This is off of their third album, Atlantis. From what I can tell, Maybe Tomorrow Maybe Tonight was the only single released off of Atlantis. It was a hit for the band, breaking into the top ten in both their native Netherlands and in Belgium. It only reached the 44th position in the German charts. Who knows why.
This video, like the majority of the music videos from the 70s, is a performance clip. Apparently, it was originally filmed for a Dutch television show.
Just Can’t Get Enough is about as upbeat of a song as you are ever going to get from Depeche Mode. That has a lot to do with the fact that it was written by Vince Clarke, who was a founding member of the band and who was considered to be the band’s leader until he left in November of 1981. While Clarke went on to become best known as a member of Erasure, Depeche Mode went in a harder, less pop-orientated direction, with Martin Gore eventually taking over Clarke’s role as the band’s main songwriter.
Just Can’t Get Enough was the third single from Depeche Mood’s debut album, Speak & Spell. The song was written as the punk scene was winding down and London club kids were looking for new music that wasn’t quite as aggressive and self-destructive. Just Can’t Get Enough was the first Depeche Mode song to become a top ten hit in the UK.
The video, which was directed by Clive Richardson, was the band’s first and it remains the only Depeche Mode video to feature Vince Clarke. The outdoor scenes were filmed at the Southbank Centre in London. Though the video did occasionally air on MTV, it wasn’t placed in the station’s regular rotation. In fact, MTV didn’t really embrace Depeche Mode’s videos until the release of Personal Jesus in 1989.
The year was 1986 and director John Hughes had a problem.
Test screenings for his latest film, Pretty in Pink, indicated that his target teen audience loved the film up until the final scene, which featured Molly Ringwald going to prom with her geeky best friend, Jon Cryer. Audiences booed when they saw Ringwald dancing with Cryer instead of with Andrew McCarthy. Realizing that he would have to refilm that entire final scene in order to give the audience what they wanted, Hughes also realized that he would need a new song to fit the mood.
As OMD’s Andy McCluskey later told Songfacts:
“We were delighted to be asked by John, and went to the set where Molly and John Cryer were shooting. Unfortunately, the original song that we wrote didn’t fit after they changed the whole ending. We had 2 days to write a new track at Larabee Studios in L.A. We worked until 4 a.m. writing a rough version and sent a motorbike to Paramount. John heard it, liked it, and our manager phoned us at 8 a.m. and told us to go back in and mix it. That’s how ‘If You Leave’ Happened! The song had to be 120 BPM cos that’s the tempo of ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me),‘ which is the track they actually shot the prom scene to. Unfortunately, the editor obviously had no sense of rhythm because they are all dancing out of time in the final film.”
The popularity of Pretty in Pink led to If You Leave becoming OMD’s biggest hit in the United States. As a band, OMD was always more popular in the UK than in the US. Interestingly enough, just as none of OMD’s UK hits were big in the U.S., If You Leave was not a hit in the UK.
The video is typically 80s, made up of footage of the band performing intercut with a few scenes from Pretty In Pink. About halfway through the video, the lead singer starts to knock out pieces of a pink wall, as if they’re showing Roger Walters that tearing down a wall isn’t anywhere near as difficult as he made it sound.
“It was a conversation between myself and the child within myself, but it was sparked by having a conversation with someone who was really young and around that time thought about God and those kinds of things, and just being really curious about it but hadn’t been taught to think a specific way. I just loved the innocence and honesty of having that conversation with someone who didn’t care either way how you would describe this or that – they were just curious.”
— Dishwalla’s JR Richards on Counting Blue Cars
If you were, for some reason, challenged to come up with the epitome of a generic 90s alternative band, that band would probably look a lot like Dishwalla and the song that they sang would probably sound a lot like Counting Blue Cars. That doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily bad song. It just means that both the band and the song definitely belong to a very specific era.
Counting Blue Cars may have been their only big hit but, for a period of time, it was inescapable. You could not turn on the radio without hearing that familiar chorus of Tell Me All Your Thoughts On God. The song also received attention because it described God as being female. According to Wikipedia and Songfacts, that made the song controversial. I can’t remember any controversy about it at all.
The video also feels like the epitome of a generic 90s alternative video. You would think that the video would at least feature a child asking questions or maybe a blue car but instead, it’s the band playing in some sort of new age trailer park. New age trailer parks were very popular in the 90s music videos.
What kind of weird child asks for all your thoughts on God?
I ain’t no hollaback girl …. I ain’t no hollaback girl ….
Oh wait, wrong Gwen Stafani song. This one’s Cool too, though. In fact, that’s the name of the song! It’s all about how Gwen used to date this guy but they broke up but they’re still cool, as in they’re still friends. In this video, Gwen proves just how cool she is by inviting her ex and his now lover to her Italian villa.
This video was filmed at Lake Como, Italy and the main reason I like it is because I like Italy and watching a video like this reminds me of how much I want to go back and visit Italy. That was kind of the plan for the second half of this year but then the COVID-19 panic hit and upended everything.
By the way, are we still doing the quarantine thing? It’s hard to keep track. I know that two weeks ago, people were threatening to throw me up against the wall for wanting to go outside. Now, they want to do the same thing because I don’t want to go out. Personally, I just want to know that I can safely travel to Italy.
Anyway, enjoy this video and hopefully, we’ll all get to travel again at some point in the near future!
It occurred to me that I have yet to congratulate Elon Musk and Grimes on the birth of little X Æ A-Xii. It’s interesting to note that Elon and Grimes first discovered each other on twitter, where they independently came up with the same pun. Personally, my favorite pun has always been, “If it’s not baroque, don’t fix it.”
This video features Olivia Krash covering one of my favorite songs, Big Data’s Dangerous!
Covers are always interesting. I like covers when they bring something new to the song and I think that Olivia Krash definitely does that with her version of Dangerous. Her version is a bit less paranoid than the original version that was performed by Big Data and Joywave. It takes an anthem to suspicion and turns it into a party song and there’s nothing wrong with that. In the future, all parties will be paranoid. Really, they already should be. I remember there was a Brinks Home Security commercial that featured a woman throwing a house warming party and discovering, to her surprise, that she didn’t know one of the guests. His name was AJ and later, he broke into her house. If she had been properly paranoid, she would have said, “Hey, what’s the stranger doing at my party!?” Instead, she was just like, “Who’s that? I don’t know him! Ha ha!” It’s not so funny once you’ve got a broken window that you’re going to have to pay to get repaired, is it?
My least favorite covers, by the way, are the ones that sound like duplicates of the original. I mean, what’s the point? I’m also not a fan of extremely overdramatic cover versions. For instance, there used to be a WGU commercial that featured the most over-the-top version of The Times They Are A Changing that I had ever heard and it was so terrible that I always had to hit mute whenever I came across that commercial. I’m also not a huge fan of the song Amazing Grace, largely because everyone who sings it always seems like they’re on the verge of tears and that’s just not fun to watch. Plus, I just take issue with any song that requires me to describe myself as being a wretch. I mean, I like songs that make me feel confident, y’know? Calling myself a wretch would be the exact opposite of that.
Through the Shattered Lens