If you’ve ever heard of Slade, then it’s likely because their songs Cum On Feel The Noize and Mama Weer All Crazee Now were covered by Quiet Riot and The Runaways. I’m not sure what led me to find them, but I’ve enjoyed their music ever since. I had no idea they made it out of the 1970s in order to have music videos like this one out there.
The reason we have it is that Quiet Riot’s cover re-popularized Cum On Feel The Noize. This created attention in America for their music. Thus, we got Run Runaway, among other songs, which did well in the States. And we got this video to go with it.
If the Wikipedia article on the band is to be believed, then they are cited as an influence on just about everyone from the late-70s onward. I can understand that. For me, they fall into the same category as Sweet–ahead of their time, underrated, and influential.
A music video was filmed to promote the single, which was directed by Tim Pope for GLO Productions and cost £16,000 to make. It was shot at Eastnor Castle in Ledbury, Herefordshire. In keeping with the song’s celtic/jig sound, the video featured the band performing the song in front of an audience dressed in tartan. Other sequences showed a marching bagpipe band and a kilted Scot grappling with a caber.
The video was a big success in America, where it reached the top of the playlist charts. Its constant showing on MTV helped “Run Runaway” become Slade’s biggest American hit. Despite its success, the band were disappointed that the video did not feature any direct shots of Powell. In a 1986 interview, Lea said that the band’s only requirement in their music videos is that each band member is featured, however in the “Run Runaway” video, Powell is only seen in the background. In a 1986 fan club opinion poll, fans voted the video was the band’s best music video.
In 2011, the coat guitarist Dave Hill wore in the video sold on eBay for £295. The seller had bought the coat many years ago from the Slade Fan Club where Hill auctioned off a few items to raise money to build a home recording studio.
The only thing I would add is that I like that it captures the goofiness of the band. I especially love the part near the end when the camera is looking up at them. You keep thinking it’s going to cut away from them, but it doesn’t. They just keep going.
I didn’t think there’d be much to say about this video other than that Mudhoney–much like Meat Puppets–are one of those groups that get brought up if you want to go further than just Nirvana and the other members of the Big Four. In fact, they go back to another group that is part of those bands that are important, but aren’t household names–Green River.
The only other thing I noticed was Krist Novoselic in the video.
I wasn’t even sure when this video was done.
Then I came across an article over on the A.V. Club’s website. I can’t say I’m a fan of that particular article even if Sean O’Neal did seem to be writing in a style to mirror the video and career of the band–which I do appreciate. It did provide me with some useful information though. Most notably that this video wasn’t done in 1998 as the video would suggest, not only by it claiming to be celebrating 10 years of grunge, but by also looking like a video I would expect from that era by a band such as Mudhoney.
This was apparently done in 1992. It’s a joke. You’ve got the band playing at the Admiral Benbow Inn in Seattle. It has the commemorative posters, and the viewer can enjoy both the song and energy of the performance. But it’s sad. That shot of Novoselic above gets that across quite nicely.
I didn’t grow up on this particular song. But there is a song I did grow up on that sums up what I read in the aforementioned article concerning the band and this video–We Are Not Going To Make It by The Presidents Of The United States Of America.
Peterson–like many music-video directors–is a photographer. His work has shown up in films such as 2015’s Cobain: Montage of Heck. Unfortunately, I can’t find any listings of music videos he’s done. He’s also written some books about the grunge scene. You can see some of his photographs on his website.
There’s one last thing I’d like to mention. Despite seeing the Sub Pop label all the time as a kid, I wouldn’t have recognized the founders of the label. Courtesy of the A.V. Club article, Bruce Pavitt is the one tending bar, and Jonathan Poneman is the one manning the door.
If you’re like me, then you learned about the Meat Puppets thanks to Nirvana’s cover versions of Plateau; Oh, Me; and Lake Of Fire from the album, MTV Unplugged in New York. Cobain even said their name during the concert. Also, the Kirkwood brothers were guest musicians during that performance.
