FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Hammer Horror at Forty-Five
Inside Lionheart’s Unusual and Underrated Lead Single
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THERE is a lot to discuss…
when it comes to the Kate Bush single, Hammer Horror. It turns forty-five on 27th October. Released as the lead single of her second album, Lionheart, it is a song about an actor who gets thrust into the lead role of The Hunchback of Notre Dame after the original actor dies in an accident on the film set. He is then guilt-ridden ends up being haunted by the ghost of the jealous original actor, who was a former friend. Thanks to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia ahead of time, as I will be quoting a bit from them for this anniversary feature. Even though it was a single that only reached forty-four (her lowest chart position to that date; the next single, Wow, got her back into the top twenty), she performed it all around the world. Whilst in Australia during a promotional tour, Kate Bush devised the dance routine for the song in her Melbourne hotel room. She performed the song on the television show, Countdown. Coffee Homeground, one of the three new songs she wrote for Lionheart, was the B-side. Many I speak to feel Hammer Horror was a good first single to release. I have no doubt the song works as a single though, as you have options like Wow, Symphony in Blue and Kashka from Baghdad to choose from, Hammer Horror seems like a risky first release. The parent album, Lionheart, turns forty-five on November. That was a chart smash. Although not as adored as 1978’s The Kick Inside, there is a lot to love and recommend on Kate Bush’s sophomore album.
I am going to go on in a second. Before getting to that, Kate Bush provides the full story when it comes to the inspiration behind one of her most important and underrated singles. One would have thought her popularity and momentum would have got Hammer Horror inro the top forty at the very least. Maybe audiences felt that the song was too much of a departure or was a little inaccessible (though they got Wuthering Heights to number one!):
“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)”.
I say that Hammer Horror is one of Kate Bush’s most important singles, as it was the bridge between The Kick Inside and Lionheart. That being said, she was still discussing that debut album in some form when promoting Lionheart. In fact, the final single from The Kick Inside, Strange Phenomena, was released in Brazil on 1st June, 1979! If not one of her most loved singles, I do really like the video for Hammer Horror. Directed by Keef (Keith McMillan), the single did fare better in countries like Australia and Ireland. I wonder whether people here were expecting something different or were a little overloaded with The Kick Inside. Did Hammer Horror come out too soon?! There is a big argument to suggest EMI should have halted release of an album until 1979. Trying to capitalise on the attention around their Bush, I think that rush to get a new single and album out was a mistake that could have cost her dearly. A big reason why Bush was keen to produce her third studio album (with Jon Kelly), Never for Ever, in 1980. This is some of the critical reception of Hammer Horror:
“On 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"). Record Mirror's Ronnie Gurr opined: "Kate keeps up the formula and doesn't upset the fans... sounds like Joni Mitchell popping tabs with the LSO." In NME, Tony Parsons wrote: "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".
Like pretty much every Kate Bush songs, the lyrics are compelling and original. It is hard to pinpoint why Hammer Horror didn’t resonate when it came out. Maybe there was a sense of sameness. Perhaps the public didn’t expect the first single from Bush’s second album a mere five months after The Man with the Child in His Eyes came out! The contrast between those two songs is quite stark. I wanted to highlight the opening lyrics of Hammer Horror as being especially interesting and vivid: “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”. There are a couple of features about Hammer Horror I want to focus in on before I conclude. Into the Pop Void shared their take in 2015:
“This was absolutely not how things were supposed to go – only a few months earlier the rather divisive Wuthering Heights had sailed to no.1, and even at the age of five I was aware of how polarising it was. My school playground was divided into those who pranced around doing Kate impressions at playtime and those who thought we were nutters. I suppose the risk with Wuthering Heights was that it’s strangeness would mean it ended up as a novelty record, and as we all know, novelty success isn’t often repeated. But when The Man With the Child In His Eyes followed it into the top 10, it looked like that pitfall had been successfully avoided.
And then came Hammer Horror.
I’m not sure what anyone really expected of a brand new Kate Bush single at this point, but apparently it wasn’t this. Opening with a fabulously dramatic string and piano pairing, it’s definitely something of a curiosity. The creeping, tentative verse gives way to a jagged, almost violent rock chorus and the whole thing veers wildly between the two styles, with Kate alternating her upper and lower registers like she’s got two heads. It may be a bit Rock Follies at times, but it’s a gift to interpretive dancers.
You could argue that it was just too strange to be a hit, but the follow-up, Wow – a song about theatrical luvvies containing pop’s best – and probably only – reference to the other use for Vaseline, went to no.14. For Kate, oddity was never a barrier to success, so I think Hammer Horror – despite its helpful just-before-Halloween release date (27th of October), was just a bit unlucky.
A lot of people tend to think that Lionheart, coming just nine months after The Kick Inside, was a bit rushed and lacking the depth and intricacy of its predecessor. I disagree with that: it’s overflowing with ideas, beautifully arranged and the most overtly theatrical of all her albums, which makes perfect sense given that 1979’s Tour of Life was already in the planning stages. I was too young to attend (“mummy, please can I go and see the screaming lady?”), but every bit of that strange, glorious energy was still in place when I went to the Before the Dawn show in 2014. Wept for most of it, couldn’t speak about it coherently for weeks afterwards. Still not sure I can.
Entered chart: 11/11/1978
Chart peak: 44
Weeks on chart: 6
Who could sing this today and have a hit? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Lady Gaga belted this out on American Horror Story: Hotel”.
I am interested in a feature from Dreams of Orgonon from back in 2018. Christine Kelley made some interesting observations about Hammer Horror. A song I feel that people should revisit ahead of its forty-fifth anniversary on 27th October:
“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.
ART CREDIT: Lisa Kilanowski
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?”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
It is weird and kind of cool that the two U.K. singles from Lionheart relate to the stage and performance. Film and theatre technically! Maybe Bush was feeling paranoid or like an actor in a game. Even if these are songs written before her debut came out, there is this subconscious indication that there was perhaps some dissatisfaction creeping in. I always thought that the album could have benefited from a third single. Symphony in Blue was released in Japan. Kashka from Baghdad wasn’t released at all. Crucially, all three of the new songs written for Lionheart – Symphony in Blue, Full House and Coffee Homeground – were used as A or B-sides. Important to ensure they got into the world. If the stage was at the centre of Wow, that is where Bush found herself the following year for her only tour, The Tour of Life. She would be able to bring to life Lionheart songs that were denied the chance to become singles. Hammer Horror, naturally, was part of the set. With wit, ghoulishness, paranoia, regret and some lovely wordplay (“I've got a hunch that you're following/To get your own back on me”) in the blend, I would like to see Hammer Horror get some love in the lead-up to its forty-fifth anniversary. Even if I consider it not to be a natural first single from a crucial second studio album, Kate Bush obviously felt something and had an intuition that it would be popular. Maybe EMI were more a driving force regarding the choice of the first single. I might have to scour the interview archives and see if Bush was asked about it. In any case, the genre blend of Glam Rock, Art Rock, and Baroque Pop expanded her musical palette from The Kick Inside and showed she was not an artist who could be easily labelled and predicted – something that would become more apparent with each subsequent album. The final track from the massively underappreciated Lionheart, I think that Hammer Horror needs…
SOME fresh love.