ART GARFUNKEL – “Bright Eyes”
Who wrote “Bright Eyes”, and why they wrote it, I don’t care. I know, but I don’t care. You can talk about all that stuff Because all “Bright Eyes” means for me is this:
Sorry about the glutinous string arrangement there, which completely destroys the fragility of Art’s original, but it’s the visuals that matter. This, good people, is why the rabbit is the most terrifying animal in pop: those swirling sun-rabbits, those warping and distoring pylons, and most of all the Black Rabbit and his red eyes and weird totem-mask ears.
As a fairly precocious child I had already read Watership Down before the film came to a local village hall, maybe a year or so after this single hit number one. I was very eager to see it, because I loved the book: there were bits in it I found scary, the vicious rabbits of the Efrafa warren for instance, but the film was a cartoon, and how frightening could cartoons be? More fool me: I still get chills when I see the sequence above but it’s nothing – nothing – compared to the warren destruction, with the crushed blinded rabbits dying in claustrophobic fear. I am not a great fan of horror films, but nothing I have ever seen in the cinema has been as terrifying as Watership Down. And when I try to imagine the horror of warfare or plague, what my mind reaches for is pale circles of dead rabbits.
The amazing thing about “Bright Eyes” the song is that it actually manages to live up to my terrified imaginings – Art’s lovely, strung-out vocal managing to sound like the graceful, fatal will-o-wisp of the film’s Black Rabbit, the vision you chase even though you know where it is leading you to: “following the river of death downstream”, what a great line, or at least it becomes one with Art singing it with that slight beckon in his voice. The power is all in the verses, though – the chorus of “Bright Eyes” is too big, too strong, too arranged to sustain their wan intensity. It turns the track into, well, a pop song, gives it the safety and resolution of closing credits and lights coming up. But the verses are a shadow glimpsed jumping across the setting sun.
6
it’s a pretty tune – I always used to think he was singing about a ‘frog upon the horizon’. I wasn’t aware of Art’s role in ‘Catch 22′ at this time but after seeing him in ‘Bad timing’ the year after this made me reevaluate my opinion of him as a bit of a softy
I can’t bear this song. I remember even at the time not being able to take it seriously.
Hearing it again just makes me think of that episode of the Goodies when they donned bunny costumes and took the piss, quite brilliantly, out of Watership Down.
I never read the book, I never saw the film, and so I remain unmoved by this lachrymose evocation of Bunnygeddon, which merely struck me at the time as a tedious and unwelcome interruption of the Glorious Revolution of 1979.
(Then again, at least it kept Racey’s ghastly “Some Girls” off the top of the charts – a song which my cloth-eared step-siblings had on near-constant rotation during the Easter holidays.)
Three decades on, I am prepared to afford grudging respect to its craft – but that’s as charitable as I can get.
What year was this? 1979? Sorry, I was busy co-opting the ska revival.
“Some Girls” being basically a rewrite of Max Miller’s “I like the girls that do”
But that’s for “Slightly UnPopular”, the week by week analysis of the number two records of the GB charts.
Mark #30 – or indeed “Music Sounds Better With Two”, the new project by Lena aka Lady Punctum which was recently plugged on these very pages.
Mike #24 – can’t see YouTube, but is that by any chance the Matthew Butler version from Tiswas?
Yeah, Grout, careful.
Lena, what would make “Pop Muzik” rapping and (for example) “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” not? I have an odd feeling you’re right but I’m not sure I could justify that feeling.
#31-1 – Let’s have another proper link to Lady Punctum’s fine Number Twos blog.
#31-2 – Yes, Matthew Butler, whose “Bright Eyes” cover was played every week for months and months and months on our University radio station’s chart show, for a laff like. Bloody students!
#29 – No visible ska revival in April 79, unless you lived in Coventry and were massively ahead of the curve. Although I think “Gangsters” slipped out quietly in May or thereabouts?
A few years ago, I met someone who had a blog (long since defunct) called Popdizzy.
“You know, after that song.”
“What song?”
“Come on, you must know it. Pop-pop-pop dizzy! Everybody’s talking ’bout, pop dizzy!”
“Oh, Pop MUZIK. You’ve heard it wrong.”
“Are you thick or something? It’s called Pop DIZZY.”
“What, as in New York, London, Paris, MIZZY?”
He didn’t have an answer to that. Stupid boy.
Yeah, “Rhythm Stick” is much more in the Max Miller line. Hard to say but “Pop Muzik” is maybe the first white “rap” record to sound like “the future” (and irony of ironies “Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 3″ might qualify as the second).
