Rob Halford has said that this song is about “freedom.” Once you are on the highway, you can go anywhere you want. With it being Labor Day weekend, a lot of people are going to be taking advantage of that freedom today.
This video was one of the man to be directed by Julien Temple. Temple will probably always be best known for his work with the Sex Pistols.
Enjoy!
Adam In Chains was the third single to be released from Billy Idol’s controversial Cyberpunk album. Billy Idol predicted the future with Cyberpunk, though no one appreciated it at the time. In interviews, Idol said he was inspired by the work of William Gibson while also admitting he had never read anything written by Gibson.
The video was directed by Julien Temple, who is best-known for his work with the Sex Pistols.
This song and video were both a part of Duran Duran’s early 90s comeback. Backing vocalist Tessa Niles is both heard in the song and seen in the video as she struggles to escape from the underwater chains that bind her. The majority of this video was shot in Los Angeles but the giant aquarium scenes were filmed at the London Zoo.
Director Julien Temple needs no introduction. He is, of course, best known for his work with the Sex Pistols.
Enjoy!
One it comes to one-hit wonders, there really aren’t many that hold up as well as Come On Eileen. In a year dominated by Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Come On Eileen managed to take first place on the Billboard 100, displacing Billie Jean before then being displaced itself by Beat It.
The music video of Come On Eileen was filmed in the inner south London district of Elephant and Castle in the vicinity of the corner of Brook Drive and Hayles Street, then known as Austral Street and Holyoak Road. Playing the role of Eileen was Máire Fahey, the sister of Bananarama’s Siobhan Fahey. “Poor old Johnnie Ray” appears as himself, via footage of him arriving at Heathrow Airport in 1954.
Director Julien Temple is perhaps best known for his association with the Sex Pistols, having directed both The Great Rock and Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury.
Enjoy!
You and me both, Priest, you and me both.
Rob Halford has said that this song is about “freedom.” Once you are on the highway, you can go anywhere you want. With it being Memorial Day weekend, a lot of people are going to be taking advantage of that freedom today.
This video was one of the man to be directed by Julien Temple. Temple will probably always be best known for his work with the Sex Pistols.
Enjoy!
The most interesting thing about this performance clip music video is that it was directed by Julien Temple. Temple was and still is best known for documenting the brief but memorable career of The Sex Pistols. He went on to direct two Sex Pistol films, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury.
Temple has directed music videos for just everyone who was anybody on the British rock scene: Sex Pistols (naturally), Depeche Mode, David Bowie, Rolling Stones, Duran Duran, Sade, and many others. He also directed the music video for Planet Texas, in which Kenny Rogers is abducted by aliens. The music industry brings together even the most unlikely of collaborators.
Enjoy!
Today is John Lydon’s 64th birthday so today’s music video of the day features him at his best.
For the record, John Lydon (or Johnny Rotten, as he was known when he was the Sex Pistols’s lead singer) is not an anarchist. The famous lyrics that start off Anarchy in the U.K, came about because “I am an anarchiste” was the best rhyme that Lydon could come up with for “I am an Antichrist.” Lydon has described anarchism as being “mind games for the middle class.” Lydon’s right, of course.
Remarkable, John Lydon has gone from being regarded as a symbol of everything that was wrong with British youth (a representation of what the Daily Mail famously called “The Filth and the Fury” after drummer Paul Cook called Simon Grundy a “fucking rotter” on national television) to being a national treasure. Songs that once scandalized Britain are now unofficial anthems and, remarkably, Lydon’s gone from hated to beloved without changing a thing about his outlook or even his attitude. Listening to an interview with Lydon from the Sex Pistols-era is not that much different from listening to an interview that Lydon may have given last month. He may now be doing butter commercials and appearing on I’m A Celebrity! Get Me Out Of Here! but he remains that same Johnny Rotten who once scared the Hell out of anyone with a pension.
Enjoy!
It doesn’t matter how many times I watch this music video. The headbangers in front of the wall will always be funny to me.
According to Wikipedia, this was filmed in London during January of 1984. I’m not sure if that meant in a studio or not because if you look carefully at the left-hand side at the beginning, you’ll see what looks like car headlights going past. Maybe they did film this outside. That really is lead-singer Udo Dirkschneider riding the wrecking ball. Here’s a quote from him about it taken from Songfacts:
“It was very cold in London, near the airport,” Udo told us. “It was very cold, and especially when I had to step on this wrecking ball. That was something else. I said, ‘Please, no, I don’t want to do this!’ But in the end, I was young, so I said, ‘Okay, here we go.’ But it was freezing like hell.”
