Thu, 28 Feb 2013 10:37:59 +0000
The Bangles - Walk Like An Egyptian ( HQ 1080p HD Upscale )
"Walk Like an Egyptian" is a number-one hit from the album Different Light by The Bangles in 1986.
Liam Sternberg wrote the song after seeing people on a ferry walking awkwardly to keep their balance, which reminded him of figures in Ancient Egyptian reliefs. The opening lyrics state, "All the old paintings on the tombs/They do the sand dance don't you know". The reference to the sand dance possibly refers to a music hall routine performed by Wilson, Keppel and Betty where Wilson and Keppel danced around in the postures portrayed on the reliefs wearing the fez while Betty watched.
Sternberg offered his song to Toni Basil, who turned it down. David Kahne, the producer of Different Light, took the song to the Bangles who agreed to record it. Kahne had each member of the group sing the lyrics to determine who would sing each verse, with Susanna Hoffs, Vicki Peterson and Michael Steele each singing lead vocals on a verse in the final version. Kahne did not like any of Debbi Peterson's leads and she was relegated to backing vocals. This angered Peterson and caused tension within the group as she felt the rest of the group wasn't being supportive to her, which was worsened by fact that the drumming in the song is done by a drum machine instead of Peterson, further diminishing her role in the song.
The music video for "Walk Like an Egyptian" was nominated for Best Group Video in the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards. It featured people dancing in a pose similar to the pose depicted in the Ancient Egyptian reliefs that inspired songwriter Liam Sternberg; while most of them are ordinary people, some famous figures were depicted dancing in that same pose through the use of simple special effects, like Lady Diana and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. In a popular scene from the video, Hoffs was filmed in a close-up where her eyes moved from side to side, looking left and right. When asked about the scene in an interview with online magazine PlanetOut.com, Hoffs explained that she was actually looking at individual audience members during the video shoot, which took place with a live audience. Looking directly at individual audience members was a technique she used to overcome stage fright, and she was unaware that the camera had a close-up on her while she was employing this technique, switching between one audience member on her left and one on her right.
Info source http://en.wikipedia.org
The video vob file I have for this is not very good and yet my copy is better than the others I've tried to get to replace this one. So in the end I used my copy even though it was blurry, chock full of noisy fizz and other bits of crap that made me wince. Truly one of the worst videos available for such a good song. Well this is a classic and lots of people love it including me and so I had to do the best I could with this.
I have removed 95 percent of all the noise from this video without damaging the already poor image detail. Even the blocky compression artifacts have been zapped to never never land. This rendered the image quite clean and brought out some of the poor detail obscured by so much digital junk. Lighting and colors have been tweaked as well to round it all off before sharpening and scaling it to HD resolution. Don't expect miracles with this video. I've pushed it as far as it would go and it came out better than I expected. Unfortunately there is no better source file to work with. The better the file the better the results will be.
Audio from the original source was good and just needed normalizing which I have done.
Even though this came from a poor quality file the end result is the best quality you will get online for this old video.
Enjoy walking like an Egyptian! :-)
"Walk Like an Egyptian" is a number-one hit from the album Different Light by The Bangles in 1986.
Liam Sternberg wrote the song after seeing people on a ferry walking awkwardly to keep their balance, which reminded him of figures in Ancient Egyptian reliefs. The opening lyrics state, "All the old paintings on the tombs/They do the sand dance don't you know". The reference to the sand dance possibly refers to a music hall routine performed by Wilson, Keppel and Betty where Wilson and Keppel danced around in the postures portrayed on the reliefs wearing the fez while Betty watched.
Sternberg offered his song to Toni Basil, who turned it down. David Kahne, the producer of Different Light, took the song to the Bangles who agreed to record it. Kahne had each member of the group sing the lyrics to determine who would sing each verse, with Susanna Hoffs, Vicki Peterson and Michael Steele each singing lead vocals on a verse in the final version. Kahne did not like any of Debbi Peterson's leads and she was relegated to backing vocals. This angered Peterson and caused tension within the group as she felt the rest of the group wasn't being supportive to her, which was worsened by fact that the drumming in the song is done by a drum machine instead of Peterson, further diminishing her role in the song.
The music video for "Walk Like an Egyptian" was nominated for Best Group Video in the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards. It featured people dancing in a pose similar to the pose depicted in the Ancient Egyptian reliefs that inspired songwriter Liam Sternberg; while most of them are ordinary people, some famous figures were depicted dancing in that same pose through the use of simple special effects, like Lady Diana and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. In a popular scene from the video, Hoffs was filmed in a close-up where her eyes moved from side to side, looking left and right. When asked about the scene in an interview with online magazine PlanetOut.com, Hoffs explained that she was actually looking at individual audience members during the video shoot, which took place with a live audience. Looking directly at individual audience members was a technique she used to overcome stage fright, and she was unaware that the camera had a close-up on her while she was employing this technique, switching between one audience member on her left and one on her right.
Info source http://en.wikipedia.org
The video vob file I have for this is not very good and yet my copy is better than the others I've tried to get to replace this one. So in the end I used my copy even though it was blurry, chock full of noisy fizz and other bits of crap that made me wince. Truly one of the worst videos available for such a good song. Well this is a classic and lots of people love it including me and so I had to do the best I could with this.
I have removed 95 percent of all the noise from this video without damaging the already poor image detail. Even the blocky compression artifacts have been zapped to never never land. This rendered the image quite clean and brought out some of the poor detail obscured by so much digital junk. Lighting and colors have been tweaked as well to round it all off before sharpening and scaling it to HD resolution. Don't expect miracles with this video. I've pushed it as far as it would go and it came out better than I expected. Unfortunately there is no better source file to work with. The better the file the better the results will be.
Audio from the original source was good and just needed normalizing which I have done.
Even though this came from a poor quality file the end result is the best quality you will get online for this old video.
Enjoy walking like an Egyptian! :-)