Like numerous videos, I am guessing about the release date based on the release date of the album it was on–Forbidden Places. The band dates back to the early-80s, and saw a resurgence of popularity thanks to Nirvana. The songs Nirvana performed are from 1984’s Meat Puppets II. They are one of those bands that are brought up whenever you hear discussions about the groups that led to Nirvana, Soundgarden, and other bands of that sort.
Despite that this is the only video on the Meat Puppets Vevo channel, I can’t find any info on it.
It’s not a complex video. The only thing noteworthy is the editing that matches the machine-gun fired lyrics. I always like editing that matches the pace of the song. It draws you in without having to tell a story, but doesn’t simply point a camera at some people standing on a stage. Otherwise, it’s just them playing a catchy song inside of a building, and outside of it.
I decided to spotlight it because it has been my queue for a while, and I love the quick delivery.
However, I can’t find anything specific to this video. I’m guessing that it came out in 1980 because that’s when the single was released. I think the director might be Chuck Statler since he worked with Iris on several other videos, but I can’t find anything to make me feel comfortable enough to include his name in the title.
There’s the usual nonsense in the YouTube comment section. I only look on a video like this because once in a blue moon there’s something useful about the video. There wasn’t anything this time. The closest I came across was speculation about the identity of the woman in the video.
Michael Stipe: Robert Longo was one of the premier painters coming out of New York. We wanted to upset the visual language of videos, and that’s what we got with “The One I Love.” He was referencing Renaissance paintings, rather than Madonna. I saw the video he did for New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle”–he interrupts it about two-thirds of the way through with a scene out of a movie, where a woman stands up at a table and says, “I refuse to believe in reincarnation, because I will not come back as a bug or an insect,” a guy goes, “Well you’re a real up person,” and then it slam-cuts back into the song. I don’t think anyone had ever interrupted a song, cut to something, and then cut back to the song.
That’s quite the memory Stipe has. He still misquoted the video, but he was really close. That part actually goes like this:
“I don’t believe in reincarnation because I refuse to come back as a bug or as a rabbit.”
“You know, you’re a real ‘up’ person.”
I can’t find out who the third person in the room is, but the other two are well-known.
The first is Jodi Long. She’s been in a bunch stuff, and is still acting today. She was in Paul Schrader’s Patty Hearst (1988), which Lisa reviewed yesterday. I didn’t pick out this video to go with that review. I didn’t know till I went to write this that there was even a record of who these two people are.
The second is E. Max Frye. He has done numerous things over the years. You probably know him best as co-writing the screenplay for Foxcatcher (2014), which earned him an Oscar nomination.
Stipe says that this part is from a movie. From what I’ve read in other articles, that part was shot for this video. If this was a film, it is still undocumented on IMDb. The only time I can find on IMDb where Long and Frye worked together was on the film, Amos & Andrew (1993). That film was written and directed by Frye.
For the video for “Bizarre Love Triangle,” released in November of 1986, New Order turned to New York-based director and visual artist Robert Longo, who claimed that the music of Joy Division and New Order were very influential on his work.
Longo would end up giving New Order a very experimental film as a promotional video, with fragmented vertiginous fast cuts, infused with color, which were then merged together visually competing ideas.
One of those ideas included men and women in business suits are seen falling through the air, something he’d based on his own set of lithographs called “Men in the Cities.”
Another of the other ideas Longo pursued was the use of visually appealing panels of Longo’s own art, which are then interrupted by a “bizarre love triangle,” a black and white melodrama scene with Asian actress Jodi Long and Oregon-based screenwriter and filmmaker E. Max Frye arguing emphatically about reincarnation.
They also go on to say that the shots of the band were filmed when they performed live “in the hills of Italy.”
Director Robert Longo appears to have made only one feature film. He directed Johnny Mnemonic (1995).
The video was produced by Michael Shamburg. Shamburg produced quite a few videos for New Order. He’s also has producer credits for a lot of well-known movies such as The Big Chill (1983), Reality Bites (1994), Gattaca (1997), Garden State (2004), and Django Unchained (2012).
