The fourth in this music-writing experiment brings together horror, sci-fi, murder, Florence Nightingale, Dawn French off the telly, a singing ghost, plus Kate Bush serving tea and packages them into a video that Top of the Pops deemed “too violent to show” even as the show itself was presented by, well, Jimmy Saville so insert your own joke here. Are you ready for “Experiment IV”?

Introduction

Such as it exists at all, the conversation around using sound to injure and kill centres upon two points: whether the sound can be so loud that the sheer volume kills; and whether the oscillations in the body produced by the sound waves can essentially shake you to death. This is a blog about pop music (I originally misspelt that as ‘poop music’ which as a scatalogical parapraxis will be idly funny three paragraphs from now so put a pin in it for the moment) and not really the right forum for such ruminations.

However, in the course of my research (I spend longer going down right-angled rabbit holes for each of these reviews than I did on my dissertation, I swear) I did discover that there is a near-mythical NASA technical report that purports to have discovered the exact frequency for making your eyeballs vibrate. I suppose in theory that if delivered with sufficient volume and intensity, this frequency would make your eyeballs pop in a distinctly Ren & Stimpy manner. If you’re interested, and can be arsed to find it, which I can’t, beyond a lazy 5-minute Googling, it is the catchily-titled “NASA Technical Report 19770013810” and you can find it alongside much other detail about bodily vibrations (oo-er missus) discussed in this paper: The Ghost in the Machine. Knock yourself out.

Apropos of nothing, here is my least favourite clip ever featuring eyeballs.

Taken from Lucio Fulci’s “Zombi 2” (aka “Zombie”) I can find no fault whatsoever with the title of this clip as it appears on YouTube.

Of course, there is one other use for noise that is intended to do injury to a person and that is the so-called ‘brown noise’ wherein brown is used as a metonym for poo (you can take the pin out now, that was the funny bit). As far as your hardly disinterested author can discover the whole thing appears to be an urban legend (VICE suggests that this spoof article from the New Scientist may be the root cause). There does seem to be a story about The Grateful Dead trying it at a concert and periodically the urban legend will come back when some hack claims that a band or DJ played it during a gig, but there is only one documented and peer-reviewed scientific appearance of the brown noise and I suggest that this will likely be the first, last and only.

Excellent! 500 words in, 500 words of shit, 250 words about shit, and we still haven’t mentioned the bloody video we’re all here to discuss. It’s going well, listeners.

1986!

There was a cowboy in the White House (no change there then) and a crook in Downing Street (no change there then). In a zenith moment for blue riband UK journalism, The Scum took a moment out of phone hacking and publishing private medical records to accuse the almost life-long vegetarian Freddie Starr of eating a hamster. Jeremy Bamber was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years, 35 years ago, and still sees no prospect of a successful appeal even though the foundations for his conviction are less firm than, say, Tokyo city centre. And the single most unique singer, songwriter and performer in the UK at that time, possibly even ever, released her greatest hits album.

Preamble

To accompany “The Whole Story”, wacky songstress Dame Catherine of Bush released the brilliantly odd single “Experiment IV” alongside the even more brilliantly odder self-directed video, presumably also called “Experiment IV”. I did some Googling (bet you’ve never come across the sentence “I did some Binging”) as per the above disclaimer to find out whether the single was based on a true story or was just inspired by her singular and oddly brilliant brain. On what is possibly the first website ever created there is the quote

“one of the fans who played a dead body in the “X4” film made reference to two or three sources for the subject of the song and the film. (He didn’t say where he’d heard of these sources, but pretty clearly he’d learned of them from Kate during the filming.) One was a nightmare Kate herself had had. Another was a true story of a French scientist working with sonics who created a huge steam whistle, which actually did kill several people, including himself.”

which doesn’t really clear up anything, does it. Here is that website, itself a marvel of accessibility and thoughtful design, available at http://gaffa.org/dreaming/tws_exiv.html should you choose to expose yourself to it (but not in that sense):

I can’t find out anything about the story or who the French scientist was but if you know or it was you, leave a comment below.

Here’s the deal. I play the video and I write down what comes to mind as it unfolds, like the great MBMs and OBOs in the Guardian. This is how I choose to review music; because this is my blog, and not yours. Shall we?

