The Price of Pop: Halloween Challenge Night 16

 

I am twelve, and like most people I know my age, I am crazy about Michael Jackson's new album. 'Billie jean' is an absolute banger, 'Beat It' a badger of very hot properties. The whole things sounds brilliant and is probably the first album I ever buy that I listen to, absorbing as much of the backing instruments and their interplay as I can to try and work it all out. It was a fool's errand, and I may as well have tried to pull apart Jackson's insane dance moves for all the good it (and that!) did me. But the best was yet to come. Tonight, for Halloween, I'm revisiting the next big thing to come off Jackson's unassailable album: 

Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' (John Landis, 1983)

The production is a film and cult media geek's dream: Landis was not long off the set of The Twilight Zone, bringing Rick Baker in tow for makeup - both had worked together of course on An American Werewolf in London, the only movie of Landis' that Jackson had seen, although  it was enough to get him on the line. Rounding out the interstitial music was Elmer Bernstein, also a past collaborator with Landis on Werewolf as well as Animal House, and soon to be providing the original score for Ghostbusters. And then of course Vincent Price, who doesn't seem to have been on set, but whose presence is essential in the song and for the extended reawakened dead scenes. The short film itself is an honest homage to the old form - Jackson loved the tradition of movie shorts, so wanted to bring them back, the story takes place in a Fifties'/ Sixties opening, and later zombies storm a creepy abandoned house, shuffling and moaning in a visual recreation of Night of the Living Dead. Finally there's the cinema itself, location of the movie within a movie opener, and tellingly festooned with posters of Price's - and Landis' past works. Much of this I know - but not all. And for the first time seeing it on TV, the same night as all of those other kids I know, I have no idea what's coming next. But it's brilliant.

Forty-three years on, and it's still a great diversion, even if you have to squint your brain at the history of some of its principal players. The direction is nice, the sound and lighting terrific and the colours in particular are fantastic - I'm a sucker for Eighties zombies with their parchment skin, deep-set eyes and angular features. get them dancing the way Jacko did and it's a vision. Plus, I can swear that one of them is a reference to Tor Johnson. In y opinion Jackson peaked here - he never looked as good, cast such a shadow, or electrified the screen. Thriller is a miniature treat, from gas-strapped prologue to that memorable final spin with its cat-eyed hero that would stay in my young mind for days afterward. Truly, noone could resist this Thriller.

Halloweenometer. As loath as I am to go straight down the zombie route, this has graveyards, a full moon, a spooky house and a werewolf. It's pretty much made for Halloween.

Companion Piece. The audio for Vincent 'One Take' Price's additions (complete with third, unused verse) is here. But why no add in another of Landis and Baker's great collaborations from the time - courtesy of a future Ghostbuster, naturally. I rewatched this again for a laugh and still jumped, crying out, knowing what was coming. And laughed at my silliness. By jeepers it's a good scene!

Christmas is a Love Story

The kids these days - and by kids I also mean middle-aged nostalgonauts, have apparently taken to dubbing a certain Bruce Willis movie a 'Christmas Movie.' Fair enough - I can't argue, as to shout against all that would also be to shout against some other fine Yuletide romps, like Gremlins, Batman Returns - and even Shazam! has Santa in it. It's a movie about children, wishes, magic and families - of course it's a Christmas movie!

But similar things could be said for songs. We adopt songs for our times, and reinvent songs to fit our times. I was agog this week to discover, for example, that my chosen musical bete noir of Nativity-tide, the veritable dog in the manger if you will, said Jingle Bells - is many times not Christmas. It's a Thanksgiving song, apparently. But here we are. And sometimes songs slip into Christmas by intent, despite some ropey sentiment (cough!DoTheyKnowIt'sChristmascough!) and, in the following case, by timing and visuals.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood's The Power of Love, the third and greatest of the singles troika going by that name in 1985, is now 35 years old. Sweet Baby Jesus. Released in November of that year, it crept into the public consciousness and made FGtH's third consecutive number one from their debut album. Thematically, it's not Christian in focus or Christmas in theme, but I cant hear it without thinking of the Godley and Creme video and its multi-ethnic magi, imagining the lyrics to be the sentiments of a bewildered and bowlderised Joseph, who loves this girl, but like her is just being carried helplessly along by a greater tide. Back in its native home that video (not to mention single sleeve) did the job, almost, and it would have made the coveted Christmas Number One slot but for Sir Bob Geldof and chums. Never mind. Enjoy this at the close of another brutal year- the sweeping strings, lulling piano, children's cartoon bogeymen, and those vocals. Dampen down the inhumanity and misfortune that 2019 wrought, and hope for better things to come. Let yourself be beautiful, indeed.

I had a girlfriend once who thought this song was warbling drivel. Always knew she was a wrong'un.




"I always felt like 'The Power of Love' was the record that would save me in this life. There is a biblical aspect to its spirituality and passion; the fact that love is the only thing that matters in the end."
- Holly Johnson

Video Affects: 'Wuthering Heights' - Kate Bush

It's a point of historical fact that for probably the first years of my life my family don't own a modern TV. Ours is big, blocky, and black and white. When we finally have the luxury of two TV sets, the old one is housed for a while in the bedroom of my older sister, and on it of a Saturday evening she, my brother and I will watch the early evening fare before bedtime. Probably The Dukes of Hazzard, The Incredible Hulk or Little House on the Prairie. But crucially also, among my sister's M*A*S*H and Scott Baio posters, some tidbits of pop music via classic chart show Ready to Roll. I am eight years old, and about to have one of the great frights of my life.

Picture a night-black studio, its floor smothered in dry ice fog. Out of it and strobing with the same video feedback trick that made The Jackson Five's Blame It On The Boogie so memorable, is something more starting. A ghost. A wailing, wide-eyed spectral woman in white with a high pitched mournful song that could only itself be about a ghost. At eight I think I've heard of a banshee - and this seems the most accurate depiction of one I could imagine. Somehow, I think the song's creator would approve.

Kate Bush's oeuvre has always had elements of the supernatural and horror about it, from Hammer Horror to Experiment IV, the opening snippet of Night of the Demon leading into Hounds of Love to the wonderfully (and literally) batty cosplay on the back of fourth album Never For Ever. But no song is as redolent as Wuthering Heights, its Gothic imprimatur well intact. Unsurprisingly for what follows, Bush is a revelation - and Wuthering Heights sets out her agenda with aplomb. Eerie, arty, outsider music of a kind which ought not to be able to escape its Seventies trappings were it not for Bush's own ability to follow the trend and her ability to reinvent herself.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. For the moment this is the first time I'll ever see Kate Bush, and I'm ready to run to the hills in terror. There are two videos for Wuthering Heights; this is the lesser-seen one, but it's the one that will haunt my nights for a good few weeks to come.

