ART GARFUNKEL – "Bright Eyes"

Mike Batt, innit?

It was frequently used as the “last dance” song at my school disco, and I still consider it a strange song to be deployed for romantic purposes, since it is about someone – or something – blundering around in the dark, lost, dissociated from society, trying to find their place in the world, real or otherwise (“Wandering over the hills unseen/Or is it a dream?”).

It could also be described as the revenge of the Wombles – another enclosed community forced to hide itself from humanity; think of the air of desolate melancholy seeping through the opening cracks of “Wombling In The Rain” or “Dry Those Womble Tears From Your Eyes.”

So “Bright Eyes” might represent the Wombles, grown up, compelled to wander towards the world as Christopher Robin has to do at the end of The House At Pooh Corner. The aura of approaching death is palpable throughout the song – “Bright eyes, how can you close and fail?” – and there is something dreadfully ominous about such signifiers as “A fog along the horizon,” “A strange glow in the sky” or “A cold sound in the air.”

The choice of Garfunkel as singer lends the song an especial poignancy, since “Bright Eyes” suggests where “Bridge Over Troubled Water” might have led had it remained quiet and hushed all the way through; his voice is tender but distended by echo, and I cannot think of anything more spine-chilling in that year’s pop – not even Throbbing Gristle’s “Six Six Six” – than the warm, reassuring voice of Art singing a lullaby about “Following the river of death downstream.” The music is appropriately hymnal and resonant, discreetly orchestral – those cascades of flutes near the beginning reminding us of better, brighter but now too distant times – and patient, as though delaying the business of death, whether through disease or massacre. Garfunkel, finally, sounds like his own ghost, and a life filters through the song’s pores and quietly slips away, just as I had to do in the spring of 1979 but the latter is none of your business.

Still 2-0 to Art on Popular, and no sign of a reply from Paul…

I assume the bit I can’t see in Tom’s post from my werk PC is an embedded youtube vid, either the promo or another clip from the WD movie. I vaguely recall the former, but have never seen the movie (or read the book). TBH I’ve never really cared much about rabbits one way or the other. (Present company excepted OBV!)

My late Mum really liked this song so we bought her the 7″ either for Easter or Mother’s Day in ’79. The strongest associations this song generates are therefore memories of her. She was no rabbit-lover either, none of our family were. She just loved the tune.

jeff @ 4: I make it 3-0 to Art, since Paul doesn’t appear on Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Loved by my six-year old self, but for the visuals and the chorus – it was a single which I’d only ever experienced through television until this year! The silhouettes, the hillsides, particularly the sequence of the rabbits dancing and seeming to change colour, this thrilled me whenever it was shown. I think that this may be the first song which I registered as being sad, and thus decided that it must be beautiful.

Obviously, 29 years on, my critical acuity has developed, and I have a lot of other songs to compare it with. Does it still affect me? In patches – I find that my attention wanders a lot when its playing. The sense of impending death and decay within it commands a certain respect, though.

Number 2 Watch: 3 favourites; A week of ‘Cool For Cats’ by Squeeze, three weeks of ‘Some Girls’ by Racey, and – most gallingly – two weeks of ‘Pop Muzik’ by M, which might well be the greatest pop thing ever.

I think this is the first instance of a phenomenon that I suspect Popular will come to regret in due course.

There have been films before that have spawned number one hits. Lately we’ve seen Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Summer Holiday springs to mind from an earlier pop era as a particularly fruitful source. But they were films designed as a vehicle for the pop music. This is a film that is not in itself a pop vehicle, but it has a song clearly designed to be a blockbuster pop hit.

A terrifying encounter with a man in an Easter Bunny costume has left me scarred on rabbits…bright eyes or not…

I can’t bear this song. There are very few number one songs that I loathe so much that I can’t stand to *think* about them, let alone listen to them. But this is one. Ugh. 0/10

Bravo, Kat! You’ve got it right on the money! Most of the thread has been most poetic about this, weeping softly about doomed buns, quivering in fear in the warren of death. Look – No-one forced the little fuckers down there, did they?… Sorry if this superficially offends. All I can say is that I was also guilty of laughing when Bambi’s mum got stoked, “Bambi’s old deer”, as I very amusingly described her (Waldo was, of course, a rather disturbed youngster).

This is the song which made me positively warm towards myxomatosis. We have Mike Batt to thank for this grim piece and I’ve heard interviews with him when he has said that Garfunkel had always been his first choice to spring this on an undeserving UK public. A song about bunnies would have been bad enough but this was a song about CARTOON bunnies, thus magnifying the crime to an uncalculatable degree. Sarah Palin has the right idea about rabbits, I think.

One extra curricular point: Many moons ago, I responded to a scathing attack on Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather by a political journalist and hate figure to the present government by suggesting that putting the shortcomings he had outlined in the young woman to one side, she undoubtedly did have the misfortune to closely resemble a principal character in the very film to which “Bright Eyes” is aligned. I suggested that hitherto Miss Teather, who represents Brent East (previously occupied by Livingstone), should instead be styled “The Hon Member for Watership Down”. The journalist e-mailed me back pretty much by return with the response “Spot-on!” and if any fellow bloggers are at all interested, they can google images of both Sarah and Bun to decide for themselves.

Re: 1979 Cup Final – This was one of the dullest Finals for years before those last astonishing few minutes. I’m no Gooner but that image of Alan Sunderland running away having scored that winner is one of those images I shall always remember.

Re: Mrs T – I am pleased that the 1979 General Election has been given a light touch treatment. I’m certainly not getting into it. Something for another place for me.

Parodywatch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4ENXy5J1xo

This frightened me as much as amused me when I was seven.

I have only very recently (compared to everyone here) heard this song, and I have never seen the movie nor read the book, so I can only judge it on its merits; I am sure the 12-year-old me would not have liked it, though perhaps if I had a pet rabbit (instead of two cats) I would have felt differently.

“Bright Eyes” is sweet, pretty, and yet it is about death. I can only imagine it stayed at the top so long as people liked the movie, liked the song, liked Art…there may well be some extra significance to its being at the top when That Woman became PM, but I will let someone else carmodise here.

The song already mentioned as being one of the #2s is my real concern – I’m going to write about it in full at my blog eventually, but suffice it to say that “Pop Muzik” began New Pop and that the church organ flourish at the beginning is like the start of time; that Robin Scott’s voice is in effect the first white rapping (“talking over music” as Radcliffe & Maconie would call it) complete with references to nursery rhymes, and his call to “Infiltrate it/Activate it!” is like the clarion call to the post-punk world to rise up and do something. Soon enough, New Pop will get to #1. YAY!

My great Watership Down memory is seeing it in a badly soundproofed cinema, listening to the fighters taking off from Battlestar Galactica next door.

But yeah, lovely song, and I mean that in the sense that I love it, not that it is a *lovely song*. It does however upset me to learn that Mike Batt was involved in its creation.

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.

What year was this? 1979? Sorry, I was busy co-opting the ska revival.

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?

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.

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.

#31 and #32: Oh, really? I missed that, sorry.

Hmm. You can use that observation then. If you like…

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!

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.