SONG OF THE DAY

“Sledge­ham­mer” by Peter Gabriel (So, Gef­fen Records, 1986). Writ­ten by Peter Gabriel.

INTERESTING FACTS (from wikipedia)

- It peaked at #1 in Canada for 4 weeks on 21 July 1986, #1 on the Bill­board Hot 100 chart in the United States on 26 July 1986,^[1] and #4 in the UK sin­gles chart, thanks in part to a pop­u­lar and influ­en­tial music video.

- It was his biggest hit in North Amer­ica and ties with “Games With­out Fron­tiers” as his biggest hit in the United Kingdom.

- The song was influ­enced by 1960s soul music, as evi­dent by the use of horns and a gen­eral Stax sound. The dis­tinc­tive Horn sec­tion was pro­vided by the Mem­phis Horns, the house musi­cians for Stax records. The song also fea­tures a syn­the­sized shakuhachi flute.

- It replaced “Invis­i­ble Touch” by his for­mer band Gen­e­sis, which had its only number-one U.S. hit the pre­vi­ous week.

- Dave Matthews Band began cov­er­ing this song dur­ing the 2008 tour.

- “Sledge­ham­mer” spawned a widely pop­u­lar and influ­en­tial music video directed by Stephen R. John­son. Aard­man Ani­ma­tions and the Broth­ers Quay pro­vided clay­ma­tion, pix­i­la­tion, and stop motion ani­ma­tion that gave life to images in the song. The video ended with a large group of extras jerk­ily rotat­ing around Gabriel, among them: Gabriel’s daugh­ters Anna and Melanie, the ani­ma­tors them­selves, and direc­tor Stephen Johnson’s girl­friend. Also included were six women who posed as the back-up singers of the song. Gabriel lay under a sheet of glass for 16 hours while film­ing the video one frame at a time.

- In 1987, it won nine MTV Video Music Awards, a record which still stands as of 2008. It ranked at #4 on MTV’s 100 Great­est Music Videos Ever Made (1999). MTV later announced that “Sledge­ham­mer” is the most played music video in the his­tory of the sta­tion. “Sledge­ham­mer” has also been declared to be MTV’s #1 ani­mated video of all time. The video was also voted #7 on TMF’s Ulti­mate 50 Videos You Must See — first aired 24 June 2006. It ranked at #2 on VH1’s “Top 20 Videos of the 80’s” as well as being named the #1 “Amaz­ing Moment in Music” on the Aus­tralian TV show 20 to 1 in 2007. The por­tion of the song fea­tur­ing the syn­the­sized flute solo was real­ized in the video by first one and then two oven-ready chick­ens, head­less and feath­er­less, ani­mated using stop-motion. These were ani­mated by Nick Park (of Wal­lace and Gromit fame) who, at that time was refin­ing his work in plas­ticine animation.

VIDEO OF THE DAY