Fear of a Chicken Duck Woman Thing

Last week found me casting my mind back twenty years or so to the temporary musical career of the younger Simian, and how, aided by a nifty cassette Walkman since lost in a freak library incident, a friend managed to play one of my compositions (fittingly titled 'Rewind Mind') backwards. Taping the resulting sounds, we picked out weird semi-words and phrases, putting together a new version of the song which my friend (rather uncharitably, I thought) dubbed 'I am a Dwarf' from its most-repeated alleged utterance. In the end we failed to find the Devil in my music, but as an experiment in backwards masking we were lucky to find anything at all. I wonder where that tape got to in the end...

Anyway, I love serendipity, and the moment where something accidental and organic gives birth to a new and exciting creation. Sadly, most of my best artwork arose out of slips of the pen or brush, and many a waking dream has provided inspiration of some kind. My hat is off, then, to this month's ear worm, borne of a line from Bad Lip Reading's treatment of A New Hope. If I'd thought that their earlier Redneck Avengers was a work of quiet genius, then this raises the bar again. Funny, surreal, and oddly moving.


Better than anything George came up with, I reckon.

Ed Games

This has been out a week now, so apologies for the dated-ness.

But, datedness is sort of the theme of this post! Iron maiden's new album is out next month, and in advance of this their new single 'Speed of Light' was released to the internet just over seven days ago.

The song is pretty cool - something of a throwback to early Nineties Maiden with Bruce Dickinson's growly voice, and a more rocking feel than the progfests of recent albums. That said, it's an opening track, and the band tend to have form on this tactic - 'El Dorado' was the taster for Final Frontier, 'A Different World' was AMOLAD's opener, and it's arguable whether either was indicative of their parent albums.

But hey, I like it. It's got a lovely Ritchie Blackmore style riff to kick things off, some nice leads from all three guitarists, Bruce sounds great (pre-cancer diagnosis, it must be said), and there's more cowbell working hard here than Waikato Stadium in a home game.

To be honest, though, it's the video that's the drawcard. I love a good video, and with Maiden I think they're something of a rarity: the early days are very much live performance-based with movie cutaways; in the Nineties these turned into slicker products that somehow didn't really sell the band or Eddie very well - some of them just tried too hard. On the whole, however, it's when Eddie'in the visuals that the videos work best, and 'Speed of Light' is a great example, being almost all about the history of Eddie and Maiden's most memorable album covers, as experienced through the medium of... video games! I have fond memories of mashing rubber ZX Spectrum keys to the background sounds of Number of the Beast and Maiden's debut album (point of fact: both games and music were likely loaded on the same tape deck.) Iron Maiden are around the same age as your common or garden home entertainment system, so the synergy of the band's evolution alongside that of digital gaming works really well. Eddie is back in his rightful punkish fright wig original form, it's witty, deferential, self-referential (count those nods!*) and, I think, more than a little essential.

A brief pause to reflect that this is not the first time the worlds of Maiden and video games have crosed paths, as the mid-Nineties compilation/video game Ed Hunter attests. Reception in the gaming mags was not kind, apparently, and it goes to show that despite heavy metal making an excellent gaming soundtrack, getting the right mix is a delicate art. I think they've cracked it this time, though. Hell, I'd buy it :)

UPDATED: Thanks to Dave R's observations, it appears I got my wish! 

*Visual references I noted:

Friday Night Local: Chris Knox, 'My Dumb Luck'

Now, there have been a few upsets to a rough schedule in this Friday Night Music column, and today's entry is yet another. I didnd't intend to return to Chris Knox's music so soon after posting the Tall Dwarfs video a fortnight ago, and yet I didn't intend to go all J-Pop lat week either. This week was to have been either another female or all-female act, or a non-Flying Nun band from yesteryear, but instead I'm putting up another favourite video from one of Invercargill's finest former inhabitants.

My Dumb Luck is from Knox's 1988 solo sophomore effort Seizure, and is a typical track from the record (albeit a favourite song as well). I love the animation - it's simple, witty and creative, which are three things I also admire about Knox's compositions, as well as video and song here sharing a cyclical pattern. To this day I'm torn between appreciating Knox as a solo artist and for his collaborations, particularly with Alec Bathgate as the 'Dwarfs. By 1988 Knox's style was working its way into something of a groove, with buzzing guitars and looped percussion that wasn't a million miles from some Dwarfs songs (say, Crush), while the Dwarfs tracks remained more eclectic, sometimes more inventive and less direct, sometimes less accessible. I still like them both, although at the time I recall swinging fro Knox quickly and back to the duo just as soon. Was it the emergence of Knox's most famous solo song Not Given Lightly - a rueful, slightly cynical pitch at mainstream success (which did come after some time)? Perhaps. I never bought another Knox album after Seizure, with the exception of a cassette of Polyphoto Duck-Shaped Pain and Gum (whose stand-out track Inside Story was nearly a candidate for inclusion here - it's just not as fun as Luck) and the tribute album Stroke, featuring Knox's past work solo, as half of Tall Dwarfs or as frontman for The Enemy and Toy Love interpreted by his friends, colleagues and devotees. It's an impressive set of songs, and a testament to a creative spark whose work in music, film, animation, writing and cartooning seems to have been all but curtailed by a series of strokes five years ago. And I'm only just now thinking about how much Knox has inspired me in nearly all of these areas since I discovered him in my teens.

I'm posting this because there is a crowdfunding campaign underway to collect Knox's visual works in book form, Grafix Knox, next year - it's a great idea and deserves a wider platform, and you can find out more here!

Land of the Long White Sound: day four

As I said in my last post - too many white boys with guitars n this series so far. Time to move over, guys...

Acoustic guitar, a choral synth backing, accompanied by a minimum of bass, striking percussion (rakau sticks?) and rounded out by an eerie koauau, Emma Paki's System Virtue is utterly unique, real shiver down the spine stuff, belying the actual optimism of the song. Paki explained it once simply as an inversion of the common complaint that "the system sucks", giving it a virtue that can only be seen through a positive attitude. Recorded by Jaz Coleman for free, it's matched by a video that could be Ans Westera portraits given movement; stark, monochrome images of rural tangata whenua. Real faces, families, homes, animals, bikes, moko, and the tino rangatiratanga flag. If there was one song which deftly caught and challenged with a  moment of local identity poised between the 'Ruthenasia' reforms of the National government's 1991 Budget and the cultural phenomenon of Lee Tamihori's Once Were Warriors, then this was it.There's even a shout out to the national anthem.