Video

Review

00:00 Good Lord, it’s 4:43 long. In pop music terms this is “the whole Lord of the Rings extended cut trilogy played back to back” long.  

00:05 This is actor Richard Vernon, best remembered for playing memorable roles like “Man on Train” in  “A Hard Day’s Night”, The Beatles’ version of “Spiceworld”. He also played award-winning Norwegian fjord designer slash pun maker Slartibartfast in the BBC’s partial adaptation of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, written by notably tall Beatles fan Douglas Adams. Adams was of course half of a gestalt personality with Stephen Fry, who was the narrator of the Guide in the rancid, worthless and execrable 2005 adaptation of H2G2 and voice of the far more successful audiobook (the novel, not the actual Guide this time. Is that a first? Someone playing the part of the voice of a book and then later narrating the audiobook of the book about the book? I almost certainly can’t be bothered to find out). Fry is also well-known for “A Bit of Fry and Laurie” and in a moment, the young Prince Regent-performing whippersnapper himself will be adorning this same video with his shining presence. Ah. The circle of life is complete.

Vernon plays a character called “Professor Jerry Coe”. In the “Game of Thrones” forerunner “The Old Testament”, the walls of Jericho are destroyed by the sound from 49 trumpets (Biblical scienticians are going to tell me I’m wrong and it was seven trumpets but the text makes it clear: “The seven priests carrying seven trumpets went forward” (Joshua 6:13). I did maths not good but even I know that seven priests with seven trumpets equals 49 trumpets). Anyway, the point is that the walls were destroyed by a deadly sound.

00:10 Professor Coe enters a shop which we are later informed is called “Music for Pleasure”. Said fake music shop was apparently so realistic that passers-by would pop in to place a mail order for a crumhorn or organistrum, this being the days before the Internet. Now this begs the questions: exactly what would a fake musical instrument shop that looked fake look like? However it’s not a question that sustains the interest for long so let’s move on.

00:19 Professor Coe enters what looks like a changing room and pulls the curtains shut. He pushes the back wall of the changing room and it opens into what we presume is a military facility, or a very roomy and recently redecorated Victorian hospital. Several odd things are happening virtually at once:

• Why does a music shop need a changing room?
• Why was it night time when Professor Coe entered the music shop but bright daylight when he exited the back of the changing room?
• And is that really Dawn French with the cheap “Papa Don’t Preach” bleach bottle blonde ‘do?

The answer to all of those questions is of course ‘yes’.

Yvie Oddly enough there’s a good reason that this looks suspiciously like a Victorian hospital. It’s because it’s a former hospital, designed at least in part by Florence Nightingale, built during the reign of Queen Victoria. Here’s a still from the BBC News channel of Queen Vicky greeting staff at the opening of said Royal Herbert Hospital in 1865:

00:29 French is playing a mysterious character known only as “Assistant 1” on IMDB. She wears the number “969” prominently displayed on her lab coat. I have some theories about what this could be a reference to:

• The number 969 bus, which goes nowhere near the Royal Herbert
• The Myanmarian “969 Movement”, a numerology-inspired peace/anti-Islam (delete as appropriate according to your worldview) movement
• The year 969, which was the year that Judith of Hungary, Queen of Poland was born

Safe to say we haven’t got to the bottom of this mystery yet.

Coe and Assistant 1/Agent 969 are doing a weird thing where they are moving superfast but pretend to be walking slowly. Possibly they’re being pulled on skateboards out of shot.

00:44 Coe and Agent 969 enter a mixing studio called “Sonic Research Department” where they are greeted by “Assistant 2”, the young Hugh Laurie at the peak of his career. According to Kate

“We had to create a recording studio for the video, so tape machines and outboard gear were recruited from my recording studio and the mixing console was very kindly lent to us by Abbey Road Studios. It was the desk The Beatles had used…”

Another mysterious Beatles link! Assistant 2 is wearing 57 on his lab coat. The only reference I can find to 57 is “Passenger 57” starring Wesley Snipes and it’s probably not that.

01:01 First chorus! 

Onscreen now is “The General” played by British thespian Peter Vaughan who was in “Time Bandits” and “Zulu Dawn” (not to be confused with “Zombie Dawn”) but nothing much since then. “Heartbeat”, “Lovejoy”, that’s about it. He lip syncs the chorus’ lyrics in a far more convincing manner than Valentina or Charlie Hides: “and they told us / all they wanted / was a sound that could kill someone from a distance”. Tell you what, in terms of subject matter this is no “No Way No Way” by Vanilla.

