Music Video
Gerald Scarfe created a music video, initially a backdrop film for when the band played the track on its 1977 In the Flesh tour. The fanciful video begins with a giant mechanical beast; a cross between a Triceratops and an armadillo (similar to the creature on the cover of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Tarkus). The creature slowly lumbers across an apocalyptic cityscape. The scene then shifts to show emaciated rats leaping around corpse-laden steel girders. Gleaming industrial smokestacks soon fade in, and disturbingly crack and ooze blood. A view of a barren desert is then immediately shown. In the background a small tower grows out of this desert, but then transforms into a screaming monster, which stops to pant for a few seconds before viciously decapitating an unsuspecting man in the foreground. His head then very slowly decays to a damaged skull as the sun sets. Finally, an ocean of blood washes away this scene, and the waves turn into thousands of hands waving in rhythm to the music (much like people at a rock concert). All of the surrounding buildings are swept away; except one. Despite being pulled at by the bloody masses, it survives and, synchronising with the sound effects at the end of the track, flies up and away, high above the clouds to where it fits snugly into a hole inside a gargantuan floating ovoid structure.
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Famous quotes containing the words music and/or video:
“Orpheus with his lute made trees
And the mountain tops that freeze
Bow themselves when he did sing.
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung, as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past—the portrayals of family life on such television programs as “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” and all the rest.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)