I was lucky enough to catch an impromptu performance by Paki in Marion Sqaure during the Wellington Fringe Festival, ooh - circa 2002? Brilliant stuff - unaccompanied with only a mic'd up acoustic and an open sky, she was the real deal.

So, whatever next? Ditch the guitars, maybe?

Land of the Long White Sound: day one

May is New Zealand Music Month, and I'm nearly a little bit late to the party for once. For maybe a good ten years I'd mark the month by committing to buying an album from at least one local act (I think the last time I did this was two years ago, with an iTunes purchase of the 3Ds compilation), but I have of late been remiss.

  My disgrace then becomes your viewing chore for the next seven days: a daily clip picked by me from the archives (NZ On Screen, or if my memory's a little better and social media comes to the party, You Tube) redolent of local music from the past fifty years.

I wanted to kick thing off with something from the 60s, but wouldn't you know it - most of the big numbers or personal favourites are typical of many of the standards of that era in that they were reworkings of international ditties (stand up She's a Mod, Western Union, Love Hate Revenge, How Is The Air Up There?), so straight to the Eighties we go and so a somewhat predictable choice but a personal fave: Pink Frost by The Chills.

It's cold in the Monkeyhouse tonight, and it's snowing in Dunedin as I type this, which seems almost perfect. Roll the clip!

As locals may know, Pink Frost is largely shot in and around Lover's Leap on the Otago Peninsula, a wonderfully isolated place with, apparently, a deserved name and though it's obviously degraded video here, the picture quality fits the setting and the song perfectly, picking out the skeletal pines and brittle waves of the South Pacific below, while later on Martin Phillipps' sinister scarecrow is all flickering eyelids and paleface makeup somewhere nearby - Waitati? Aramoana? I could seriously do all Flying Nun songs this week - hell, I could easily do all Dunedin bands this week, but I promise I won't. Next time: Auckland!

Rewind the Blog

Happy New Year, everyone

Back after a ten-day holiday at home/s on the Mainland, and back to the routine of work tomorrow.

Around the tail end of '13 I had more time to read (but only read, alas) some social media and in that time was surprised to read how rough last year had been on some of my friends - the number of times I saw iterations of the phrase "good riddance to a crap year" was... arresting.

For myself 2013 was just another year - altogether survivable, and mostly harmless. If anything it was an unproductive year, and that's not a good thing for most of us. I think as a species we have an innate urge to create in some form; even those who profess to not have an artistic bone in their body still follow some existential will to do something, maybe out of fear of doing nothing.

"The act of creation saves us from despair" goes a line in the song below, from an album I'm more than a little embarrassed to admit I didn't know had even been released until the end of year music overviews (it's not alone - the Chills released a single, 'Molten Gold' to coincide with Martin Phillipps' 50th birthday this year - whoosh over my head it went, but check it out - it's lovely). I'll return to Manic Street Preachers' Rewind the Film very soon, but for now here's the opening track This Sullen Welsh Heart, equal parts hope and despair, and a gorgeous and moving version it is. Taken from an intimate live performance on Later With Jools Holland it retains the studio version's guest talent of Lucy Rose and in its stripped-back sound is very indicative of the album in all. I picked the album (and Postcards From a Young Man, along with Wilco's Hotel Yankee Foxtrot) up on sale at the Warehouse in Timaru (a store whose sales have never let me down!) and am really looking forward to getting to know it better.


After this, some rewinding of my own with holiday-inspired entries, and some much-overdue painting updates. And to all of my splendid readers and friends out there, here's to a much more creative, enjoyable and prosperous year ahead...

Odd Space Ditty

Jet Junior is going through a very enthusiastic David Bowie phase right now, singing him, drawing him, remarking on the Thin White Duke's more memorable Seventies incarnations ("Eyes are different!" "Paint on his face!" "He's a singer!"), but is so far unmoved by astronaut Chris Hadfield's cover of Space Oddity. I can't say the same.

Space Oddity and I go a long way back. It might be the earliest Bowie song I know. No, hang on, that might be I Am A DJ. Or is it The Laughing Gnome? Cat People? Thanks to Sunday morning kids radio it's probably Gnome, dammit, but for the sake of the man’s preferred canon, let's say it's something else again - Ashes to Ashes. Freaky video, utterly memorable in song and visuals - that's the one. So, really, I suppose I experienced the story of Bowie's ill-fated astronaut Major Tom backwards, from Heaven's High back to Countdown.

And yet Oddity is the one that stuck with me because in our house it, Starman, and Life on Mars were the only three songs assured easy access to me until I was old enough to work out how to tape Let's Dance off the radio during its local chart peak. The three tunes were all collected on a compilation I actually wanted to feature on Jetsam under a different category. An LP of space tunes simply called, I think, Star Trek, featured paintings of your actual Kirk and Spock on the cover, but inside offering soundalikes of such fare as the Star Wars theme (erring on the side of the Giorgio Moroder interpretation), Close Encounters (again, a regional stab at Gene Page's great disco mix), Telstar (don't even hope for the Tornadoes/Joe Meek version nor even The Shadows), Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft (nope), Night Flight to Venus, and Rocket Man. Alas, no chance of tracking down a picture or full track listing of that LP for the moment - even Google is doing a pretty good job at sweeping what's likely to be another K-Tel cash grab under the carpet. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Eventually making my acquaintance with the original Oddity via a British Pop box set changed little in the end - it was a still a really strange song, lyrically inventive with its countdown and key changes, and it tells a story! Not an easy story to decipher at the end, of course - does the hero lose contact with Ground Control accidentally or does he disconnect himself? It's deliberately vague and unashamedly juvenile space fable, its moral and conclusion left to the listener's interpretation. External interpretations came, of course, including the soundalike I'd heard, plus a rivetingly spartan, twitchy 1979 remake performed by a post-Low Bowie on Kenny Everett's TV show, patently and visually linking the original with the imminent strung-out Scary Monsters sequel (its minimal bass kick-and-snare backing recalling also to my ears Five Years' backing beat). A few years later and there is Peter Schilling's 1983 literal Europop re-telling of the story in Major Tom (Coming Home). After that, the literal grounding in Ashes to Ashes, and later still a posthumous cut-up resurrection in the Pet Shop Boys remix of Hallo Spaceboy in 1996 which, again, excused itself before coming to any form of explanation. As it ought to have by then, of course.