Also worth remembering that Robin Scott was art school pals with McLaren and Westwood (and they were all in attendance at/organising various key ’68 countercultural happenings in London) before they went one way and he another and with “Pop Muzik” coinciding with the fall of the Pistols and of the original punk movement and the rise of Thatcher (subtext: see, this is where it all got you) there’s more than a hint of Scott coming back into the picture and saying, “OK, how about we try it this way?”
#31 and #32: Oh, really? I missed that, sorry.
Hmm. You can use that observation then. If you like…
BTW Lena – sorry for not giving MSBWT a proper plug on here! – I was going to but the first entry seemed to be saying it was meant as a private blog! Good luck with it and I will add it to the sidebar (along with DJP’s new project) next time I update it.
The first new #1 of 1979 which I didn’t like. As with many other observers, with the passage of time, I can see it’s a well-crafted, well-performed, song, but it’s nothing special, and a real surprise that this was the UK’s best-selling single of the year!
As far as 1979 number ones go, “Bright Eyes” was as cold as ice cream but still as sweet.
Oh yes, I’d forgotten Channel 4 Top 100 Watch – funnily enough “Bright Eyes” was number 53 on that all-time best sellers list, while “Heart of Glass” was number 50. On their figures Blondie outsold Art by 1,180,000 to 1,155,000, so that would seem to have been the biggest seller of the year unless there were significant later sales.
The song was remixed and returned to the Top 20 in 1995.
Right now I am fighting a cold and resting after a busy, busy morning of packing and re-packing and sorting out books. However I should be able to write more this week and have posted today – thank you Mike, for posting the link, and to Tom, I really appreciate your linking me here (and I will put everyone here on my blog soon).
It’s not so much Robin Scott’s politics that make this a ‘rap’ song (though those have to be taken into account) but the very controlled way he uses his voice – Ian Dury sounds like a jazz singer to me, Robin sounds more like a pitchman, “Pop Muzik” being a kind of ad for…itself, as so many rappers talk about how great they are and can become very tangled up in self-referentiality. (I only know the one song by M, so I have no idea if he sings or just always talks.)
I was reading a lengthy 1979 Melody Maker interview with Robin Scott earlier this evening; he’s very upfront about his entryism (see also Lena’s #23 above), and very clear about the nature of the break he’s making with the punk/new wave orthodoxy. (I’d link, but it’s another Rock’s Back Pages subscription-only jobby.)
Didn’t M only have one song anyway?
Incidentally, it was around this time I summoned up the courage to go into my local record shop and part with a sizable portion of that week’s pocket money in return for Pop Muzik, my very first single purchase.
Mike, is there any way you could print it out and send it to DJP? That is the sort of thing I would LOVE to read (and him too).
“Pop Muzik” gets regular airplay here on the retro-disco show every Saturday night, and was #1 in the US in the fall of ’79, when rap was just taking off.
Yeah, Mike, I’d definitely be grateful if you were able to do that; I owe you yet another Hot Compilation As Soon As I Get Around To Getting A Flipping CD Burner! ;-)
Will – check out the parent album New York, London, Paris, Munich for some more excellent stuff in the same vein and also other very different veins (the subsequent single “Moonlight And Muzak” is HUGELY underrated) and then, if you can find them, the next two M albums – The Official Secrets Act and Famous Last Words, the latter of which boasts both Barry Adamson AND Mark King on bass (and pre-fame Level 42 crop up quite a lot in various configurations on all these records). Also one of the great lost singles of 1982 – “Danube” (with its sinister, hushed refrain of “where’s the water running to?”) with Brigit Novik, Scott’s then (and still?) other half (she does all the female vocals on “Pop Muzik”) on lead vocals.
Oh, and Mike – document received with immense gratitude! I’ve forwarded it on to Lena as well.
Have to agree regarding M’s “Danube” being one of the great lost singles. I seem to remember it came in a sort of sickly yellow/lime coloured vinyl, and pretty much sunk despite a fair amount of radio airplay. I think Malcolm McLaren may have listened to M, as a lot of his later works seem to owe a debt to their catalogue, in particular his more “opera”/”classical”-leaning work, which “Danube” would have fitted into perfectly.
McLaren and Robin Scott went back a long way, actually – they were fellow situationist student agitators in 1968, and maintained intermittent contact thereafter. I think the M project was partly motivated by a certain sense of “Well, if he can do it then so can I…”
Re: 43 – Lena I’m not sure that I can get with “sounds like a pitchman” being more in line with “rapper” than “sounds like a jazz singer: quite the opposite, in fact. But I see what you mean about the self-referentiality.
I think it’s possible that this song’s huge chart success may have surprised even its creators. Take away the vocals and it sounds like another piece of instrumental score, which wouldn’t have been released as a single at all.
Agree with all those glad that it stopped Racey’s Some Girls from getting to no.1. I had the misfortune to see this horrible song on TOTP2 once, a pile of sexist garbage sung by a group of ugly pub rockers.
