Gary Gilmore's Eyes

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Gary Gilmore's Eyes
The Adverts
publication August 12, 1977
length 2:17
Genre (s) Punk rock
Author (s) TV Smith

Gary Gilmore's Eyes (German: Gary Gilmores Augen ) is a song by the British band The Adverts . The music and lyrics are provided by T. V. Smith , the band's front man. The first recording of the piece of music was produced by Larry Wallis and The Adverts and released as a single on August 12, 1977 on Anchor Records . The fast, minimalist piece of music is one of the most famous punk rock songs . It reached number 18 in the British charts in September 1977.

Background and origin

The robbery murderer Gary Gilmore was executed on January 17, 1977 in the US state of Utah . The state complied with Gilmore's request and then released the man's still intact organs, including the corneas of his eyes, for transplantation. The song Gary Gilmore's Eyes was written by T.V. Smith after hearing the story through a newspaper article. In the spring of 1977, The Adverts performed the title in front of a live audience.

On April 25, 1977, the band made their first appearance on BBC Radio 1 at John Peel's and presented the song Gary Gilmore's Eyes along with four other pieces . Due to the influence of their manager Michael Dempsey , a contract was signed shortly afterwards, for a single for the time being, between The Adverts and Anchor Records, the British subsidiary of ABC Records . The recordings for Gary Gilmore's Eyes were made over a weekend at Pebble Beach Studios in Worthing under the direction of Larry Wallis, who had already produced The Adverts' first record, One Chord Wonders .

Publications

Gary Gilmore's Eyes was first released as a 7-inch single in August 1977. On the B-side was the song Bored Teenagers . The cover by Nicholas de Ville is designed as a colorful collage of silhouettes of the band members and Gilmore. The eyes of all persons are painted over with black bars.

The band's debut album Crossing the Red Sea with The Adverts did not contain the track Gary Gilmore's Eyes for several reasons when it was released in February 1978 ; it was supplemented in all later editions of the album from 1981. A second production of Gary Gilmore's Eyes , which was created in November 1977 at Abbey Road Studios under the direction of producer John Leckie while working on the band's first album, was only released as a single by Bright Records in 1983. Sara Batho's cover shows the black silhouettes of the band members from The Adverts against a yellow background.

There are also various live versions of the song that came on the market in connection with the releases for the John Peel Sessions or The Old Gray Whistle Test . The song can be found among other things as a recording of one of the appearances of The Adverts at Barbarellas in Birmingham on June 10 and 11, 1977 on the album entitled Live at The Roxy Club from 1990. To date, Gary Gilmore's Eyes has appeared on more than forty punk rock samplers.

The documentary Punk in London by Wolfgang Büld contains a recording of Gary Gilmore's Eyes , which was made during a concert by The Adverts on September 2, 1977 at the Marquee Club in London . A live recording is also part of Büld's feature film Brennende Langeweile from 1979, in which the band members took part as amateur actors.

Gary Gilmore's Eyes was covered in 1991 by the German music group Die Toten Hosen in collaboration with T. V. Smith and released on the album Learning English Lesson One . Another version of the song with accompaniment by the band Die Toten Hosen was created in 2002 for T.V. Smith's album Useless . The Finnish band Punk Lurex O. K. covered the song in 1994 under the title Tappajan Silmät ("The Eyes of the Murderer") in Finnish. Together with Punk Lurex O. K., Smith recorded another interpretation of Gary Gilmore's Eyes in 1999 , which was released as a yellow vinyl single with four other tracks under the title The Future Used to be Better . Live versions of Gary Gilmore's Eyes with T.V. Smith as the soloist, who accompanies himself with the acoustic guitar, are on the B-side of the single Thin Green Line from 1995 and on the album Live at the NVA, Ludwigsfelde from the year 2008. The Finnish band The Valkyrians recorded a reggae version of Gary Gilmore's Eyes with T.V. Smith and released it in 2011 on their album Punkrocksteady .

The Belgian producer Roland Bellucci published in 2015 by the label Tracks & Traces an EP with four different interpretations of Gary Gilmore's Eyes , among others as electronic darkwave version of the band Attrition and the EBM - Remix by Kenny Germain B and another unplugged Version of the song.

A cover of a processed text the formation Gary Kaye & The Enemies of Promise published (German: Gary Kaye & The enemies of promises ) entitled Nicky Morgan's Eyes in March 2016. The satirical text criticized the British education policy and refers to the Conservative MP in the UK House of Commons and Education Secretary Nicky Morgan .

text

Gary Gilmore's Eyes is written from the narrator's perspective . His bandages had just been removed after a cornea transplant when he heard about Gary Gilmore and his donation on the news. After that, the thought of supposedly looking through the eyes of a murderer never lets him go. He despairs at the idea that by owning Gilmore's eyes he has also taken over his scheme of perception :

The eye receives the messages
And sends them to the brain
No guarantee the stimuli
Must be perceived the same

Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes.

