FEATURE:
Reel-to-Real
Stephen R. Johnson: Peter Gabriel – Sledgehammer (1986)
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MAYBE an obvious choice…
but I wanted to spend a moment with a real classic. The first single from his masterful 1986 album, So, Sledgehammer has one of the greatest and most innovative music videos ever. Its stop motion and meticulous filming and concept must have taken so long to come together! Peter Gabriel was very patient when being filmed. It looks rapid and seamless when you watch the video, but it consists of so many different scenes, tiny movements and eye-catching visions! Directed by Stephen R. Johnson and commissioned by Tessa Watts at Virgin Records, it was oroduced by Adam Dowd. Aardman Animations and the Brothers Quay provided claymation, pixilation, and stop motion animation that gave life to images in the song. It is fantastical, mind-bending and utterly innovative. I am not sure how many videos prior to 1986 were as groundbreaking! Sledgehammer’s video nine MTV Video Music Awards at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards, in addition to Best British Video at the 1987 Brit Awards. Even today, it has been unsurpassed. Nowadays, you would be able to film a similar video more quickly. Not many modern artists tackle claymation and stop motion for videos! So original and iconic, I have written about the video before. For a series that celebrates and illuminates the best and most captivating music videos, I could not pass by Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer! Sort of repeating himself with the video for Steam (from the 1992 album, Us), nothing beats the wonder and awe one gets from watching Sledgehammer. Although a great team put it together, I do especially love Stephen R. Johnson’s direction.
During a decade where MTV was born (in 1981), so many songs were defined by the power of their videos. From Madonna and Michael Jackson to Peter Gabriel, we got some of the most remarkable videos ever in the 1980s. Maybe there was this ambition to get a video seen. Artists and directors pushing the form to lengths that had never been seen. Whilst music videos are used today, I can’t see the same sort of pioneering clips and genius as back then. Maybe it is very hard to reinvent the wheel or blow people’s minds. I want to use this moment to introduce a feature from Stereogum. One of the rare occasions where a video is so good that it eclipses a song that is phenomenal, Sledgehammer’s video will be remembered and adored for generations. Stereogum discussed the making of one of the best music videos ever:
“Sledgehammer,” Peter Gabriel’s big hit, is one of the many, many songs that owes a great deal of its success to its music video. That’s another thing that Peter Gabriel embraced early: The warping, convulsive possibilities of music videos as an art form. Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” video is one of the all-time masterpieces of the medium. The year after its release, “Sledgehammer” went Titanic on MTV’s Video Music Awards. It won nine trophies, the most ever for a single video. By some estimates, “Sledgehammer” is the most-played video in the entire history of MTV. So before we talk about “Sledgehammer” itself, we need to talk about the video.
Here’s the thing about the “Sledgehammer” video: It’s the fucking best. It rules so hard. It’s an experimental short and a Bugs Bunny cartoon at the same damn time. In its five minutes, the clip veers in all sorts of wonderfully weird and goofy directions. It turns Peter Gabriel’s face into a jittery glitched-out mirage, a blue sky, an ice sculpture, a sentient fruit garden, and a claymation hallucination that kicks itself in the face, along with who knows what else. I love it.
Before making that “Sledgehammer” video, director Stephen R. Johnson had made the similarly wild clip for the 1985 Talking Heads song “Road To Nowhere.” That video, in particular its stop-motion sequences, were what attracted Gabriel to Johnson. Johnson, in the oral history I Want My MTV: “I didn’t even like [‘Sledgehammer’], frankly. I thought it was just another white boy trying to sound Black. But Peter Gabriel took me to dinner, got me drunk on wine, and I agreed to do it.” With the “Sledgehammer” video, Johnson just went nuts, and Gabriel did everything necessary to bring Johnson’s visions to life.
In making the video, Johnson enlisted the help of the groundbreaking experimental stop-motion animators the Brothers Quay. At Gabriel’s behest, he also brought in Aardman Animations, the British production house that would later make the Wallace & Gromit films. Nick Park, who went on to create Wallace & Gromit, personally animated the bit in the “Sledgehammer” video where the two chickens dance. Park used real chicken carcasses, and they started to rot and stink while he was working on them. (Later on, Park co-directed the 2000 hit Chicken Run, so the experience apparently didn’t put him off working with chickens.) In working on the video, Gabriel himself had to spend 16 hours laying underneath a sheet of glass, and he got a bunch of electric shocks while wearing a Christmas tree costume. It all worked out. Gabriel, Johnson, and all their collaborators made something immortal.
A spectacle as outsized and surreal and popular as the “Sledgehammer” video makes for a fitting peak of Peter Gabriel’s career”.
A video that I first saw as a child, it has lost none of its magic. Sledgehammer broke ground in 1986, and it is regarded (rightly) as one of the best music videos of all time. To hear the song and come up with a video like that is amazing! Credit to director Stephen R. Johnson and everyone who made it happen. Credit also to Peter Gabriel, who would have given so much time and energy to a single music video! It is testament to his belief in the concept and potential of the Sledgehammer video. Even if you have seen it hundreds of times or see it for the first time today, the video for Sledgehammer will hit you with…
AN almighty wallop.