V&A East Archive Report: Two 'New' Labyrinth Songs Discovered!
(Apologies for my long absence from any meaningful posting here - I'd run out of things to say for a long while, but my discoveries today warrant a return to the world of Labyrinth!)
I had a fascinating visit to the study room at the David Bowie Centre at V&A East today, where I requested all their papers relating to Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. I made one particularly exciting discovery: two completely ‘new’ songs Bowie wrote for the film.
I can’t share the full lyrics for either song to avoid falling foul of copyright law, but the songs are titled ‘All in All’ and ‘Crystal Heartbeat’. Both songs have full lyrics, and are written in Bowie’s own hand. If you want to access either lyric sheet, the V&A archive reference is DBA/4/1/14/2.
I enclose ‘new’ with quotation marks very deliberately because I have the impression that these are both draft lyrics for what would become ‘As the World Falls Down’ (‘All in All’) and ‘Underground’ (‘Crystal Heartbeat’). This is an educated guess on my part, but I believe it’s likely based on the lyrical evidence.
Like ATWFD, ‘All in All’ (27 lines) is a love song with a woozy feel - it’s bombastic and filled with grand romantic gestures, and literally quotes the phrase “in the heat of the morning” (the title and refrain of an early Bowie song). IMHO, it’s easily the superior of the two ‘new’ songs.
‘All in All’ seems well-aligned with the more didactic early drafts of the ‘Labyrinth’ script, which was written by Terry Jones to present Jareth as a more straightforwardly manipulative trickster hiding beneath a facade of physical beauty. It’s filled with Jareth’s overwrought declarations of love (unlikely as it may seem, his love is bigger than the sun that shines!) and invites Sarah to join him in a world of pretend. ATWFD is definitely better from a lyrical perspective, and certainly more nuanced, but 'All in All' isn't half bad.
‘Crystal Heartbeat’ (23 lines) is simpler and less lyrically complex, and has a similar theme of being lost in the confusion of adolescence to ‘Underground’. It’s highly repetitive and feels like an up-tempo dance track (thus why I think it’s an early attempt at the main credits theme).’Underground’ is vastly superior from a lyrical perspective, so it’s easy to see why this draft was ditched.
There are also handwritten lyric sheets for ‘As the World Falls Down’ and ‘Magic Dance’ (on the same sheet), ‘Within You’ and ‘Underground’. These lyrics are mostly very similar or identical to the versions included in the film, though ‘Magic Dance’ has some interesting annotations on delivery (so “what could I do” had “fun” written in the margin).
The only song without handwritten lyrics is ‘Chilly Down’, though there are various storyboards and correspondence relating to that particular song in the archive. It was clearly one of the harder nuts to crack, given the technical complexity of the Fire Gang scene (with the puppets filmed against black velvet, and the sequence workshopped over many iterations).
The collection is fascinating and completely free to access (though you have to book!) and I can’t recommend going along enough - I feel very lucky and privileged to have handled all of this with my own hands! You can contact the archive and book an appointment to see the collection for yourself here: https://vam.libanswers.com/archives
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