This song, produced by New York DJ Arthur Baker, was the first song that New Order ever recorded in New York. It was released as the follow-up to their breakthrough hit, Blue Monday.
The video was shot in New York City, primarily at a club called Funhouse. Director Charles Sturridge was a former actor who went on to work as a television and occasionally a film director. His best-known work is probably the original BBC adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.
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This song was supposedly written on a train ride from Philadelphia to New York City. Having played a killer show in Philly, the band was riding the train back home when they noticed some members of the crew were starting to fall asleep. To keep everyone awake, the Beastie Boys started to chant, “No sleep till Brooklyn!”
(The name of the song is also a play on the title of Motörhead’s No Sleep ’til Hammersmith.)
The song is one of the band’s signature tunes and the video features the Beastie Boys when they were young, rebellious, and didn’t care who they pissed off. The video parodied that type of glam rock (think Poison, for example) that was popular in 1987.
The video was directed by Adam Dubin and Ric Menello, who previously directed the video for (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party). Menello also plays the club owner who rejects the band at the start of the video.
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“We used to play the Hawaii 5-0 theme as a novelty cover version to start our shows. When we got bored we did this track instead, but the original recording was only 45 seconds long. We didn’t even think it would get on the album. Our record company boss heard it and got our producers to loop it. We still start every gig with it. We’ve tried other songs but that’s the one we always come back to. Cathal’s introduction is a clarion call.”
— Graham “Suggs” McPherson on One Step Beyond
One Step Beyond is actually a cover. The original version was done by Jamaican SKa singer Prince Buster. For Madness’s version, a spoken intro was provided by Chas Smash, who was not an official member of the band at the time but who would join a few weeks after the release of One Step Beyond.
The live performance that’s featured in this video was filmed at The Hope and Anchor, a pub in North London.
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Originally, I wanted to share the video for Kim Wilde’s cover of You Keep Me Hangin’ On but for some reason, it’s impossible to find a good upload of that video on YouTube.
So, instead, I went with the video for a less-known Kim Wilde cover, her version of Born To Be Wild. Born To Be Wild was written in 1968 by Mars Bonfire. Mars meant for it be a ballad but when Steppenwolf got their hands on it, they turned it into what has been described as being the first “heavy metal” song. Born To Be Wild was prominently featured in Easy Rider and it’s appeared in countless films since then. If someone is going to ride a motorcycle in a movie, chances are that Born To Be Wild is going to appear somewhere on the soundtrack.
I guess it was inevitable that Kim WIlde would eventually end up covering Born to be Wild. Kim Wilde was actually born Kim Smith but her father was a 1950s rock and roller who performed under the name Marty Wilde. (Marty was one of the first British rock and roll stars.) When Kim started her music career, she used her father’s stage surname so it can be argued that Kim was indeed born to be Wilde.
This video was directed by Phil Griffin, who has also done videos for Paul McCartney, Annie Lennox, Amy Winehouse, and a host of others.
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The Power by Snap! was the first rap-based single to hit number one in the UK, as well as being a hit in the United States. A lot of people got screwed over on the way to it achieving that honor.
First off, despite what many people undoubtedly thought when they first saw this video, neither rapper Turbo B nor singer Penny Ford were members of Snap! Instead, Snap! was the project of two German producers, Michael Münzing and Luca Anzilotti. Following the lead of the KLF, Snap! created songs by sampling other dance tracks and then hiring a singer to perform. In the case of The Power, they sampled rapper Chill Rob G’s Let The Words Flow while the famous “I’ve Got The Power” line comes from Jocelyn Brown’s Love’s Gonna Get You.
After first trying to hire Chaka Khan to perform on the track, The Snap! settled for Penny Ford, who was Chaka’s main backup singer. Ford flew out to the Germany and spent a few weeks recording her part of the song. She also improvised a few lyrics in order to get a songwriter credit and to ensure that she would get paid for her contribution.
Not getting paid for their contributions were both Chill Rob G and Jocelyn Brown. Brown wasn’t paid because, even though her vocal track was a key to the song’s success, she didn’t actually write the lyrics to Love’s Gonna Get You. Chill Rob G wasn’t paid because, unlike Snap!, he didn’t have a huge record company to back him up.
When the song became a hit in Europe, Chill Rob G recorded his own version for release in the United States. However, Snap! also recorded a version of the States but, instead of using Chill Rob G, they recruited a rapped named Turbo B. Turbo B performed not only Chill Rob G’s original rap but he also added “I will attack and you don’t want that.” Again, because Chill Rob G recorded an independent label while Snap! had Artisan backing them up, Snap’s version received considerably more promotion than Chill Rob G’s. For example, Snap! got a music video to help push their version up the charts.
Turbo B appears in the video. Penny Ford does not. Instead, a woman named Jackie Hayes was hired to lip-sync to Ford’s vocals. The video went into heavy rotation on MTV and the song became a huge hit, despite the fact that most listeners had no idea who was actually responsible for what they were hearing. Though Snap! didn’t have many hits beyond this song, The Power is still regularly heard whenever a film or a television show has to establish that it’s taking place in the 90s.
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Love and Rockets is definitely one of those 80s bands that should have been bigger than they were. Basically made up of every member of Bauhaus except for Peter Murphy, Love and Rockets was responsible for some of the best songs of the decade.
No New Tales To Tell is from their third studio album, Earth, Sun, Moon. Thanks to this music video, which was put in heavy rotation on MTV, the song did manage to reach number 18 on the U.S. charts. The video was directed by the very prolific Tony van den Ende and it features a few shots of the band in their Bubblemen costumes. (The Bubblemen were a side project for several members of the band. They performed while dressed as friendly bees.)
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Through the Shattered Lens 