As for the book, it could just be taken as a kids’ story about a group of rabbits. But each individual character is so well written that you forget that they’re any particular species at all, but somehow at the same time you never say to yourself ‘they’re rabbits, they wouldn’t do that’. Only that ridiculous, annoying seagull character should have been edited out. The destruction of the original warren and the Efrafa dictatorship make it as strong a critique of totalitarianism as anything by more ‘political’ writers, and the whole thing is a feat of storytelling to equal anything Tolkien ever wrote.
Much better written than this posting anyway!
This took a while to chart as the release date on the demo is a couple of months before it made a chart debut. The combination of Art’s fantastic voice and Mike Batt’s writing skills made this a perfect song.
I do like Walliams and Lucas’s parody on Simon and Garfunkel when “Simon” declared “The rabbits didn’t buy it”
Mike Batt was prone to sugarsweet paranoia around this time – see also the Garfunkel/Faltskog single Sometimes When I’m Dreaming where everything is quite lovely in a Macca-esque melancholy manner until the chorus payoff – “but I wake up screaming, sometimes when I’m dreaming.” How queer, as Zuleika Dobson would say.
Seconding Marcello on love for the Wombles oeuvre, especially the first album (Wombling Songs) which is chocka with gorgeous baroque pop, minor key odes to “wombling along” etc
Re 52: “Some girls will, some girls won’t.” Umm, most girls I’m guessing… (punchline pinched from Popular pub convo last night). If Racey were handpicked like Westlife, how come Chinnichap picked such a bunch of oddballs? (trying to be kind here)
Re 50: That’ll be at Croydon College, where Scott and McLaren plotted the long term pop future along with Jamie Reid.
I must have been one of the few to actually buy M’s earlier single (possibly first) ‘Moderne Man’ which was a terrific slice of rock/pop. ‘Moonlight & Muzak’ was an excellent single as well.
As for Art. After the sublime ‘Breakaway’ from a few years back, he’d hit a bit of a lean period so ‘Bright Eyes’ was a return to chart form although it was somewhat disappointing with it’s syrupy chorus and over-egged string arrangement. Hopefully Mike Batt will not be at any time ripe for an ABBA – style make over.
I’ll bet you don’t got “Cry myself to sleep” though. On do it records, by “Comic Romance”, a fairly straight ska-pop ballad thingy with all post-modern irony on the sleeve art…
Read the story behind the song here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7919049.stm
This is one of the earliest singles in my collection – I gave most of my mid-70s ones to jumble sales or swapped them because I’d overplayed them (including an Eddie Howell one which I later learned was very valuable because of Freddie Mercury’s involvement -ouch !).
I bought it as soon as it came out after the film along with Cool For Cats and three weeks later they were 1 and 2 in the charts- the closest I’ve ever got to the zeitgeist !
It’s great in the film context which prompted the purchase but I think (at 14) I also had some precognition that my childhood was ending and wanting to buy this sweet song about rabbits before the doors of innocence closed for good. 1979 was also the year I bought my last Matchbox car and Marvel comic.
BUNNY UPDATE:
“The Hon Member for Watership Down”, Sarah Teather, is now an Education minister…
Re M and Pop Muzik – http://drunkennessofthingsbeingvarious.blogspot.com/2011/01/m-pop-muzik-1979-no-2-23-weeks-mca.html
Everyone thought it was Sparks when it first came out.
I didn’t.
Neither did I, and I don’t remember anyone else thinking that. It really doesn’t sound much like them at all.
nice site billy. i really liked you piece on ‘say hello wave goodbye’ which made me think at lot as i’ve never heard the song that way *at all*. from the lyrics on the page i can’t fault your analysis one bit, but listening to the song, i don’t hear sneering sarcasm, i hear marc tearing his heart out. to me he doesn’t sound smug about finding a nice little housewife and a steady life, he sounds utterly distraught – that bit, with the wavering synth wash rising up behind him is one of the most beautiful moments in pop music. i hear the song as someone steeling himself to do a terrible thing (all the stuff about what a mess she is him desperately trying to convince himself) for the sake of..what, i dunno – respectability, his career? ( the nation? there’s definitely a touch of hal and falstaff). so yeah, selfish maybe, but not callous – just listen to that terrible moment of hesitation in “we’re strangers meeting for the first time…okay?”. what a song.
Well thank you very much, Champale! I’ve replied to your thoughts about ‘Say Hello’ on the ‘Tainted Love’ thread, where I thought it would fit in better.
Perhaps Mike Batt’s greatest hit; http://drunkennessofthingsbeingvarious.blogspot.com/2011/01/wombles-remember-youre-womble-1974-no-3.html
I’d have said “Superwomble”, but that would be mainly for the Chris Spedding solo…