01:16 An Oscar-worthy moment. The General tells the Professor and Assistant 1 what he wants for Christmas and the Professor is so outraged that he SMASHES his fist into the desk and then collapses into a chair, suffering from melodrama. It’s madness, I tell you, madness.

Did you know that in 1988, after Madness split up, four of the original members decided to continue making records under a new name. They held a competition on Radio 1 (this is before Radio 1 skewed their demographic towards listeners who weren’t old enough for “In The Night Garden”) to find a new name and do you know what they ultimately came up with? “The Madness”. Crazy, crazy nights.

01:29 Assistant 1 brings a tray full of tea and biscuits out to where the Professor is talking to three heavily pregnant women. I don’t just mean pregnant, these women are all between 50-60 weeks pregnant and look in some discomfort. The Professor ignores them and takes tea and biscuits for himself. The cad!

Returning to the opening of this essay, we talked there about how the possibility of using sounds as a weapon centred upon volume, amplitude, frequency and oscillation. Bush takes a different tack. She envisages a sound so terrifying, so dreadful, that it would stop one’s heart dead if one was to hear it, as the lyrics tell:

“From the painful cries of mothers / and the terrifying screams / to the sound of Education Secretary Michael Gove trying to explain that all schools should be reaching ‘above average’ status”

01:37 Now we’re in a padded cell, recording the anguished screams of a mad man (played by big brother Paddy Bush, for fans of celebrity siblings). Assistant 1 has toothache, probably caused by all the biscuits she had in the previous scene. If I could record toothache, I would. That would be a sound that could kill someone.

01:50 What the jiggins? It’s another chorus! It’s been literally nineteen words since the last chorus. Swizz!

01:55 Now we have someone strapped into a dentist’s chair but not in a good, Gazza/Euro ‘96 sort of way. I believe that this is Del Palmer, bass guitar funkateer for Kate’s band and a long time paramour of hers for some time. Assistant 2 carries out a menacing looking box with a slightly wonky wifi extender aerial.

Now I’m slightly puzzled, but we have at least identified another Hitchhiker’s reference. If the sound is the scary thing, then surely it doesn’t matter what the container/amplifier for said deadly sound looks like? Like, if you were in an on-going war situation, and there was a deadly sound killing all your chums, would you be looking for a) something painted a deathly black with a large speaker and excitingly non-specific but threatening contours or b) something nonentitical like a breadbin with a sort of English countryside brambles’n’blackbirds motif painted on the side to beat the everloving shit out of? They just haven’t thought it through.

And that reminds me of the Kill-O-Zap Gun:

The designer was clearly not instructed to beat about the bush. “Make it evil,” they’ve been told. “Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sorts of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, this is a gun for going out and making people miserable with.”

02:14 Disaster! The sound is so terrifying that it’s only blown the bloody top off. The Victim looks suitably startled; B- for acting. Smoke billows out of the top of the stricken media centre, but wait-

02:17 A shape begins to form out of the smoke! It has blonde hair and a raggedy ill-fitting dress which to be fair could have described most pop stars in the 1980s of any gender, even Andy Taylor out of Duran Duran. The Professor and his two Assistants merely watch, as though somehow they are not surprised that a banshee that looks astonishingly like Kate Bush with blonde hair and a raggedy ill-fitting dress has burst out of the top of his buggered Microsoft Zune.

02:32 The Victim looks amazed at this ethereal spirit that has appeared before his eyes out of the top of the broken stereo, especially given how much it looks like his girlfriend. The apparition with the overdrawn lips blows him a kiss and then rips off her wig! It’s a bit like Sasha Velour’s rose petal wig reveal except instead of a bald head, this reveals a hideously angry phantasm in one passed for special effects in 1980s pop videos. The Professor, Assistant 1 and Assistant 2 look startled by this development, as though they hadn’t expected something violent to arise from a brief that read, “a sound that could kill someone”. Hmmm. Assistant 1 does some acting.