Chris Hadfield’s in-orbit cover does something new, of course, leaps apart from Schilling and Tennant/Lowe’s rather too reverential nods. It’s by no means an attempt at a further chapter to Major Tom, but an endearingly personal sign-off from one of our farthest frontiers, heaven’s high being this time a breathtaking and uplifting window onto our planet home as the ISS glides over oceans an continents, observing pinpoints of light that mark the cities of the world. Hadfield’s voice is for the most part up to the job, and he acquits himself remarkably well with his guitar in a zero-G environment, but it’s the sentiment behind his rewriting that really strikes me “Your Commander comes back down to Earth and grows”, providing a version of Major Tom who completes his mission, returns to Earth changed and equally proud and humbled, and shows us all in our best light – from the anonymous distance of space. It's a profound, humanist and ultimately optimistic piece against Bowie's tripping, existential original.

1985: Ich bin ein Britischer

I am 15 and my world is expanding.

This isn't going to be a Video Affects post, nor a Manic Street Preachers one, although the video below is useful for more than just illustration. In my mid-teens my musical tastes went Northward, to the United Kingdom. Obviously, thanks to the Summer of Pop and the early Eighties British Pop Invasion the presence of a wide range of popular music from the Mother Country on New Zealand radios would have led to a lot of young teens such as myself building a music collection which had a particular geographical bias. Thanks to that, and after a brief dalliance with West Coast US rock, through an even briefer interest in NWOBHM, I settled on following British music almost exclusively - Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Duran Duran, The Police and Sting, U2, and eventually The Skids, The Clash, and The Smiths. For a while I could see no point to the sunshine and sweetness of American pop, and resisted the likes of Madonna and Prince to follow acts which I thought, in my tender years, spoke to me more about how the world really was. Goodbye California Girls, hello Eton Rifles.

Quite silly, of course, and by the time I'd left home a good few months of university life fixed such notions and I was adding The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth to a palette that even at high school couldn't quite manage resisting College-radio era REM. But enough listmaking, it's making me feel all weird and old.

The thing about following British culture, as I did in my teens, was that half a world away it seemed to require an additional investment in background cultural accumulation. Reading comics (Eagle, 2000AD) that over ten years would move from nodding at contemporary novelty newspaper headlines and TV ads through to actually quoting Morrissey lyrics; following TV series (The Young Ones, Spitting Image, Black Adder, any number of Comic Strip specials, New Statesman, Red Dwarf) that were the product of a new wave of politicised young comedians - all of this demanded some sort of context to it, and working out the relevance of terms like Special Patrol Group, or names like Scargill, Tebbit, Lawson... Thatcher.

At least the last name needed little introduction. Margaret Thatcher's political career spanned many more years than my teens, but her eleven years as British PM overlapped them neatly enough, and culturally she was everywhere, perhaps more than any other Prime Minister since Churchill. Looking back it seemed the political landscape of Cold War Eighties was dominated by these huge and polarising world leaders - Thatcher, Reagan, a succession of doomed Soviet Presidents culminating in Gorbachev, the formidable Bob Hawke, and here the outwardly sharp-witted David Lange, an orator king who'd thrust our defining foreign policy riposte into international waters - out Anti-Nuclear stance. This seemed like a brilliant burst of desperate hope compared to the grim picture painted by the songs, programmes and stories I'd read and watch and listen to. Polarising leaders inspire entire cultural movements in revolt, and so my music collection also acquired tones of political protest - The Specials, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello and The Proclaimers. Only  my following all of this seems now more than a little disingenuous - a combination of good tunes and unfocused adolescent fervour. A far cry from those early Eagle magazines and their Falklands-themed pull-out posters of Harrier jump jets and MIG Foxbats. Culturally as well as politically the Thatcher years as I experienced them as a teenager still resonate in the movements and phases that followed - angry small press-inspired comic titles like Deadline and Revolver, Britpop's courtship and rejection of Tony Blair's New Labour, the stories of Ian Banks and Irvine Welsh, and even the shape of modern Doctor Who. Thatcher's death this week is a strange thing for me to mark then, her past career seemingly forming the bedrock of an artistic reaction that I could only really experience vicariously. It all seems so distant, geographically and chronologically; and as I type this with Tramp the Dirt Down playing in the background I feel I'm no closer now to the heart of it than I was at fifteen, seventeen or twenty.

Video Affects - Art Garfunkel: Bright Eyes (1979)

I am nine, and my family have just been to see Watership Down, an animated movie about rabbits which, going by the elegant and haunting music video accompanying its related single Bright Eyes, will be just the sort of wholesome, non-threatening entertainment the three youngest of us (fourteen, twelve and nine) should enjoy. The actual result, if you are unfamiliar with the story of Watership Down, is quite a different thing. I stay through to the end, and bedsheets go unbothered for nights afterward, but even now it’s clear to me that this was probably the first great instance of cinematic trauma I endured in my childhood. Added to the list of shorter snippets from the later Sea Gypsies (a shock shot of a skeleton in an abandoned cabin), the earlier The Mouse and his Child (a living doll decapitated under a cartwheel), Watership Down’s tooth-and-claw lapine warfare, scenes of mauling animals and warren gassing by farmers, plus the nightmarish and ever-present spectre of the Black Rabbit of death are the top of the list, an experience so vivid that even as an adult I recently recall genuinely hovering with hesitation over bargain bins with the DVD among the cheap offers. Google “Watership Down trauma” and you’ll see page after page of the same story. Previous generations may have had Bambi’s mother being shot, and later generations the Hamlet-on-the-veldt of The Lion King, but neither can compare to the relentless wholesale and, above all, matter of fact natural slaughter of the lapine characters of Watership Down.

   

Revisiting it recently, the music video itself comprises clips from the film, and of them there’s little that’s going to offend – Bigwig’s being caught in a snare, the red-eyed pale gassed rabbit, the warping jagged lines of a rural pylon. What delivers the blow now as much as then is the juxtaposition of expected reactions – as a nine year old, cartoon characters were for the most part wholesome, sympathetic or comic. They didn’t tend to actually die, but stepped away from their cartoon fates blackened with soot, flattened by anvils or crumbling into charcoal only to be reconstituted offscreen. They were immortal, and they didn’t bleed. But Watership’s wide-eyed rabbits like Hazel, Bigwig and Fiver do, as matter of factly as they do in Richard Adams’ novel. And accompanying this, the sleepy, near-pastoral strings and woodwinds of Mike Batt’s musical composition, lulling the unwary viewer like a will-o-wisp. The video as it stands is mostly safe for very young viewers. It is not, however, for grown men.

