Sledgehammer!

I was on vacation visiting my aunt and uncle's house in New Hope, Minnesota when I had first
heard Peter Gabriel's amazing and crazy song, Sledgehammer, off the album "SO". My cousin, Joy, was turning the
stations on the television very fast.It was a large floor model with a large dial that you actually had to get up and crank
to your next channel by hand. Remote controls were for the rich and famous, not regular people like us.
I bet some kids today have never seen TV's like that! But it was no big deal to us, as my family
had one of those, too. The large dial for the regular channels and then the next dial below for the UHF channels.

So anyways, my cousin turns the channel so fast that we could hardly see what was on each channel. She stopped on
MTV, which was pretty new at the time for us. We hardly ever had seen cable before. And as she stopped the Peter Gabriel
video for "Sledghammer" was starting.

It was the most insane and funny video I had ever seen at the time. Peter is singing and fruit is dancing and every possible
art project technique is used to make this video. He is made out of clay, his head melts, stop-action photography shots make Gabriel shuffle from one side of a
room to another without moving his feet and so on. The most visual effect, I feel, is when he turns out the lights at the end of the video, and
everything lights up like stars. He gets up and walks out the door and he becomes part of the starry night sky.

The song itself is as nutty as the video:

You could have a steam train/if you just lay down the track
You could have an aeroplane flying/If you bring your blue skies back
All you do is call me/I'll be anything you need

You could have a big dipper/going up and down
Around the bends
You could have a bumper car, bumping
This amusement never ends

 
Peter Gabriel was an intregal part of the English supergroup, Genesis and their early shows were always very theatrical, mostly in part
because of Gabriel's influence. This creativity shines through on "SO" and much of everything else Peter Gabriel has put out since becoming
a solo artist in his own right.