02:52 More acting. The violent windstorm that the banshee has whipped up breaks the glass into the control room and throws our three intrepid scienticians against the far wall. Curiously it doesn’t even budge the well-oiled outwards-swinging door which Assistant 2 pushes open with a single fingernail, allowing a fortunate egress from the devastation.

03:02 A great shot which foreshadows the one of Ripley and the Xenomorph face to face in Alien3. Interestingly, the Xenomorph in that shot wasn’t the female, so either a) the poster is somewhat presciently calling the male Xenomorph ‘bitch’, which wasn’t a widely used slur for male-identifying murderous Xenomorphs in thr future back then, or b) it’s calling Ripley the bitch. Given what that franchise has to say about the liminal state of motherhood, I know where my money is.

03:04 For reasons beyond exposition or my power to parse, Assistant 1 is covered under mountains of video tape (or possibly dark brown ribbon) which falls from the ceiling. The Professor has uncomfortable stitch.

03:23 The banshee, flying down the corridor having escaped from the sonic research lab thingy, makes a b(ansh)eeline for Assistant 2 and leaves him sort of awkward-looking and googly-eyed on the floor. It’s hard to say what has happened because that’s sort of what Hugh Laurie looks like all the time.

03:38 La Bush, smiling smugly, serves tea to the General and then stands there waiting for his next command. Close-up on 2: wait! The face changes to that of the banshee! This is followed by a montage of all the faces of her victims.

03:59 Again with the litter as a signifier of destruction, dystopia and slightly odd pop music.

04:10 Exterior shot of “Music for Pleasure”. White-coated lab techs litter the street like Spiced-up zombies litter Sheffield city centre. The camera pans out across some wasteland to a point where a flimsy corrugated iron fence has been erected around the scene and a wee small sign says “PROHIBITED”. That sign wouldn’t even keep out bad language and it’ll be covered in shit graffiti and bill posters in literally seconds. The van drives off, but stops to pick up one passenger. As they get into the van they turn to the camera and break the fourth wall. It’s the banshee, dressed as an English female singer/songwriter from the eighties! She puts a finger to her lips as if to say, “don’t tell anyone” but without need really, it’s just a video from the 80s Kate.

Actually it reminds of the very last scene of the “Thriller” video now that I think about it.

And there it ends, with the sonic malevolence let loose on an unsuspecting world. I think the world is probably safe; it’s the 1980s and as soon as she opens her mouth to sonic someone to death, some white cis straight man is bound to start talking over her.

What’s the verdict?

The last two issues have featured artists that I quite like releasing what can only really described as half-hearted dirges with questionable videos. But this is an artist that I quite like, and in fact in 1986 I was at the peak of my quite liking Kate Bush; “The Hounds of Love” and in particular “The Ninth Wave” is quite simply one of my favourite collections of music of all time, and for me nothing she has done since has come close to how magnificent they are.

I’ve never been fully on board with this idea of releasing a brand new track to go on a greatest hits album. I mean, what if the new music is released as a single and disappears straight down the great dumper of pop, ie it spends one week at number 57 and is never heard of again? But then, “The Whole Story” isn’t an ordinary greatest hits. Of 12 songs, this song was brand new; “Wuthering Heights” was essentially a remake of the original; “The Man with the Child in his Eyes” appears to be the album mix and not the single; and the singles “Hammer Horror”, “December will be Magic Again”, “There Goes a Tenner” and “Suspended in Gaffa” don’t appear at all. The Christmas single “December will be Magic Again” is actually a bonus track on the 12” of “Experiment IV”.

Whilst not at the same standard as – well, any of the other tracks on “The Whole Story” really – “Experiment IV” is actually “quite good”. The video is a bit bonkers, and it takes the lyrics of the song as literally as an Australian when asked to think up a name for a desert that is both great and sandy. The music is interesting and sounds unlike anything else, and, well, let’s just compare this single to everything else in the Top 100 on the day that it was released:

I mean, there are some bona fide classics (“Suburbia”, “Notorious” (yes it fucking is), “Anotherloverholenyohead”) but, Letitia Dean and Paul Medford? Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Also, who knew that Linda Lusardi had tried her hand at pop? A new entry at number 92, it went up one place the week after and that fortnight was the whole of her career in pop. 

Let’s end with this wonderfully deadpan performance of “Experiment IV” and meditate on how quite good this single is.

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