It would explain what looks like rain on the lens near the end of the video. There also appears to be wind since it does knock over something onstage and you can see their hair blowing to the right. It could be simulated, but given the quote from Dirkschneider, I’m not sure.
If you’re curious, and the video wasn’t clear about it, here is a quote from guitarist Wolf Hoffmann about the meaning of the song:
“We’ve always been interested in politics and in human rights and things like that, so a lot of the lyrics that we had in those days, and to the end actually, were dealing with human rights, for instance, and that’s really what ‘Balls To The Wall’ is all about. ‘One day the tortured will stand up and kick some ass!'”
In other words, it’s their version of We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister. Makes sense that Julien Temple directed this video seeing as he also did Breaking The Law for Judas Priest. It would be fun to go through a retrospective of Julien Temple’s music videos. You wanna see him do ABC? You can. How about some Stray Cats? Yep! Dexy’s Midnight Runners? Absolutely. Sade? No problem. Kenny Rogers? Of course. Janet Jackson? Sure! It goes on and on. In the meantime, enjoy this video.
I normally don’t talk about the thumbnail used on a video. However, It would be perfectly natural for someone to look at that thumbnail and think they are about to watch a music video remake of Casablanca (1942) with Martin Fry playing Bogart. It’s not too far off. I would add that it also seems to take place in a lost Rainer Werner Fassbinder film.
When I watch this music video I get the distinct feeling that I am missing previous chapters in this story of three different guys that become enraptured with the same woman. This also isn’t too far off. I haven’t listened to the whole album, called The Lexicon of Love, but I know enough to say that I am kind of missing other installments in this tale. Wikipedia tells me that while it is not a concept album, it does have repeated themes that revolve around heartache. This also makes sense seeing as several of the songs off of the album have names like The Look of Love, All of My Heart, and Valentine’s Day. A longform music video was even made called Mantrap. Still, you don’t have to have heard the whole album, or have seen the other music videos that were made for songs on the album in order to enjoy this one.
I mentioned before that there are three different characters who try to get the same woman, but I have to admit that I thought they were the same person till I read the Wikipedia article on the song. It comes across as a guy spotting a woman that he knew while watching a play, disguising himself as a singing telegram to confront her backstage, and then she comes to his nightclub where he confronts her again, only to be literally reduced to a little nothing in her life. I have no doubt that these are supposed to be three different people. I also believe that they had Martin Fry play all of them for a reason. It seems to me that the music video visually hints to the audience that the three different characters come from the same place while the song itself has all three men singing the same song that asks her to shoot the “poison arrow” to their heart. The combination of the two binds them visually and audibly. I’m not sure about the beginning and the end. I could guess, but I’ll just leave that to you. I could be completely wrong about the whole thing.
In the end, it doesn’t matter that much. It is one of the best music videos of the era whether you get exactly what they were going for or not. Director Julien Temple did an excellent job here. It’s no wonder he has done more than a hundred of them. It’s also not a surprise that when ABC decided to make a return recently, they brought Julien Temple back to direct their new music video.
As is often the case, I come to the end of one of these posts, and just as I am ready to leave, I decide to do one more Google search only to find something else worth mentioning. Since I am stubborn, I often stick it at the end where/when I found out about it anyways. Does the woman look familiar? She didn’t to me, but it’s Lisa Vanderpump who would be in several other music videos–including one for Lady Gaga–and the TV Show, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Enjoy!
There’s so little to say about this music video that I’m surprised they even bothered. The only noteworthy thing I can see is the beginning where we have somebody–possibly Dave Holland–drumming sans drums. Other than that, I believe that with Dancing in the Dark by Bruce Springsteen, it is the only one I have done so far that is partially made up of a live performance rather than being lip-synced (according to mvdbase). It feels like they needed a promotional video for the song, so they took a filmed live version they had, and spliced it together with some footage they shot at another time. So, exactly how we got Dancing in the Dark, except I have a feeling it wasn’t planned in this case. But I could be wrong. According to Wikipedia, it was filmed at Sheffield City Hall.
It is the second music video directed by Julien Temple that I have spotlighted. He has worked in both music videos and other types of films. His music video output was quite large from the beginning of the 1980s till the mid-1990s. Then he seemed to drop off the face of the Earth in music videos except for one here and there. He did a bunch of music videos with the group ABC, so it’s no surprise that they brought him back this year for the music video of their comeback song Viva Love. Unfortunately, it has been blocked on YouTube in certain countries (including the United States).
Enjoy this quite unremarkable video for a fun Judas Priest party song.
Through the Shattered Lens 