With trick or treaters on the way, I’ve curated some music videos of classic spooky songs for your enjoyment. No, thank you.
Fleetwood Mac, “Hypnotized”
“It's the same kind of story / That seems to come down from long ago / Two friends having coffee together / When something flies by their window…” If the staccato drum intro isn’t immediately recognizable, the guitar lick should be. Back when Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were still skipping high school, Bob Welch wrote and sang this classic 1973 Fleetwood Mac number. A quarter century later, Welch answered questions about the song’s themes on a fan-based website:
What I remember about the Mystery to Me sessions is almost everything, so let me be selective. It was a cold winter, and we used the Rolling Stones’ mobile unit to record…
Those two guys in Pascagoula, Mississippi, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker had just reported on a major UFO encounter, and it was all over the TV for a while. Part of that went into ‘Hypnotized.’
…‘Hypnotized’ was primarily inspired by [Carlos] Castaneda’s books, the Hickson Pascagoula UFO sighting, some stories told to me by friends, and some personal experiences.
A guy that I used to work with from Winston-Salem [NC] told me the story of he and some friends riding dirt bikes 20 miles or so out in the woods when they came upon a strange ‘crater’ in the ground with smooth sides like melted glass. It was a ‘pond’ in the sense that there was some rainwater in it I guess. There were no access roads or caterpillar tracks so it wasn’t a construction site … They all immediately got the feeling they should get out of there. Maybe it was a meteor impact? I just liked the imagery for the song.
Marianne Faithfull, “Witches’ Song”
Faithfull imagines sisters in sorcery meeting in secrecy, at a time when participating in pagan rites carried great risk for women in the so-called Holy Roman Empire. From the singer-songwriter’s uneven 1979 album, Broken English.
Kate Bush, “How To Be Invisible”
The spooky musical genius comes up with a tongue-in-cheek occult primer in under six minutes. It’s tricky: becoming invisible involves some deformation of your local space-time continuum. From one of her best albums, Aerial, in 2005.
Ian Hunter, “Resurrection Mary”
The former Mott the Hoople frontman resurrects Illinois’ most famous ghost - or urban legend if you prefer - of the "vanishing hitchhiker" variety.
Since the 1930s, men driving northeast in Justice, Illinois, along Archer Avenue between the Willowbrook Ballroom and Resurrection Cemetery have reported picking up a young female hitchhiker. Wikipedia:
“This young woman is dressed somewhat formally in a white party dress and is said to have light blond hair and blue eyes. There are other reports that she wears a thin shawl, dancing shoes, carries a small clutch purse, and possibly that she is very quiet. As the driver nears Resurrection Cemetery, she disappears into it. According to the Chicago Tribune, "full-time ghost hunter" Richard Crowe has collected "three dozen ... substantiated" reports of Mary from the 1930s to the present.”
Hunter works many of the details of the Resurrection Mary legend into his story about a hard-living character transformed by his encounter with the spook, who asks him for directions to Heaven. From the British rocker’s overlooked 1996 album, The Artful Dodger.
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, “Fortune Teller”
Including this one for fun. The two singers breath new life into a clever 1962 number written by the great Louisiana songsmith Allen Toussaint.
The Waterboys, Corn Circles
Years ago, I moseyed around in UK crop circles without ever getting a vibe of the explicitly supernatural or alien. Not that that my sensations - or non-sensations - mean anything in terms of their actual origin. Explanations range from clever hoaxes to directed energy platforms to aliens. Choose any of the above, mix and match, or come up with your own (singer-songwriter Mike Scott wisely leaves it a mystery here). From The Waterboys classic 1990 album, Dream Harder.
Blondie, “Shayla”
“Suddenly some subtle entity / some cosmic energy / brushed her like shadows
/ Down here we stop to wonder / Cause on the freeway /Bright lights and thunder.” A wonderfully melodic ballad about a factory worker’s highway alien encounter. Likely inspired by the group’s late seventies’ UFO sighting. From Blondie’s 1979 album, Eat to the Beat.
Sufjan Stevens, “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois”
What is it with Illinois? This indie performer’s spooky lead song on his 2005 concept album concerns a 2000 UFO sighting by police officers near Highland, Illinois.
The Charioteers, “Ezekiel Saw The Wheel”
If the Biblical prophet hadn’t been putzing around in a Palestinian desert two millennia back, but rather motoring through 21st rural Illinois, he might have described his blinding vision of wheels within wheels as a UFO. Whatever Ezekiel saw, imagined and/or ingested, it made for a spooky gospel number.
Eels, “Bone Dry”
A Halloween-worthy music video for a typically morose yet kinetic Eels song.
BONUS VIDEO
Dame Edna, “Christmas is the Spookiest Time of Year”
You think Halloween is spooky? The annual spookfest has ghouls, ghosts and goblins, but Christmas has the hard stuff: the virgin wife of a carpenter impregnated by a Holy Spook, with the bonus of a stationary star - perhaps a UFO! - parked above the newborn’s birthplace as a dropped pin for three Arabs on camels. Can’t get spookier than that.
Just recently I became fascinated by an old group that I used to know a little back in the 80's, researched them a little and then went and found an old 80's album of theirs, The Circle and the Square; the band being Red Box. I later discovered a spooky-ass video and song of theirs on youtube called "Ho, Ho!". Check it out, it's a good'un! A Great and varied playlist as ever Geoff.