A total show, seductive memories and admirable effort for a great video. Kirpianuscus Jan 4, Details Edit. Release date December 10, United States. United Kingdom Ireland. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 6 minutes. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Edit page. Hollywood Icons, Then and Now. See the gallery.
It's influential, it's memorable, and it's arguably downright filthy. It's Peter Gabriel. It's Sledgehammer. And it all starts so innocently, too, with a close up of tadpoles swimming happily in a big dark pond of Wait, that's no ordinary tadpole That's grade-A wiggling man-drizzle! Sorry, sperm. And it's funny, because when you think of this video, people quite often say "I never realised it was about sex at the time And the wiggling of an ear which is more impressive in motion than it is in freeze-frame, I admit :.
See, on the left, it's about a millimetre further down and more elongated in shape than on the right? Well, you should see it in action. It's almost imperceptibly remarkable. The aforementioned oven-ready chickens went bad under the studio lights during filming and caused a bit of fowl stench. The video kicks off with a microscopic look at flowing sperm. Later on, we see some plasticine sperm.
And that person would be Peter. I mean — wrongly in my way of looking at it — I think I was seen as a fairly intense, eccentric Englishman. When he had them nearly complete, his vocals would usually require five or six takes and then we'd just comp between them. In early October, the backing singers PP Arnold, Coral Lewis and Dee Gordon then came in and we recorded them facing each other with a 47 and a 67 onto one track, doubled. The verdict: completely positive.
In the case of 'Sledgehammer', we still had to record the lead vocal and some minor bits and pieces. There were also little tambourine hits and the synthesized shakuhachi flute that Peter played with the Fairlight. By late October, he had 90 percent of the vocal, after which it was a case of, say, adding a little part to make a specific section transition more quickly, changing a lyric, or adding the odd word to plug a hole.
By then, we were very good at taking things and moving them around, either manually or by sampling and dropping them in. That wasn't true for all songs, but for 'Sledgehammer' we created a comp track. Shortly after I arrived, we'd started setting up for vocals and he had told me he normally sang through an SM Dan said, 'OK, we'll set up an SM57 but let's set up other microphones as well and do a blindfold test.
He wasn't allowed to touch the microphones, and all the gains were set the same so that he couldn't tell which was which in terms of level. He went through each one, walking from one to the other, and the one he ended up picking was the Neumann U It had an unusual tone, and Peter has that lovely little rasp in his voice as well as a certain airiness. We thought the U47 sounded really good on him and then, just before we ready to record, our tech Neil Perry said something was shorting out in the cable connecting the mic to the power supply.
We asked Neil , 'Is there any way of mimicking that response? He did by removing the shield on a patch cord. Then he said, 'We should plug the microphone's input into a mult on the patch bay, take a regular patch cord out of that mult into a fader, and mult the dropped shield patch cord into a secondary fader. You'll have the normal 47 response with the modified 47 response on separate faders. You can use that to balance between the airiness and roundness of Peter's voice.
Peter likes to sing in the control room and to not be totally isolated with headphones. We had small NS10 monitors and a pair of Tannoys as well.
So, we'd flip the phase on them, placing the U47 at the apex position from the speakers while monitoring at a moderate level, and then Peter would sing with a pair of Sennheisers around his neck. Afterwards I'd record a track at the same monitoring level of just the backing track minus the vocal.
Then I'd comp with that backing track out of phase with the vocal to see if we could get it to cancel.
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