The eye receives the messages
and sends them to the brain.
Without guarantee that the stimuli
must be perceived immediately

when I look through Gary Gilmore's eyes.

The song consists of three stanzas, each with eight lines, with the closing syllables of the second, fourth, sixth and eighth lines rhyming. The refrain, which is attached to each stanza, consists of the single phrase: “ … looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes ” (German: “… through Gary Gilmore's eyes”), which is repeated several times. The two sentences “ Gary don't need his eyes to see, Gary and his eyes have parted company. "(German:" Gary no longer needs his eyes to see, Gary and his eyes have separated. ")

music

On the first recording, the piece is orchestrated with electric guitar , electric bass and drums , played by Howard Pickup, Gaye Advert and Laurie Driver. T. V. Smith is the singer in the foreground. The two-minute and seventeen-second long piece of music consists of an intro , three stanzas, an instrumental intermediate piece ( bridge ), the refrain and a coda .

Bass run in the chorus audio sample ? / iAudio file / audio sample

As an intro, the drums provide a fast eighth-note rhythm over eight bars, which is underlined four times very briefly, each time by two notes from the guitar and the whispered words “ Gary Gilmore's Eyes ”. Then T. V. Smith starts with the first stanza. He is accompanied by bass, guitar and drums. The half-sentence in the chorus “ … looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes. "Is melodic, in some places two-part, sung by all band members in the choir and repeated four times after the first verse, after the second verse and after the bridge. After the third stanza, before the coda, it is repeated five times. The final chorus over eight bars, in which all instruments can be heard, ends abruptly.

resonance

Gary Gilmore's Eyes received a lot of attention back in August 1977. The single received consistently high ratings in leading UK music magazines. Alain Lewis wrote in Sounds of August 13, 1977 that he considered Gary Gilmore's Eyes to be "one of the most macabre and smartest records" that New Wave had produced by then. He described the story the song tells as a "charming little piece of dirt". In an advertisement tied to a cursory description of the recently released single Gary Gilmore's Eyes , the NME announced on August 13, 1977 the dates and locations for five upcoming concerts by The Adverts in London. In another article that appeared in the NME the following week, the reviewer wrote that while “the performance of the piece was minimal”, “the idea was great” and the recording would “shudder with it”. The song Gary Gilmore's Eyes reminded him of "old horror films, or Marty Feldman in Frankenstein Junior ". In the August 20, 1977 Melody Maker , Gary Gilmore's Eyes and the B-side Bored Teenagers were highlighted as "two of T.V. Smith's strongest pieces of music"; they would sound “more compact than ever”, “especially because of the studio recording”. The Daily Express announced that Gary Gilmore's Eyes was "simply one of the best New Wave records".

"The song's macabre theme" would have created "exactly the kind of controversy that a newly emerging punk band needed," recalls Pete Johnson in 2011 in his reflections on the music scene at the time. “The subject of the song,” Al Spicer writes in his article on The Adverts in Rock - The Rough Guide 1996, “sparked tabloid interest, fueled by exploitative publicity photos of Gaye [Advert] released by the new record company The single Gary Gilmore's Eyes entered the UK charts on August 27, 1977 at number 27. Reinforced by two appearances in Top of the Pops , broadcast on August 25th and September 8th, 1977, the single reached number 18 on September 24th and stayed a total of seven weeks in the UK charts. Spicer: "A TV appearance on Top of the Pops suddenly brought out thousands of new punks, mostly teenage boys who were strangely touched by Gaye's amphetamine street-kid looks." The 1983 single was reissued on July 23, 1983 Number 91 on the UK charts.

The British music magazine Mojo put Gary Gilmore's Eyes in a list from October 2001 in twelfth place in the Mojo - 100 Punk Scorchers category .