 I’ve long been puzzled as to why the movie and the song were soon after chosen as ripe for lampoon, and can only conclude that in part satire was a natural reaction for a large adult population stunned or offended by the movie’s shock factor and the incongruous longevity of its otherwise unassuming single. Even today there are plenty around who would dismiss Bright Eyes as ‘that song about cartoon rabbits’. The truth is of course that the song is a mediation on dying, one’s “following the river of death downstream’; a curious subject for a number one single, and the video bears this out too, with its odd combination of family-friendly bunny rabbits and dreamlike bounding shadow of the rabbit spirit. Art Garfunkel’s vocals are distant, offering questions that can never be answered: “is it a kind of a dream?” “a shadow?” And as in life there are no answers: “Nobody seems to know where you go”, a line reworked later, as I hear it, by Coldplay in God Put a Smile on Your Face. There’s spirituality in Richard Adams’ rabbit world, but an animal one – no salvation, no resurrection, just oblivion. The dying rabbit of the video's close leaves his lifeless corpse to join the Black Rabbit of Inle in a flight over the land, one with the 'fog along the horizon', the 'high wind in the trees', and no longer one among the living.

 Batt’s lyrics reflected the death of his father from cancer, supposedly the starting point for the song. The composition would be covered by others later to varying degrees – one of the more affecting I’ve come across is a self-conscious solo with guitar by James Dean Bradfield on the nights of Richey James’ last ever appearances with Manic Street Preachers. At the time the song was dedicated to the band’s late manager Phillip Hall, but naturally grew in fans’ minds to take in a broader picture. But for a nine year old me in a darkened cinema, the world of Hazel, Fiver and Bigwig was a very small thing indeed, subject to the cruelty and injustice of the wilds, occasionally visited by the brutal hands of men. You age and mature, and life’s lessons and lack of fairness become less surprising, some you can even prepare for. But life’s final phase, unseen, little-expected, unfamiliar and unyielding is still a mystery.

Video Affects - The Smiths, Girlfriend in a Coma

Morrissey is coming to NZ this December. It's kind of a big deal, I guess, with people of my age, added to that the fact Moz hasn't visited these shores in twenty-one years. There's the sense that this time, a bit like The Pixies maybe and Bowie (though we didn't necessarily see that one coming) is a 'last chance to see' sort of gig. Nevertheless, I'm already double-booked, so there we are, and there I won't be, Boo.

I discovered The Smiths late, like most of New Zealand, the late Eighties being (as I see it) the last gasp of our Antipodean six months/two years-behind-the-rest-of-the-world-in-pop-culture factor that led to most of our punk bands arising in the early Eighties and Acid House not really a going concern until 1989 at best. By the Nineties and the arrival of the Worldwide Web, our embarrassing South Seas Bubble would burst, but 1987-1988, The Smiths were a vaguely-known thing to me; the source of obsession by a schoolmate Mark, and of bewilderment by yours truly.



Enter the video for Girlfriend in a Coma, one of their last singles. This is a video that's a signature of the band, is in a big way irrelevant to the song with its scenes from The Leather Boys (as much as their album and single covers steadfastly eschewed images of the band themselves, opting istead for silver screen idols), yet rewards the viewer curious enough to follow up the images (I haven't) - to get to know the band without actually seeing the band. Front and slightly left or right of centre is enigmatic frontman Steven Morrisey in action, and this as far as I can recall, ismy entry point proper to the world of The Smiths. By my second year of university a couple of years later I'd heard pretty much all I could get my hands on, bought their albums and resold them again for ridiculously small fare (but then I had to eat), and having learned a few songs along the way and taken all I could at the time from them, moved on.

But the video was a serviceable entry point for the band, as late as it was to their story. Here's Morrissey at the corners of the frame, singing devotedly to the black and white image of Rita Tushingham, the singer's colour and the footage's monochrome separating the two subjects until the 1:40 mark where Morrissey's face becomes merged with that of co-star Colin Campbell. The rest of the band are absent, as is the case for the other videos from parent album Strangeways Here We Come, and the vdeo says nothing of The Smiths' internal ructions and impending split - in fact, it's business as usual.But it was enough for me. I'd not seen a video like it, in a decade known more for putting musical artists in increasingly narrative or cinematic contexts, here's a video apparently about adulation and worship. Curiously introverted, studied and coy. It started me on a short road of Smiths fandom.

My Rainbow Connection

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, a fact that quite frankly blows my mind just a little.

We had a Spectrum, my brother and I, after months of attending the local Computer Club and watching the slow transition of those in the group from the modest but limited ZX81 through to models that were a little more ambitious in memory and performance - including the Speccy. Money was saved, cases were argued (including the old chestnut that it would improve our education) and, eventually, as a family we made the trip down to Dunedin to pick up the new addition, all 16 kilobytes, peripherals, manuals and polystyrene packaging of it. It was a big moment in my adolescent life. I was thirteen and this looked for all the world like the future in our spare room. We loved our ZX Spectrum, lavishing it with hours of our developing lives and crafting it a fuzzy blue workstation of its very own, with holes for its coaxial cables and a shelf for its cassette player. Within a year or so we made a further plunge and with the help of a school friend, upgraded our little beauty to a more impressive 48k.

Let other blogs and sites tell of games and cheats and fledgling forays into BASIC and COBOL; my Spectrum experience was forged in site of these. I was no programmer, although my early attempts at computer graphics started with our home machine; nor was I a gamer, my lot in digital life seemingly ever to be terminated (with extreme prejudice) around the end of level three of every game I've ever played. My Spectrum experience was however an immersive one: lured by glossy ads and the promise that my comic heroes (Dredd, Nemesis the Warlock, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper, Dan Dare) would be realised in interactive, noisy 8 bit form. I became savvy to the Spectrum phenomena of marketing and fan culture - the slick advertising that promised so much (even if it delivered slightly less), the cheat-sheets and playground negotiations of these and bootleg game cassettes, the specialist magazines with their infinite lives pokes and codes. Every day trip to Dunedin had to involve two shop visits: to London Bookshops for White Dwarf magazine, and to David Reid Electronics, who'd sold us the computer and had many more cheap games and cassettes to copy others on to.


Somewhere amidst travelling with Bilbo Baggins, collecting Chuckie's Eggs and Jet-Setting with Willy I grew up. I learned the shrewdness of brand recognition (Melbourne House games were often literary based - The Hobbit, Sherlock Holmes, earnest but very well put together, Ultimate games - Sabre Wulf, Atic Atac, were punchy, dynamic, imaginative and innovative) and brand loyalty (I spit on you, Amstrad! et cetera). I learned my limitations as a programmer and gamer. But I communicated wit other kids about our shared interest in the computer, I made friends, and by god I actually got more out of it than I put into it. That's a rare thing in life right there. In time the world moved on: my friends upgraded to C64s or Amigas, and our school BBC Micros became robust, cuboid early Apple Macs. Ten years on from our ZX Spectrum I was eventually writing university essays on a word processor, then using email, Telnet, and eventually the World Wide Web. Technology, as George Lucas would modestly put it, had caught up with me. But my first love, for ever and always, will be a slim, black box with rubber keys and a non-threatening 80s-sharp rainbow flash on the corner.