According to Peter Hook of New Order in the book I Want My MTV:
We met Michael Shamburg when he filmed us playing in New York, and we gave him more or less complete artistic freedom to do our videos. Michael’s a big producer now–he did Pulp Fiction and Garden State–and he introduced us to interesting directors: Robert Longo, Kathryn Bigelow, Philippe Decouflé, Robert Frank, William Wegman, and Jonathan Demme.
We’re going back to New Zealand. This time it’s for a hit song by Sharon O’Neill called Maxine.
The video is about a prostitute named Maxine who is followed by a case worker played by O’Neill who is unable to help her. Maxine gets kidnapped and killed. O’Neill is there when they wheel her into the hospital dead. In the end, we see O’Neill lay a flower at what is supposed to be her grave before they crane the camera upward to reveal how large the graveyard is. Just like her case is #1352, her death is #???, and is lost in the crowd.
O’Neill said the following about the inspiration for the song in an interview with the NZ Herald in response to a question about why she moved to Australia:
The record company, CBS, wanted to see if they could break me in Australia so they sent me over with my Kiwi band which had Dave Dobbyn in it – he’ll josh me for saying that. We worked the pub scene five nights a week and really schlepped it.
I was living in a hotel in Kings Cross when I got the inspiration to write Maxine. She was always out there working at 3am when we’d get home bleary-eyed from a gig in Newcastle.
In that same interview, she added some info about the video in response to another question:
[Q] What do you think about the way women are portrayed in the music industry now?
[A] I find some of the videos really explicit. It’s got to the point where young girls think that’s the way it’s got to be. Back in the 1980s they wouldn’t screen the Maxine video till after 8pm because she goes into the toilets with a razor blade. You’ve got people gyrating like they’re having sex but you can’t show that because it’s drugs. I mean she’s a junkie, she dies. It’s a terribly sad story.
She’s right about the drugs part. I believe I mentioned back when I featured Twilight Zone by Golden Earring that it wasn’t just censored for the topless spy scene, but also for the couple of seconds where we see lead-singer Barry Hay injected by one of the dancers. The scene exists as a way of sending him back to the stage-dimension that may or may not be only in his mind. I wonder how they covered that up seeing as it is a key-scene. It’s not like When The Lady Smiles where they could just play some footage from earlier in the video over the parts that are still censored on YouTube today.
I’d say, enjoy, but this isn’t that kind of video.
Lisa recently spotlighted a music video for a Megadeth song called Hanger 18. In that post she mentioned that she didn’t really know much about them except that the song fit World UFO Day. Because of that, I feel I need to provide what little backstory I know about them.
When I was a kid I remember seeing the album Countdown To Extinction in the store. I remember it to this day–not because I was listening to them at the time, but because of that cover.
I saw that, and figured this band was not for me. I was a child at the time. I didn’t really get into heavy metal till I went to Cal in 2007. I knew some of the big bands, and had probably heard music they had done, but that was about it. The only band I remember having an album for in the 90s was Metallica. That’s fitting when discussing Megadeth because they are an unintentional spinoff of that group.
Lead-singer Dave Mustaine was the guitarist for Metallica until he was kicked out of the band in 1983. Metallica were well known for their heavy drinking. They were even nicknamed Alcohollica for awhile. The problem was apparently that while the rest of the band were funny drunks, Mustaine was a violent drunk. That was too much of a deadly combination, so they kicked Mustaine out of the group. Kirk Hammett would end up taking his place. To say that Mustaine was heart-broken. I remember an interview he gave close to twenty years later where it did, or nearly brought him to tears.
After Metallica, Mustaine would go on to form Megadeth. A couple of successful albums later, and they hit upon the one that featured the classic, Peace Sells. That song was so popular that according to Mustaine in the book I Want My MTV, MTV even stole part of it to use it in the theme for MTV News:
MTV scammed me. They never paid for using the bass line from “Peace Sells” as the MTV News theme. I wrote that music.
