Gloomy Sunday

[ Gloomy Sunday – Hurts ]

Not to be confused with either Sunday or the infamous Hungarian Suicide Song, Gloomy Sunday was the title of a short instrumental piece for string quartet that Hurts used to play as an interlude in-between the main set and the encore during the Happiness tour. Theo and Adam would go backstage and the quartet would play while two ballerinas would do a coreography until the main duo were back for the next song. It’s featured, for instance, in the Live in Berlin bonus DVD of the deluxe edition of Happiness.

For a piece of music so obscure it makes the likes of Once and Locked Out Of Heaven look basically official in the Hurts discography, you’d expect me to leave it alone and forget about it, but nope. Firstly because I gave even the Intro of that concet the photo treatment, and secondly because Gloomy Sunday is quite a beautiful, atmospheric and inspiring piece on its own. You listen to it and you can totally feel the ennui rising up.

Well, obscure or not, this song has been around for the better part of a decade, and yet I haven’t done anything with it in the past eight-ish years or so – though weirdly enough for this project, this time it’s my own fault. Aside from being adamant about shooting and publishing it on an actual Sunday, I had half a mind of tributing the ballerina set with some black tulle and feathers, a heavy, scaly make up to recall the Black Swan, and red ribbons like those the ballerina used in their dance. Also, I wanted it to be set in a real room, with furniture and other things that would ground it in an everyday ambiance rather than looking like an abstract studio backdrop. All in all, though, the overall idea didn’t feel quite right. Maybe it was overly complicated and still too vague, maybe it wouldn’t turn out visually striking enouhg, but I wasn’t 100% on board with it.

Sunday after Sunday have passed, a new decade has begun, until two things happened in the past couple of weeks: first, I found out just how good the light is in my mother’s sitting room while shooting an unrelated project (which I’ll have to keep under wrap for a while longer); then, I was given that lovely brass calendar, which I immediately thought would look very cool on some photograph.

Now, Gloomy Sunday: a calendar would recall the “day of the week” motif, with the sun embossed on this one tying it to Sunday specifically, so that photo in which I’d feature it might as well be Gloomy Sunday. Also, the “grounded in a real room” theme was pretty much the only other thing I felt like salvaging from the original idea, and I had that part cover. All I had to do was give in to the music and try to recreate its atmosphere through my modelling first and postproduction then, and at long last I had something to work with and take this photo.

Perhaps not the top priority in the grand scheme of the project (Better Than Love is still sorely missing, for instance), but I’m glad I got to give some love to this little forgotten song, and I’m very pleased with the image itself, so here we go.