Video Affects: Everything Must Go, Come Back Around

When a band – a genuine ensemble rather than a backing group for a front-person, loses a member untimely, the result is often a drawn-out affair. Bands that work well are built on friendship and solidarity, so it’s an unavoidable fact that the death of one of the team has a lasting emotional not to mention creative effect on the band as a whole; sometimes that member is a lyricist or composer, integral to the band’s voice – other times they may play just as significant a role in the instrumental side. The loss, though open to being over-manipulated, is a matter usually expressed publically, if not openly -there are fans and listeners outside the group who might also feel the same emotional blow. If the death of that member doesn’t spell the demise of the band – as that of Kurt Cobain’s did for Nirvana, then the question of whether the group continues – and in what form, arises. Many do – some even continue to find success well after the wake has disappeared.

Two examples here, then. The 1995 disappearance of Richey James Edwards, co-lyricist and rhythm guitarist for Manic Street Preachers is one still (relatively) recent and notable example. Edwards’ story can be seen here, though it’s far from being an unfamiliar one to anybody who followed British indie and pop music in the 90s.

What's your story baby/No control of what I am saying
Winter leaves still make me believe/No vendettas, just a cherry blossom tree
(‘Nobody Loved You’, from MSP’s This is My Truth, Tell me Yours)



Edwards and bassist, co-lyricist Nicky Wire shared a flat in the band’s early days, outside of which a cherry tree grew. That this tree became something of a symbol for Edwards can be seen in the video for Everything Must Go, the second single off the album of the same name, the next release after James’ disappearance. Blown and denuded by wind as the remaining band stage a rending, Spector-like anthem of loss and overcoming, it stands in the video, petals cascading across the faces of the band, and remains the final shot of the clip. With no confirmed sighting of him since that time James was declared deceased ten years later, the popular conclusion being suicide.

The thought of never knowing/can kill me just the same
A solitary blossom/reminders of a friend
(‘Bitter Glass’, from Feeder’s Pushing the Senses)

To another solitary blossom in John Lee, late drummer for Feeder. Lee’s suicide was no less shocking to his fans, and perhaps came as more of a surprise. With an album in the wings, Feeder continued, dedicating their first single Come Back Around to their fallen friend. Though his place was most certainly filled for the recoding, the band went one step further in the video – replacing Lee not with one drummer, but four. All women, all pretty much identical. The reveal is gradual – nothing for the first verse, then gradually as the camera pulls back, the ‘fourth wall’ is revealed to show surviving members Grant Nicholas and Taka Hirose performing not for the camera, but for Lee’s stand-ins, the filming deliberately slowed to ensure all four drummers worked precisely and mechanically. It’s an arresting video, even if somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the indulgence of the drummers being young, beautiful women being apparently a nod to Lee’s spirit in life, and complaint of no women in their past videos.



I like both videos, particularly as each song provided a proper introduction to their bands for me, though Feeder’s video was discovered long after I was aware of the song. Previously the band had been a well-meaning, fun sounding guitar group, responsible for the cheery Buck Rogers. The post-Lee Comfort in Sound certainly indicated a shift in the band’s sound, continuing to last album Pushing the Senses, where the drummer’s death remains a background concern. In the case of Manic Street Preachers I’d followed them vaguely through early music-press baiting exploits – equal implausible boasts and portentous stunts (Edwards’ 4Real incident included), but it was Everything Must Go that drew me in properly. My induction into the band is based on them as being without Edwards (who was never replaced). I can’t say I’m genuinely a Feeder fan, but I’m definitely a Manics one. Both videos come across as sensitive and not sensational, reverent but not cloying; they’re affirmations of the strength a good band can draw on and build on in the face of tragedy. That both bands had a life beyond the death of a member is a testament to that strength, and a rare thing in modern music.

Video Affects - Irene Cara 'Flashdance ..What a Feeling' (April 1983)

"She makes me feel kinda funny, like when we used to climb the rope in gym class." Garth Agar,Wayne's World

I am twelve and my life is entering the turmoil of adult change. Oh yes, on the inside it's all bubbles, toils and trouble. Thankfully, on the outside things are a little more calm. The nights are drawing in, and my brother and I have jumped on the domestic technological wave and are attending Saturday night computer club at the home of a local man who has a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It's a wonder of technology I think, but though we'll have succeeded in hauranging our parents and will have a Spectrum of our own in our home within a year, the computer is not going to be My Thing. I enjoy the games and have a stab at graphics (Sinclair's BASIC programming is ridiculously intuitive at least), but my problem is a lack of patience and my brain. It's simply not a mathematical one, and is more of your frustrating right-side model. This means, though, that music videos have a profound effect on me. The Human League have released in this same month '(Keep Feeling) Fascination', a brassy continuation of their ascent into pop from those brief and early industrial singles I'd discover years later (I still like Being Boiled!) So for the League it's a move away from the sequenced programming of their early sound and into something more organic and, well, human. The video's good too. Of course it's nothing on Irene Cara's second movie tie-in (her first being for Fame of course.)

Cara's video heroine spends almost the first minute of the video cycling through her industrial city home, back to camera or in silhouette before the camera closes in on a figure welding (or not), androgynous until her industrial mask is raised and there she is - Jennifer Beals in all her striking beauty. It's an easy trick in retrospect, and as much-used as this video has been lampooned in future videos and ads, but it surprised me at the time, as assured as the rest of the piece in its smooth movie-style editing, not greatly different (intentionally so) from the movie it's welded to.

The editing is slick here - the use of a body double for Beals' dance scenes seems so much more obvious to me now, but it's still a stylish package (though Michael Sembello's follow-up soundtrack single Maniac boasts a video that with a smaller source tape cuts and fetishises its subject to an even more surgical degree). To the uncoordinated, the physically awkward or untested - the young adolescent in other words, it's an intimidating spectacle. I felt much the same way seeing (ahem) 'Kevin Bacon's assured floorwork in Footloose - surely also the work of a more athletic double, but that's the illusion of movies, and it fooled and beguiled me. Once I worked out that the disciplined world of dance and movement were as much for me as Human League's early digitised, robotic anthems, as reliant on a small, precise sequential actions as computer programming or music video editing, the writing was on the wall. I stuck with the breakdancing meetings to third form, and that was it shortly afterward. I remember my heart sinking as I read a quote from Sting once: "music is simple, really. It's just mathematics."