Several albums later, they released Countdown To Extinction. The album did well–I’m sure this amazing video didn’t hurt.
There are different stories floating around about the source of the song. If you go to Wikipedia, then you get this alleged quote from Mustaine:
I wrote that about myself. It was pointed out to me that I’m kind of schizophrenic and that I live inside my head. Which is something I don’t subscribe to, but I enjoyed the theory nonetheless.”, and “I think all of us are sweating bullets all the time. Society’s a joke right now, and people are getting more and more hostile. When you think about having an evil twin or schizophrenia, I think a lot of us are schizo, because we live inside our heads. There’s someone we all confer with; it’s called our conscience. Some people cannot control their other side; it takes them over. Everybody has that psychotic side. Everyone has a thing that will make them snap.
The problem is that if you actually follow the source cited for the quote, then it takes you to a page that no longer exists even though it was apparently retrieved on January, 23rd 2017.
Hop over to Songfacts and you get a bit of a different story.
Dave Mustaine has said that the song is about himself, and that he wrote it after “it was pointed out to me that I’m kind of schizophrenic and that I live inside my head.”
He revealed on VH1’s That Metal Show, however, that the song was inspired by a friend of his girlfriend (and later, his wife), Pam. This friend suffered from anxiety attacks – Mustaine called her “s–thouse crazy.” She would take Pam to a party, have an anxiety spell and leave her; Mustaine would get the call and have to pick her up.
After Mustaine wrote this song, Pam thought it was about her, but Dave assured her she was “not that crazy.” Said Mustaine, “I wrote this song about her nutty friend.”
The video is a perfect storm of concept, director, and cinematographer.
The video shows us Mustaine in a nightmarish mental health cell where we are taken into his brain by literally seeing multiple versions of himself talking and interacting with each other.
There are two parts that I particularly like.
The first part is when two Mustaines are harassing another from the sides while that one is holding what looks like a human heart before they all come into sync to say the lyric, “Mankind has got to know his limitations.”
The other part is when you see one Mustaine kicking another in the face who is sitting in a corner.
The director of the video is Wayne Isham. Isham has worked with everyone from Rod Stewart to The Spin Doctors to Faith Hill. He seems to have primarily worked with heavy metal bands that include both Metallica and Megadeath. He is credited with inventing the Bon Jovi video for Mötley Crüe–Home Sweet Home–and then giving it to Bon Jovi, who built their career on that style.
The cinematographer is none other than Daniel Pearl. Pearl is the man who has shot well over 400 music videos from the early 80s to today. You could probably write a whole book that is comprised of a series of interviews with him about each video he remembers working on, and you would have a mini-history of music videos from the MTV-era.
He has only helmed a couple of projects because he has stated that he’s perfectly happy with being a cinematographer. One of the few videos that he got behind the camera for was Butterfly by Mariah Carey. He has shot seventeen of her music videos. He has also worked on several feature films, including the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
That’s why I referred to this video as a perfect storm.
What was it Lisa said the other day about why the two of us pick out particular videos?
Now, there’s a variety different reasons why Val or I might pick a video for music video of the day. Sometimes, the choice is made as a way to honor an artist who has recently passed away. Sometimes, it’s done to commemorate a historical event. And sometimes, especially in my case, it’s just because the song’s chorus has gotten stuck in my head.
And sometimes a video gets picked solely for the purpose of telling a funny story one of us happens to come across. This one comes courtesy of the good old book, I Want My MTV. It’s from Steve Backer. Backer was a promotion executive for Epic Records.
We signed a band called Danger Danger. Just the worst of the fucking hair bands. They were dreadful. But our label president, Dave Glew, was obsessed with a song and a video of theirs, “Bang Bang.” I could get five videos onto MTV and it didn’t matter to him, because Danger Danger wasn’t in rotation. So he came up with this awful idea: The entire staff of Epic would put on hard hats–because hard hats symbolized danger, get it?–and walk to the MTV offices. I’m talking about the entire label. When the receptionist announced that Steve Backer had arrived for his 11 A.M. meeting, I’ve never been more mortified in my life. I still cringe when I think about it.
