Halloween Week: Soft Cell - Martin

Kicking off a week of vaguely Halloween-inspired clips with Soft Cell performing a truncated "Martin" on The Tube in 1983. Released in its original eight-minute format as one of two tracks on a 12" single tucked into initial copies of 1983's bleak and brilliant The Art Of Falling Apart, the song takes its inspiration from George A. Romero's 1978 sort-of vampire film of the same name, although the opening "Martin is talking to you" and repeated killkillkills suggest that someone had paid some attention to Harry Manfredini's soundtrack work on the Friday the 13th films.

The lyrics run the gamut from the inadvertently hilarious ("Martin had a lot to live down/Growing up in a mining town" to the genuinely unsettling "Martin has hallucinations/Dreams that he's dead." Dave Ball layers on the unease with clanging, scraping and that patented creepy Soft Cell rattlesnake noise thing that showed up all over Falling Apart.