked to take the role over, which, because his own career is at stake, he does. The dead man comes back to haunt him because he doesn’t want him to have the part, believing he’s taken away the only chance he ever wanted in life. And the actor is saying, “Leave me alone, because it wasn’t my fault – I have to take this part, but I’m wondering if it’s the right thing to do because the ghost is not going to leave me alone and is really freaking me out. Every time I look round a corner he’s there, he never disappears.”
The song was inspired by seeing James Cagney playing the part of Lon Chaney playing the hunchback – he was an actor in an actor in an actor, rather like Chinese boxes, and that’s what I was trying to create.
Kate Bush Club Newsletter, November 1979”.
It is interesting that both Hammer Horror and Wow refer to acting. Stagecraft and different sides of acting. Well, it is about the music industry as well. How people try to cut you down and rip you off. But there is also the magic. I do love the lyrics for Hammer Horror. So vivid and original: “You stood in the belltower/But now you’re gone/So who knows all the sights/Of Notre Dame?/They’ve got the stars for the gallant hearts/I’m the replacement for your part/But all I want to do is forget/You, friend”. It is amazing that not much has been written about Hammer Horror. People do not really explore the singles.
I am going to come to a Dreams of Orgonon feature that I have included parts of before. I want to highlight what they say about the campness and Gothic nature of the song. How this is quite different to anything on The Kick Inside, yet Hammer Horror was demoed in 1976. This is a song that is fascinating to unpack. In terms of what Bush says with the lyrics and the role she plays in the song. The vocal range of the track. There is so much depth and detail in Hammer Horror. A shame, then, that it was written off by many when it came out. Those who wanted a repeat of what she wrote for The Kick Inside:
“There’s also an element of musical gender play at work in “Hammer Horror.” Bush chooses a male story with a masculine narrator and tells it through a feminine perspective with dashes of camp. This is where her “actor in an actor” fascination comes in. She’s telling someone’s story and embellishing it in radical ways. If Mick Jagger sang this track, it’d be him spitting autobiographically at Keith Richards, who would reply with some vicious chords in open D. Bush plays the actor as a frightened damsel, terrified of the stranger in the dark. She begins the song with a trembling “yooooouuu stoooood,” moving down her vocal range for a more playful “they’ve got the stars for the gallant hearts” (the most innocent confession of pissing oneself ever put on record), howl-belting out “HAMMER HOR-ROR” for the chorus, and lapsing into a more classically Bushian “are we really sure about this” in the post-chorus. It’s the most daring Bush vocal we’ve heard on this blog so far. No male artist would go this far in 1978.
What else do those vocals point to? I don’t know, umm, how about the fact that this is the most camp thing ever? Bush maintains some reverence for her Gothic source material, but not without a tongue-in-cheek performance. Her vocal for “Hammer Horror” is full-blown melodrama, containing, as Goth scholar Andi Harriman puts it, the Goth subculture’s commitment to dramaticism, or “transforming yourself into a different form of beauty.” Bush’s vocal range swerves up and down, covering C#6, Bb5, and descending to the lows of F#5 and F5. The song is absurdly eclectic and committed to its shtick, containing a licking guitar and a full-blown string section tensely opening the song and carrying the chorus. Musically, it’s full-blown hedonism. Visually, it’s another story altogether.
I mean, look at that music video. Bush is dressed in black while dancing with a man (presumably dancer Stewart Avon-Arnold) and expressing nearly every note of the song with obsessive literalism. When she sings about a hand reaching out from the dark to grab her, sure enough she gurns at a mysterious hand. Indeed she gurns at everything in the music video — Bush will remain a world class gurner until she develops a more understated relationship with the camera (and thus many great GIFs were lost to the world). Until then, this is the standard for camp Bush videos. It is utterly absurd and completely delightful.
Now we’re discussing camp, we might as well discuss the real ghost haunting this essay: Goth rock. It’s uncontroversial to say that Kate Bush is not Goth. She’s too separate from the Goth subculture in terms of aesthetic, class, and musicality to claim to membership. However Bush is, as we noted earlier, not averse to engaging with the Gothic. She launched her career on it. Naturally there’s going to be some overlap with Goth rock.
One of the most surprising things about Bush is how she’ll often stumble on an aesthetic before anyone else and perform it in a way that sounds nothing like its more famous iterations. “Hammer Horror” was demoed in 1976 and released in 1978, when the Goth scene was beginning to cohere as a subculture. When it was released as a single in October, Joy Division had recently put out an EP, Siouxsie and the Banshees had cracked the Top Ten with “Hong Kong Garden,” The Cure had recorded but not yet released “Killing an Arab,” (yes much orientalism) and early iterations of Bauhaus were playing Northampton clubs. Goth wasn’t a salient cultural movement, but it was beginning to look like a separate scene from punk and even standard forms of post-punk (e.g. Gang of Four, Magazine). While this was going on, Bush had charted multiple times with three singles and two albums. She existed in a different sphere from Siouxsie and Peter Murphy. So why comment on the similarities at all?
There’s also of course the visual similarity between Bush and the Gothic, with dark clothing and dark make-up cast against white faces (Bush and Goth both have complex relationships with race). But the two paths leads to different conclusions. Goth rock artists were interested in abjection, descending into the gutter. Bush, for all her winking at the camera, imitates her Gothic subject in a way that preserves reverence for it. These approaches aren’t diametrically opposed — they form an intersection instead of a metro running over a motorway. Bush just stumbled on some fresh cultural ideas at the same time as some other dramatically minded young musicians. She navigates her way out of the Gothic avenue into another street altogether — she resolves the tension of influence and anxiety by doing something weirder.
Demoed at 44 Wickham Road, Brockley in 1976. Recorded at Super Bear Studios in Berres-les-Alpes, France between July and September 1978. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, piano, production. Andrew Powell — production, harmonium. Jon Kelly — engineering. Stuart Elliot — drums, percussion. Del Palmer — bass. Ian Bairnson — electric and acoustic guitar. Duncan Mackay — synthesizer. David Katz — orchestra contractor. Performed live on the Tour of Life in 1979. Images: from the cover of Andi Harriman and Marloes Bontje’s Some Wear Leather Some Wear Laces; Lon Chaney and Patsy Ruth Miller in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923, dir. Wallace Worsley); The Gurning Queen; Siouxsie and the Banshees”.
With Coffee Homeground as its B-side, Hammer Horror is one of Bush’s strongest singles I think. On 3rd November, it will be forty-seven years since the song was released. I have a lot of love for it. Although not my favourite Kate Bush single, I do feel that Hammer Horror is underrated. Releasing the final track from Lionheart as the first single was unorthodox. Perhaps not the obvious first single, as I mentioned. However, between the live performances and that amazing video, Hammer Horror made an impression. It is a song that is far too good…
TO be forgotten.