So naturally since his story mentions the video for the song Bang Bang, I’m spotlighting the video for their song Naughty Naughty. There’s a very good reason for that. Bang Bang is kind of catchy. It’s also a simple stage performance video. This one on the other hand is…how can I put it…um…what was that Jedadiah said the other day about that movie where a bird tries to Poe Sharon Stone?
Dumb. Just dumb.
Truer words were never spoken–or written in this case.
I do have a couple of things to add:
Why does this video start off with a Mr. Roboto voice followed by synthesizers from Trancers, and then caps it all off with humpback whale songs from Star Trek IV?
As dumb as this video is, you could get some enjoyment out of it by playing it over scenes from Rear Window.
This last one is the most important because I know it is the burning question on everyone’s mind right now. Is there a Danger Danger music video that features an ape on a motorcycle? Yes, there is. It’s just awful.
Yes, the song is great. I’ve enjoyed the songs I’ve heard by the New Zealand band Split Enz. That isn’t the reason I am featuring this video.
It’s because I’m pretty sure this is the earliest video I have encountered that was shot in only two takes. They used the same trick as Alfred Hitchcock did in Rope (1948). Near the end, when Neil Finn opens the door, they hid a cut. To quote former Split Enz bassist Mike Chun from his book Stranger Than Fiction: The Life and Times of Split Enz:
The film clip was shot in November in a disused Melbourne warehouse and was virtually a one-take clip.
I’m surprised they did two takes at all. I don’t see anything in the video that would have necessitated it.
We see Neil walk past Eddie Rayner on keyboards.
Then they hide the cut when the yellow door opens.
Neil walks for a little while.
Finally, Neil shows up in front of the rest of the band.
I would think that there was plenty of time for Rayner to run around the camera to take his position further on in Neil’s walk. You can even see what looks like Rayner checking to see if he is off-camera in order to know when to make his run to the next part of the set.
My best guess is that while the rest of the video has the camera looking very steady, it seems to switch to handheld in order to move in on the band. You can also see both the lack of a track for the camera in the final shots of the video, and the track it was presumedly on prior to the cut at the door.
If Neil looks familiar, that’s because he and drummer Paul Hester would go on to form Crowded House.
Split Enz had been around since the early 70s. It was founded by Neil’s older brother Tim and Phil Judd. They broke up shortly after this song came out.
The video was directed by band member, Noel Crombie. He not only appears to have directed all of their videos, but did things like hair, album covers, and was particularly notable for his costumes. To quote again from Mike Chun’s book:
Backstage, in readiness for the show, Mr. Crombie walked in with a bulky suit-carrier and pulled from it a selection of brightly colored suits. For the first time we looked upon a set of Crombie original costumes designed and sewn by the man himself. In wild, pastel colours, distorted shapes and angles, the suits stood before us as a symbol of the new era. They were quickly entitled (at times) ‘the Zoots’ or (at times) ‘the Twits’.
You can see those kind of costumes in the video for the song I See Red. There also appears to be a nod to them in the video for Don’t Dream It’s Over by Crowded House, which mimics this video.
ain’t no rest for the wicked/money don’t grow on trees
Hi everyone! Lisa here, filling in for our resident music video expert, Valerie.
Now, there’s a variety different reasons why Val or I might pick a video for music video of the day. Sometimes, the choice is made as a way to honor an artist who has recently passed away. Sometimes, it’s done to commemorate a historical event. And sometimes, especially in my case, it’s just because the song’s chorus has gotten stuck in my head.
For instance, take today’s music video of the day. Sunday morning, I was driving to the store and I turned on the radio and, just by chance, this was the song that was playing. Ever since, I’ve had Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked, Money Don’t Grow On Trees stuck in my head.
And really, the song has a point. Money doesn’t grow on trees.
Anyway, this video was directed by D.A.R.Y.L., which is the creative moniker of directors James Hall and Edward Lovelace.
Through the Shattered Lens 