There's artiface behind all art. The audience is only hoodwinked when it's made to look easy.

GAZ: It's Flashdance. She's a welder, isn't she?
DAVE: A welder? I hope she dances better than she welds. Look at that. Her mix is all to cock.
GAZ: What the fuck do you know about welding, any road?
DAVE: More than some chuffing woman. It's like Bonfire Night.That's too much acetylene. Them joints won't hold fuck all.
(The Full Monty)

(A Very Special) Talkin' Eds - Bring Your Daughter... to the Slaughter single (1990)

By 1990 Iron Maiden were playing to a home crowd and were well and truly a diminished pop influence, despite good chart ratings for Seventh Son. Lacking the youth and menace of their early years they were something of a joke institutionally. And crucially this is what they were emblematic of to a new generation - my generation - of artists, as witnessed below, circa 1991 and Blur's emergence as a big hitter in the early 1990s UK pop scene:

From Bit of a Blur by Alex James:

'Andy Ross through it would be a good idea for Damon and me to go and be nice to everyone at the EMI annual sales conference… There were hundreds of people there, including some proper pop stars. The boss of the company, Rupert Perry, made a speech on a little stage and said he wanted to introduce some special guests. Iron Maiden drove on to the stage in a bubble car and started swearing at everybody. Damon had a funny turn and ran outside.
…I was really drunk by that point and I went down to the bar to have a fight. Bruce Dickinson was at the bar. I hate Iron Maiden. They're devil-worshipping ponces. I said 'The devil can suck my cock and you can kiss his arse, you fucking poodle.' He got me in a headlock and sucked the end of my nose really hard. I was laughing quite a lot, not really resisting. We left it at that.

…I got home back to the squat and Justine said, 'Has anyone seen you this morning?' I said, 'Only Adam Ant.' She said, 'Aren't you clever! Did he mention your nose, darling?' I looked in the mirror and it was bright red at the end. It took days to go back to being the right colour.'

After ten years of blood, sweat and tears Iron Maiden hit paydirt with what is still a pretty routine song from a lesser album. Despite this pedigree, Bring Your Daughter… shares the rare honour of being both a number one single and a winner of the Golden Raspberry Award for worst original song from a movie - in this case A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5: The Dream Child. The company it keeps is mixed to say the least; George Michael's I Want Your Sex from 1987 and Beverly Hills Cop 2 was only really huge in the Netherlands, while the USA's Billboard Top 100 and European Top 100 embraced Will Smith's parping ante-millennial Wild Wild West from the cinematic wet fart of the same name. The difference to note in Daughter of course is in versions, and version is as much context as a song being attached to a movie franchise. The solo original is slower, less dense in terms of instrumentation and production, and carries less of the rasping vocal of the later Maiden cover. Dickinson wails unsteadily in places and in general there's less of the thud and heft that Harris and McBrain would later add to the album version - the version that won the real gold. I definitely prefer the latter, but here's both for the sake of comparison...

Original:



Remake:



Daughter's other triumph is also in context - while missing out on the Christmas novelty slot by one week (no thanks, as the CD liner notes claim, to the likes of Radio One), it did oust Sir Cliff Richard's Saviour's Day (his 13th UK number one - unlucky!) from the spot. And that counts for something indeed. Speaking for myself I recall seeing the video and thinking it cheesy, wondering why the over-reliance on old horror movie footage was there (another retro style from Maiden - little did I know then that this has been a tradition going back to Number of the Beast). It was catchy though - but I was over Maiden and had been for years. Why did they bother with such samey and kitschy material?

Thankfully my opinion wasn't king on the day. As has been seen increasingly over the years to the point of lampoon in Richard Curtis' Love, Actually and exercised as recently as last year in X-Factor v Rage Against the Machine the concept of the Christmas Number One is kind of a big deal in the UK. Presence there is as good as media coverage can get - even in 1991, and particularly if Maiden's sneering contempt of the influential likes of Radio One could be taken to have been genuinely mutual. A lightweight single, sure, perhaps teetering dangerously toward self-parody. Shame it couldn't have been a stronger single, but for its secular-cum-occult cheerleading over God bothering earnestness, and because it's for Christmas, it's a thumbs up.

It even got them back in the NME. Who'd have thought it?

Video Affects - Shriekback Nemesis (1985)

A rare example of "I know where I was when I first saw this" applied to music videos, my first encounter with Shriekback's Nemesis took place at the house of my friend Derek, during the holidays near the end of 1985. We had been watching his music videos, particularly those of Sting, whom we both were into at the time, and Derek remembered that he'd videoed (ahh, nostalgia) the previous night's Radio With Pictures. So it was obviously a Monday. Probably the first Monday of the summer holidays, a gloriously languid and sun-drenched day as they all were at the time, the air buzzing with wildlife and the footpath outside his parents' architecturally-designed home almost ticking in the heat. I digress. We fast-forwarded idly through the videos - was ZZ Tops' Legs in among them? Unlikely. How about Neil Young's This Bud's For You? Possibly. But the last clip of the night, the last episode of RWP for the year, was reserved for presenter Karen Hay's favourite video of the year, and it was Nemesis. After a few blasts of Synchronicity II we definitely favoured Shriekback's offering in the end, and must have played it until we could remember the whole thing (although it would take years before I could decipher its bizarre lyrics.)

Nemesis represented a curious and infectious collision of worlds in our heads; though I speak for both me and my friend we were very much alike in interests and obsessions. With shaven-headed singer Barry Andrews purring his way through a melange of odd images, looking for all the world like Robin of Sherwood's latter-day villain Gulnar, the clip promised more - a Bacchanalean feast, weird masks of wood and feathers, black glassy eels and most thrilling of all, the Arch-Deviant himself, Pat Mills' comic creation Nemesis the Warlock as a slow-mo phantom swathed in red mist. Shriekback's lyrics are, it turned out, nonsensical, but contained wonderfully arch vocal triggers that caught our young ears - "In the jungle of the senses/Tinkerbell and Jack the Ripper"..."We drink elixirs that we refine/from the juices of the dying"…"Call in the airstrike/with the poison kiss". The music itself is harsher than the band's earlier, dreamlike and more avant garde efforts, with guitars and real drums to the forefront, and Sarah and Wendy Partridge's shrill screamed vocals matching the synthetic strings during the choruses. That it makes no sense either visually or lyrically has opened the song up to various interpretations - is it about the comic strip? Probably not. Is it about mankind's destructive urge? Maybe. Is it about the postulated 'death star'? Some (not me) think so. It doesn't matter though, Nemesis is three minutes and forty-three seconds of sensoral wonder set adrift in the mid-Eighties and in one moment changed my musical tastes from pop to something more askew (ironically, its parent album Oil and Gold is regarded as Shriekback's most commercially succesful). I returned briefly to Sting and the Police, but never let go of Shriekback and still have three of their albums in my permanent collection. And every time I hear Nemesis I return to that day when my mind met something quite recognisable and alien at the same time.

