| The Stairway at St. Paul's |
Offerman practiced for three months to perfectly learn to sing this song and its words backwards . After that he went to the St. Paul's Cathedral in London, a place frequently visited by tourists, to sing it in front of the stairway that lead up to the entrance. The video is a live-registration of this event but the tape is reversed (it plays from end to start) so that the song and its words sound normal again. The movements of the artists and the people surrounding him are therefore backward again.
'My piece 'The Stairway at St.Paul's' is based on the hysteria that surrounded certain music-recordings of the 60's and the 70's. Some rock bands, like the Beatles, Judas Priest and Led Zeppelin were supposed to have put hidden messages in their records that could only be heard when played backwards. These messages though, would subconsciously be picked up by the listener who would then react in response to them.
In this way the band Judas Priest ended up in a court case because their records had 'induced' children to commit suicide. Also, the Beatles were supposed to suggest through their records that Paul McCartney, one of their main band members, had died in a car crash and was replaced by a look-a-like.
The most famous example though, is Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven', a song about a woman buying herself a way into heaven. The mystic lyrics seem to urge us to follow the right path in life. But, as one line in the song already says, 'sometimes words have two meanings', and so, when played backwards, this song is full of messages that urge us to worship evil.
It's time to dive in to your record-collection and find out if it was all true. But first let us watch this video. So turn up the volume and remember the first time you smoked a cigarette...
Jeroen Offerman, 2002
Music (Artwork genre) - Performance (Artwork genre) - Video - Single-Channel Video