Yeah, yeah, yeah – up the hill backwards, It’ll be alright ooo-ooo…
Friday March 20th saw the release in the UK of the fourth A-side from the #1 album, Scary Monsters… And Super Creeps.
Up The Hill Backwards was released as both a picture sleeve 7″ 45 and also in the relatively new cassette single format, just as the previous single, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), had been at the start of the same year. (
Despite the lure of the previously unavailable in the UK B-side, Crystal Japan, Up The Hill Backwards only reached #32 on the UK singles chart. Nevertheless, fans who couldn’t afford the expensive Japanese import, (
Young Americans were treated to a 12″ 45 only release of the same coupling, with the added bonus of a 12″x12″ set of all of the stamps that had been previously released as four different sheets with the Ashes To Ashes single in the UK. You can read more on that here:
Up The Hill Backwards was also released with the same cover as the UK in Canada, Germany, Portugal and Spain, depicting an illustration by Andrew Christian of a Japanese worker wearing a surgical face mask, as worn by many Japanese as they go about their daily business.
While it’s usual to expect diminished sales as each single is taken from an album, and, as much as I personally love the song, Up The Hill Backwards was a strange and brave single release. With it’s stuttering rhythms and brilliant lead guitar outbursts from Robert Fripp, there was also no lead solo vocal from David. Instead a combined vocal from David, Lynn Maitland and Tony Visconti was used and the whole thing may have proved just a little too bizarre for the public at large.
Either way, David liked the song enough to feature it as part of the introduction sequence during the 1987 Glass Spider World Tour.
FOOTNOTE: The “I’m OK, You’re so so” line in the song was borrowed and tweaked from the title of the Thomas A. Harris best-selling self-help book illustrated in the montage above.