There’s still a couple of pre-ABBA videos to knock off. This time Frida appears to have traveled to Hawaii to rehearse for the sailboat version of Knowing Me, Knowing You.
I love how one of the comments on this video says, “that was wierd”. No, it doesn’t truly get weird till you see Frida boxing with herself. That, and when you find out that One Night In Bangkok was written by Benny and Björn, along with Tim Rice.
I did Friday Night by The Darkness yesterday, so here’s the music video that I have no doubt they had in mind when making Friday Night.
If you recognize the director, then it is probably from Cyndi Lauper videos like Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.
If you recognize the woman who gets stranded with Huey, then you probably know her because she is married to Pierce Brosnan. That’s Keely Shaye Brosnan or Keely Shaye Smith depending on how she gets credited on something. She was also a correspondent on Unsolved Mysteries back in the 1990s.
If you recognize the name Susan R. Feldott, the production manager, then you must have been in the business.
If you recognize the shark, then these posts are useless. Yes, Edd Griles also directed the video for If This Is It by Huey Lewis & The News. That’s the music video where a Sand Shark goes after a family at the end. They were obviously making fun of that here.
I was sick most of yesterday. I needed a video at the last minute. Nothing fails to cheer me up like The Darkness. This one picks up after the video for I Believe In A Thing Called Love when their ZZ Top spaceship crash lands on every island of woman from every exploitation movie ever made–complete with a giant skull to reference Iron Maiden. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the shark is a reference to the one that stranded Huey Lewis on an island in the video for Stuck With You.
To my knowledge, this was not only the debut single for the band, but also their first music video. You might have noticed that is not Bon Scott. AC/DC’s first lead-singer was a guy named Dave Evans. He’s a good singer and clearly a good performer, but I can see why the band let him go. Despite attempts over the years to classify the band as “hard rock”, they have maintained that they are just rock ‘n roll. I see that when I watch Bon Scott and Brian Johnson. When I watch Dave Evans, I see Marc Bolan of T-Rex or a frontman for one of the Sunset Strip bands of the 1980s. He doesn’t quite fit. Of course this is all in retrospect. Still, that is the feeling I take away from this music video.
The music video was filmed for the show The Last Picture Show because clearly that big sign above them didn’t make that clear.
Going into doing these “music video of the day” posts, I never would have imagined that Alice Cooper, ABBA, AC/DC, and Hall & Oates would be trailblazers for the modern music video.
There’s still some pre-ABBA music videos to do. I need a break again. So why not take this time to do one of the weirdest videos from the 1970s that I am aware of? There’s a fair amount of information out there on this video, so I’ll just cover some of the basics and let you enjoy the video.
It was shot in 1973. According to at least one site, it was originally thought to have been shot in 1976.
John’s sister Diane made it for them.
The devil is played by the band’s tour manager, Randy Hoffman.
The girl is Sara Allen who had a longtime relationship with the duo that includes the song Sara Smile being about her.
Note when Daryl actually does lip-sync in the video. He really only does it when both he and John are singing together. That’s funny because while being one of the most successful duos of all-time, Hall really did the singing, and Oates the backup vocals. Sometimes they would do songs where they would sing together, but that is what you normally would hear in their songs. This became so much the formula for Hall & Oates that when they were inducted into the Rock ‘N Roll Hall Of Fame, John said that he is probably the most well-paid backup singer in music. However, jump back to 1973, and you have a video where Hall seems to have gone out of his way to make sure you see them as a duo.
That said, the best part is easily Daryl Hall’s give-no-fucks performance. That’s not to say that Oates does a bad job, but there is just something about Daryl’s dead-face staring at you that is amazing.
Here is some additional information from an interview Oates gave concerning the video:
[Oates:] Well, I’ll give you a little background about what happened with that “She’s Gone” thing. First of all, it was 1973. There was no MTV, there was no outlet for anything like this. You know, it might be one of the first music videos ever made. I really couldn’t say, honestly, but it definitely would be a contender. What happened was, we were asked to lip sync “She’s Gone” for a teenage TV dance show broadcast out of Atlantic City, New Jersey. And we really didn’t want to do that; we didn’t want to pretend to sing the song. It was supposed to be shot in a television studio in Philadelphia. So we thought, with the mindset that we were in at the time — and I won’t say more on that, either —
([Interviewer] Ryan is laughing again.)
[Oates:] We showed up at the television studio with a chair from our living room. The woman who’s walking through the picture — that’s Sarah…
[Ryan:] Oh, wow.
[Oates:] And the devil who comes through was our road manager at the time. And we brought Monopoly money, and those weird instruments, and they thought we were nuts. They really thought that. My sister directed that video.
[Ryan:] You’re kidding me.
[Oates:] They thought we were completely insane. They actually didn’t air it; they wouldn’t air it. But we had it this whole time, and eventually I leaked it out to the internet, ’cause I just thought the world should see it.
This time we have Björn hanging out at an amusement park with Agnetha looking less like she serves popcorn, and more like she’s ready to audition for Candy Stripe Nurses (1974). Why not? They did that bizarre video in the 1970s for When I Kissed The Teacher that made the whole band look like they belonged in one of those Schoolgirl Report movies from Germany. I don’t recommend watching them, but it is worth looking them up on IMDb for the really stupid subtitles like “What Keeps Parents Awake at Night” and “What Drives Parents to Despair”.
I thought I would jump to a pre-ABBA Frida video. This is a good decade before she would sing over music that might as well have been written by Ministry. Yep, that’s a thing that happens. Stop the video at twelve minutes and fifty seconds because it will go into another video.
Last year Kate Bush released a live album called Before The Dawn. As part of its release, she made this music video for the live version of the song And Dream Of Sheep, which was originally released back in 1985 on her album Hounds Of Love.
This time the description on the YouTube video does my job for me:
“This is a special piece of film to accompany the release of the live single ‘And Dream Of Sheep’. The vocal was performed live while filming Kate lying in the huge water tank at Pinewood Studios. This was to create a sense of realism, as the character in the song is lost at sea. However it became more realistic than Kate had imagined. She spent so long in the water during the first day of filming that she contracted mild hypothermia. She recovered after a day off and carried on filming. Everyone agreed it had added to the authenticity of the performance. This film was then projected onto a large oval screen which hung above the stage during the performances of her live show.”
Through the Shattered Lens 