Supporting documents and comments

  1. ↑ a b c d Dave Thompson : TV Smith - Your Ticket Out Of Here, The Complete Collectors Guide. 2009, ISBN 978-1-4495-5815-4 . Pages 28–29.
  2. ↑ a b Mojo - 100 Punk Scorchers . In: Mojo Issue 95, October 2001; Retrieved December 30, 2011.
  3. ↑ Charts-Surfer UK. Accessed December 31, 2011.
  4. ↑ Torsten from Dorsten: Gary Gilmore 'Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes' - Adverts, 1977. Moloko Plus , April 2011, accessed on October 31, 2013 .
  5. ^ John Peel Sessions on BBC Radio 1 official homepage. Accessed December 30, 2011.
  6. ↑ Tim's Story on punk77.co.uk based on the information in the booklet to Adverts - Punk Singles Collection . Retrieved December 30, 2011.
  7. ↑ Cover of the single Gary Gilmore's Eyes / Bored Teenagers on the Stillunusual music blog on Tumblr
  8. ↑ a b Dave Thompson: TV Smith - Your Ticket Out Of Here, The Complete Collectors Guide. 2009, ISBN 978-1-4495-5815-4 . Page 89.
  9. ↑ Front cover of the single from 1983 , designed by Sara Bartho. Retrieved December 27, 2011.
  10. ↑ Note: The title of the compilation Live at The Roxy Club is misleading because the live music was recorded in Birmingham several months after the band last played at the Roxy Club . Source: Dave Thompson: TV Smith - Your Ticket Out Of Here, The Complete Collectors Guide. 2009, ISBN 978-1-4495-5815-4 . Page 26.
  11. ↑ Gary Gilmore's Eyes in the Allmusic Guide , accessed December 30, 2011.
  12. ^ Wolfgang Büld : Punk in London . DVD at Metrodome, 2005.
  13. ↑ Wolfgang Büld: Brennende Langeweile , Sunny Bastards , DVD 2007, 4-250137-270142.
  14. ↑ Punk Lurex OK: Tappajan Silmät at Discogs (English)
  15. ↑ The Valkyrians & TV Smith music video and article in Plastic Bomb online August 28, 2011, accessed December 30, 2011.
  16. ^ Attrition vs TV Smith Remix - Gary Gilmore's Eyes. Discogs , accessed March 23, 2016 .
  17. ↑ Nicky Morgan's eyes. International Times, March 24, 2016, accessed March 24, 2016 .
  18. ↑ Freddie Whittaker: Miscellaneous - Teacher's band releases anti-academies punk single 'Nicky Morgan's eyes'. Schoolsweek.co.uk, March 22, 2016, accessed March 23, 2016 .
  19. ↑ Lyrics on the official homepage of T. V. Smith. Retrieved December 30, 2011.
  20. ↑ " The sickest and cleveland rest record to come out of the New Wave so far [...]. Alan Lewis, quoted and translated from Sounds , article dated August 13, 1977.
  21. ↑ “ The heroe of this charming little dirty […]. ”, Alan Lewis, quoted and translated from Sounds, article dated August 13, 1977.
  22. ^ NME , article of August 13, 1977.
  23. ^ " The performance is - how you say - minimal, but the idea is great and the record carries a genuine chill. ”
  24. ↑ “ Remember all those old horror movies where a sensitive and observant concert pianist, violinist or somewhat gets a mist transplant and ends up with the hands o brutal murderer (or, apres the brilliant Marty Feldman, the hands of a demented circus clown)? […] ”Quoted and translated from NME, article from August 20, 1977.
  25. ↑ “ 'Gary Gilmore's Eyes' / 'Bored Teenagers' (Anchor). Two of T. V. Smith's strongest numbers, and they sound tighter than ever because of the discipline enforced by a studio. Quoted and translated from Melody Maker , August 20, 1977 article.
  26. ^ “ Quite simply one of the best records to come out of New Wave. "Quoted and translated from Daily Express , August 9, 1977 article.
  27. ↑ “ A suitably macabre subject […] The song created just the sort of controversy an up coming punk group needed. ”Quoted and translated from Sandra Gibson: Ain't bad for a Pink: The Life of Bluesman Pete 'Snakey Jake' Johnson , Troubador Publishing Ltd 2011, ISBN 978-1-84876-665-5 , p. 113.
  28. ↑ “ The subject matter generated interest in the tabloid press, boosted by exploitative publicity shots of Gaye put out by the band's new record company, […] ” Quoted and translated from Al Spicer: The Adverts , in: Jonathan Buckley / Mark Ellingham, Rock - The Rough Guide , London 1996, ISBN 1-85828-201-2 , p. 8.
  29. ^ Dave Thompson: TV Smith - Your Ticket Out Of Here, The Complete Collectors Guide. 2009, ISBN 978-1-4495-5815-4 . Page 32.
  30. ↑ “ […] a TV appearance on 'Top Of The Pops' suddenly created thousands of new punks, mainly adolescent males strangely moved by Gaye's amphetamine-waif looks. "Quoted and translated from Al Spicer: The Adverts , in: Jonathan Buckley / Mark Ellingham, Rock - The Rough Guide , London 1996, ISBN 1-85828-201-2 , p. 8.

literature

  • Al Spicer: The Adverts . In: Jonathan Buckley, Mark Ellingham: Rock - The Rough Guide . London 1996, ISBN 1-85828-201-2 .
  • Dave Thompson : TV Smith - Your Ticket Out Of Here, The Complete Collectors Guide. 2009, ISBN 978-1-4495-5815-4 .
  • Sandra Gibson: Ain't bad for a Pink: The Life of Bluesman Pete 'Snakey Jake' Johnson . Troubador Publishing, 2011, ISBN 978-1-84876-665-5 .

Web links

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on February 20, 2012 .