Video Affects - Joan Jett: I Love Rock n Roll, 1982

At age eleven my music idols are still to really appear. I 'follow' the chart show Ready to Roll along with my older siblings and note the current top ten as it changes over the weeks and months. Over 1981 ex-Runaways singer Joan Jett records this, a cover of the Arrows' original from 1975 with her new band the Blackhearts. In 1982 it reaches New Zealand and it is h-u-g-e. Well, that's the way I remember it, and Wikipedia and the RIANZ website won't tell me any different. It's probably not important, because what this does signify to me is that in the short space of a year my music appreciation has shifted from casual TV chart show viewing and likely acquiescence with my siblings'/parents' tastes through to noticing the tastes of my peers and other adults of significance. My intermediate teacher Miss Watson brought along her new purchase to school and had us write a poem about her favourite track on it. Within a fortnight I had followed suit and bought my first grown-up record, Queen's Greatest Hits but to this day I still ponder the wisdom of setting such a lofty assignment to a class of eleven year olds, based around the themes and lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody (true story!)

I Love Rock n Roll is quite a different song, however. Despite it being roughly the same age as Rhapsody its impact, delivery and video (having made a similar impression on the new new MTV) mean the song will be sung in playgrounds, along with the radio, at school camp and, most crucially, at my school social that year. Which underlines my other discovery of that year, really - girls. The obstacle I have with Rock n Roll is ironic then, in that it's sung by a 'girl'. But no sort of girl I'd see at school, that Ms Jett; and I'd not use that title - the epithet 'Ms' being viewed by my parents as a little suspicious and feminist-sounding. Jett is quite the antithesis of a pop starlet in the song and the video, scowling and sneering her way through the verses, roaring the 'Yaaow!" bits that the all-male Arrows had left to their guitars. The Blackhearts' guitars, for what it's worth, are the stronger in this too - heavier at the bottom and with a great solo. It's not hard to see why the song took on a new lease of life with Jett and is largely regarded as her composition. It was revolutionary to me - the video (the version here starts with a snippet of Runaways hit Bad Reputation) was in black and white, though not originally, as seen in the first version (in colour!) and Jett's onscreen attitude is all balls - leather jacket, spiked hair, getting in the spaces and faces of the young dudes at the bar, on which she'll later dance in a very non-Coyote Ugly way. To the girls in my class this was probably enormously exciting too - a cool chick miles from the sweet and squeaky clean fare we'd had 'til then - the Tina Crosses, Nolan Sisters and Sheena Eastons. This song, its opening line a neat inversion of The Beatles' I Saw Her Standing There (the Arrows had written it intending to address The Stones' It's Only Rock and Roll) is a deliberate role reversal. In my innocence I hadn't concieved that a girl could sing, behave and look like that. But Jett did and she was inescapable, and I soon happily saw the error of my ways, singing it at the top of my still small voice with all my classmates later that year at my school social.

And nearly thirty years on it's still a great song. Jett and the Runaways are experiencing something of a revival at the moment with a forthcoming biopic in production (Jett to be played by Kristen Stewart). A couple of weeks ago she and the Blackhearts made an appearance, looking and sounding in fine form performing Bad Reputation live on Letterman.

Video Affects - Billy Idol: Hot In The City, 1982

In 1981 William 'Billy Idol' Broad of defunct latterday UK punk act Generation X crossed the Atlantic to carve out a new career as a solo artist. He took with him a version of the band's earlier song Dancing With Myself and an image carefully combining the sneer of Presley, the patois of Iggy, the hair of Sid Vicious and the bleach of Sting. The music was as carefully pruned - Dancing, with its 4/4 beat and "whoah-oh" rejoinders could have been a longer, more commercially-lucrative Ramones track, the guitar work of Steve Stevens was an essential element in hardening an instrumental approach that owed as much to synthesisers, and yet with Hot In The City there's a look back in its pretence of earlier rhythmic trappings, and the inclusion of female backing singers (not an obvious punk ingredient) adds to this. The song's beat isn't dissimilar to Springsteen's Hungry Heart, two years older and also checking the rear vision mirror with its influences. Where Hot differs is the then ultra modern 80s punk look of its singer and the video tailored for the song.



This is the earlier version of two - the second, with a mock crucifixion (Idol being as willing to adopt the cross and rosary that the likes of Prince and Madonna would make emblematic) fell foul of MTV and was censored, but no matter - it's this version that made the impact on me. A girl walks into a record store, sees Idol's single sleeve which (with the aid of a not that convincing vis-mix) morphs into the man himself, and the song begins, Idol's face burned and overexposed with some rudimentary post-production, and some appropriate explosive images key in the background to denote - y'know, hotness and all that. If you've seen the video and on the evidence of my previous post you can probably guess the rest - some of said images are of atom bomb tests with the required infernal mushroom clouds, disintegrating model towns and burning living trees. Striking stuff; arresting images, and though I’d have had to recognise them for what they were I'm convinced that this is the first time I saw those now-ubiquitous film sequences. They freaked the hell out of me given that I was twelve and starting to notice the wider world around me.

The images after twenty years plus perhaps another thirty to forty don't carry the weight they must have back in their day or mine. The regularity with which they've been used counts towards that, as well as their replacement by other, more recent images - I can probably name videos which have include Kennedy's assassination and the destruction of the World Trade Center, for example, but those examples as much as this have affected me in the idle (sorry) way that documented historical footage and images can be adopted in the name of popular entertainment - in the case of Hot the images are in the background, 'filler' rather than focus, simply there to neatly underline a suggestive lyric. But it never left me that on seeing them at the time and some time afterwards their appropriation seemed somehow wrong - this was weapons testing, a show of strength and power and utter annihilation backing a song about feeling a bit 'restless'? Very punk and confrontational, I suppose, though not quite swastika armbands on Bill Grundy's Today show. But then even to twelve year old me Billy Idol wasn't punk, he was pop, and the visual collision of those two worlds shook me and scared me.

Mind you, for what it was worth, Idol's first couple of albums aren't bad, but that third one was a stinker.