Goosebumps.
This summer I’ve had two episodes that have knocked me for a six, particularly the second, because it came out of the blue.
The first episode: driving along country roads when a song began playing: a mash-up of Primal Scream’s paean to partying, ‘Loaded’, with the ridiculously bombastic ‘Epic’ by Faith No More. Neither song usually does it for me, to my mind they haven’t aged well, but the way the DJ, Dunproofin’, had overlaid the two tunes to create something so fresh and joyful – well, there went the tingling of my skin, the blood-rush to my spine.
The second episode: recently I spent a morning with Australian pop-art guru Martin Sharp at his Sydney home. We talked about his love of Tiny Tim, who Sharp considers a genius in the order of Van Gogh, but then he floored me when he said that Susan Boyle, of Britain’s Got Talent fame, was equally as important.
Back home, I googled my way to a YouTube video of Boyle’s original live performance of ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ from Les Miserables. Now, some facts about me: I rarely watch TV, reality programs leave me as cold as a cadaver, and show tunes are invariably so saccharine as to be vacuous. But I forced myself to watch Boyle sing; I needed to know why someone of Martin Sharp’s stature considers her brilliant.
Susan Boyle, who has the physique of a front-row forward, walks out onto the theatre stage. Her hair looks like it’s been cut by meat-axe and somehow she’s squeezed herself into a potato-sack frock. She faces the immediate derision of the judges and the audience. Innocently, but confidently, she says she wants to be like Elaine Paige. She dares to announce that she’ll sing ‘I Dream A Dream’; eyes roll into backs of heads.
Then, however, Susan Boyle opens her mouth, she starts to sing. Her singing is heartfelt and precise, it’s passionate without being histrionic, she knows exactly what she’s doing (Sharp is right). Within seconds the audience is standing, applauding and hollering. From contempt they’re now in love, rapturous even. The three judges can’t stop smiling; two of them begin crying. And then, as Boyle carries on with the song, hitting the sustained upward notes, there it goes, the tingling of my skin, the blood-rush to my spine.
Goosebumps: it’s a sure sign of life.
And, perhaps, genius.
(First published in Panorama, The Canberra Times, 12 February 2011.)
Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecote 
14 comments
Comments feed for this article
February 12, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Agnes
Am just like you – hate reality shows and all the crap that tends to go along with them.
BUT
That video is amazing, and I can never watch it without tearing up. It’s her naivety that gets me, and the fact that they have already written her off, and then she opens her mouth and you hear that voice. The looks on the judges faces, the roar of the crowd…
Honestly just got all shivery writing this comment about it!
February 12, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Nigel Featherstone
And then your comment gave me goosebumps!
February 12, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Agnes
Course I had to go watch it then, didn’t I?
All teary and whatnot now. Thanks Nigel!
February 12, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Nigel Featherstone
Under the Flutter: home of tears and goosebumps.
And it’s as free as a breath.
Agnes, thanks as always for dropping by.
February 14, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Gabrielle Bryden
Haha – she certainly showed those pretentious bastards didn’t she! What a shame she had to wait until she was 47 before anyone noticed her.
February 14, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Nigel Featherstone
Ah yes, but in TV Land ‘frumpy twenty-something-year-old comes good’ doesn’t work quite as well a ‘frumpy forty-something-year-old comes good’.
By the way, I should add that the abovementioned video is a great piece of television: excellent staging and editing, and, most importantly, excellent story-telling. No doubt it was crafted (crafted with GREAT SKILL) to get more viewers to watch the wretched show – it’s an advertisement, in other words.
But I don’t mean to put it down. It does what it set out to do, which is to engage viewers on an emotional level. And it succeeds wonderfully.
Hence the goosebumps.
February 15, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Gabrielle Bryden
They may have edited the clip slighly but there was nothing staged about her being in the competition etc.,
February 15, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Agnes
And yet it’s so beautifully done that I don’t even feel manipulated!
February 15, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Nigel Featherstone
But when looking closely at it you to start to ask questions like, did people immediately get to their feet as soon as Boyle started singing, or was that a screen-grab from the end of the song? Were members of the audience really rolling their eyes at her, or perhaps at someone/something else? And the looks on the judges’ faces: did they really go from scorn to adoration so quickly?
I’d find it hard to believe there hasn’t been some playing around with the timeline, and potentially the employment of some other tricks as well.
However, as Agnes says, this is all beside the point when it works so damn well. And it gives us goosebumps. Even just thinking about it gives me a tingle of the skin.
Whatever the telly pros did, they gave us a huge – and welcome – blast of life!
And, yes, we can over-think these things.
Well, at least I can.
February 15, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Gabrielle Bryden
I’m sure you are right about the editing (though there always seems to be a lot of eye rolling in these shows – not that I watch them very often 😉 ) – definetely switched from scorn to adoration too quickly for belief. I agree we can over-think these things – haha.
February 16, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Nana Jo
I saw Susan Boyle’s performance via YouTube a couple years ago when a good friend sent me the link and the words, “You’ve got to see this!” My reaction was the same as yours. As each contestant is only given a couple minutes to perform before the judges, I don’t think the almost instant adulation was contrived. It was raw, electrifying, form-defying talent and people knew it.
Last year I saw a tape of Susan actually singing a duet with Elaine Page. It didn’t have the same impact on me, although Susan’s voice is just as beautiful. Perhaps it’s because she has been ‘prettied’ up considerably, or maybe it’s the abject sense of the unexpected which is missing.
One thing I know for sure, seeing that frumpy 50 something year old woman sing her dreams into being, stirred something in me to an awareness that it’s never too late.
February 16, 2011 at 9:16+00:00Feb
Nigel Featherstone
Hi Nana Jo, I think you’re right that a major part of this was the fact that, in our way, we can all relate to the Susan Boyle story: we all wish we could dare to dream (as dreadfully corny as that sounds), we all feel ugly at times (ok, for some of us it’s a lot of the time), and we all want the success that for 99% of the population just won’t come.
Yeap, it’s a universal story, but buggered up by the prettiness that you refer to.
The other part of the reason why this gives us goosebumps is that most of us are attracted to people who have the courage to be themselves, who aren’t afraid to reveal their true being, people who fight to be themselves no matter what (to paraphrase ee cummings).
So perhaps it doesn’t matter that there has been some clever editing – the clip tells a story, and in that story is a truth, so it tickles our skin in the most extraordinary of ways.
Here endeth the lesson!
May 5, 2011 at 9:16+00:00May
Susan Boyle (a modern parable) | Gabrielle Bryden's Blog
[…] about Susan Boyle’s performance on Britain’s Got Talent 2009. Nigel Featherstone did a blog post recently about the video. I hadn’t seen the performance (though I knew about Boyle) – […]
December 6, 2013 at 9:16+00:00Dec
Good artists, goosebumps, and summertime | Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecot
[…] and arts facility in Goulburn called South Hill, of which Sharp was the patron – and I also wrote a short piece on how Sharp had given me goose-bumps while telling me about his love for […]