Arcane KB video influence

[Peter Byrne Manchester <PMANCHESTER@ccmail.sunysb.edu>]

       I think I've unearthed a direct influence on Kate Bush's breakthrough 
video for "Breathing."  The sequence in which Kate falls back out of the 
'womb' finally to appear in our world before the altar to the sun looks very 
much to me like it is based on a transitional scene in the first episode of 
the second season of Rock Follies, "Rock Follies of '77," called "The Band 
Who Wouldn't Die."  Anybody remember this?

       Orientation:  Howard Schuman and Andy Mackay's "Rock Follies" played 
Thames TV in England in 1976 and 1977.  Each year consisted of a set of six 
hour-long shows.  The first year comes to a kind of completion that suggests 
to me that a second year was not a sure thing.  It fact it was only the first 
year's six shows that played in the United States in 1977-78, mostly as a 
pledge drive special on a number of PBS stations.  I have tape of both 
seasons, from the 1987-88 late-night broadcast of the series on WNET ch. 13 
in New York; I don't know whether other PBS stations ran it that year or not. 
I also don't know whether it was ever rebroadcast in other countries, or is 
still in any kind of circulation in the UK.  In many ways it is a classic 
show--casting, music, writing--but it was particularly ahead of its time in 
its use of video technique to move out of realistic narrative time into the 
strange time-worlds of the songs.  Five years ahead of MTV, it remains an 
original and seminal vision of an integration of video technique with music. 
I am very confident that if Kate was watching it, she enjoyed it hugely and 
took inspiration from it.

       When the series came back for a second year, its fictitious band the 
"Little Ladies," Dee (Devonia Rose, Julie Covington), Q (Nancy Quinelle de 
Longchamp, Rula Lenska), and Ann (Charlotte Cornwell), were an actual hit pop 
act and had an album out (Island Records ILPS 9362-B), of songs from the 
first season (not the same performances as on the show, however, and without 
the title tune, "Little Ladies").  The first episode of that comeback year, 
"The Band Who Wouldn't Die," culminates in a scene in the office of a brassy 
manager named Kitty Schriver, who offers to buy the Little Ladies as an act, 
manage them and produce records for them.  As the Little Ladies leave her 
office, the show makes one of its patented segues into a song, the title song 
for the episode.  What happens visually is that the three women step out of 
the door to Kitty's office into a darkness into which they fall, downwards, 
in slow motion, slowly rolling down a barely visible black inflated huge 
plastic pillow.  The effect is exactly the same as what Kate does in 
"Breathing" in her slow-motion twisting fall into time and destiny.  It looks 
to me like technically both sequences were done the same way, with a large 
inflated dark plastic pillow.

       Anybody out there in a position to comment?  Do the Little Ladies 
still have fans?

............................................................................
                                                            Peter Manchester
"C'mon, we all sing!"                               pmanches@sbccmail.bitnet
                                               pmanchester@ccmail.sunysb.edu