Magician
A whole post? And on a Tuesday? What sorcery is this?
A good landmark of an artist’s prestige is when they do music for films. There was a period a few years ago where young artists gained traction by recording songs for the Twilight Saga. A new star will show up on the scene and filmmakers will take advantage of their star power to grab more viewers for their movies. By extension, the inverse is true as well, as long-established stars are also likely to help a film do more press. The UK’s most popular single of 1979, Art Garfunkel’s “Bright Eyes,” is inextricable from its composition for and appearance in Watership Down. Naturally this suggests that music and film as mediums go together hand-in-hand, serve each other’s purposes, and help each other sustain memorability.
Of course, this is in no way assurance of a song or movie’s quality. A song and a movie can both be deservedly forgotten. Such is the case with “Magician,” which is both a footnote in Kate Bush’s career while still being setting a trend for her.
“The Magician,” or “Magician” as it’s usually called, is the title song of the virtually unseen film The Magician of Lublin. An adaptation of Nobel-winning writer’s Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish novel of the same name, it was such a critical and commercial bomb that it’s nearly impossible to see now unless you find either the world’s best torrent or fork over $226 USD for the VHS online. Its near-unseeability causes the near-unlistenability of Bush’s song for it, as “Magician” has never been released either. “Magician” exists as a low-quality audio clip from the movie, with static and diegetic noises all over it (someone says “cow” or another sound at one point). It’s easier to hear than, say, the Phoenix demos, as it’s a professional recording rather than a home demo, but it’s no more obscure than them.
If we’re being honest, the lack of HQ ways to listen to “Magician” is no great loss. This isn’t a lost gem, just a mediocre film track that happens to set a precedent for Bush. Paul Webster and Maurice Jarre’s song is a tedious one, a bogstandard piece of carnival music set in a minor key like a particularly manic depressive Dresden Dolls song with lyrics strung together by the most tedious aphorisms and hackneyed couplets a third-rate lyricist could compose in ten minutes. How did someone read Webster’s lyrics and decide that “when you reach for a star/only angels are there/and it’s not very far/just to step on a stair” wasn’t a laughable opening to a song? The rest of the song is a series of banal vignettes about whimsical creatures and individuals having downbeat times of “the circus of life,” where “life is bitter and gay.” It’s hard to imagine any vocalist making this work, and Bush doesn’t do much to elevate it, opting for a Shirley Bassey impression she only utilizes in her worst work. The whole thing sounds like a parody of itself, and what’s more, it’s a boring one.
OK, since we just spent a paragraph slagging this song off and we’re already 500 words in, we might as well make something of this blog post. “Magician” isn’t good, but it’s got some minor significance. “Magician” is the first time Bush has been the original singer of someone else’s song. She’s done covers before (as we’ve seen), but when Kate does covers they’re usually just that: tributes to artists or fillers in setlists. The difference with “Magician” is that it marks the first occasion someone has trusted Kate Bush to sing a song of their own. In the Never for Ever chapter we’re going to see a lot more of this, albeit with more established collaborators for Bush and much better songwriters. For all that “Magician” fails, it’s not quite the most valueless failure of this era.
The nature of The Magician of Lublin is also worth noting for our purposes. The film tracks an Jewish stage magician in the 20th century who tours the Russian Empire and wreaks havoc in the lives of his loved ones with his many adulterous affairs. Unlike the book, which is fairly lacking in mysticism, the film of Lublin has some light esoteric aspects, with a prophetic vision from the movie’s protagonist Yasha and his transformation into a goose at the end (really). Yet these contrivances, however absurd they are, can both be considered aberrations in the movie. It’s not a straight fantasy movie on the whole, as its source material is on the whole literary realism. The esoterica is confined to individual plot beats rather than a running theme.
This sort of lightly esoteric non-fantasy is a consistent aspect of Bush’s work. A lot of movies she’s consciously influenced by are ghost stories or lightly fantastical without quite throwing a real spectre at the audience: Don’t Look Now, Man of a Thousand Faces, and The Innocents all have elements of the supernatural, but they don’t tip into outright fantasy. Instead horror is a largely internal phenomenon, caused by the psychological demons of their protagonists. The supernatural elements are largely avenues to explore that.
Bush also largely utilizes the mysterious as a mirror, providing reflections of a character’s soul. There’s rarely outright magical entities in her work, but her characters dwell in mystical worlds. Let’s not forget she rode into the charts on the back of a ghost story, and she’s just ended her sophomore album with a Gothic horror song. She lives in a world of spectres, often created by paranoia. Does this make Bush a magician, a conjurer who summons spirits from the deeps of the human soul? It’s not impossible.
Bush has often acted as a sort of curator of her favorite niches of taste, often integrating her favorite books and films into her music. Not too dissimilar is how “Magician” walks through different ways of life, strange individuals and entities going about their business miserably. “Magician” doesn’t especially forward Bush’s key themes, but does it fit in with the idea she’s explored across her first two albums? Sure. It’s compatible. It’s just not the best iteration of her most interesting ideas.
Recorded in February 1979. Heard by the public in The Magician of Lublin, premiering October 1979. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals. Paul Webster — lyrics. Maurice Jarre — score. London Symphony Orchestra — all instruments.