I usually wouldn’t ever consider sharing a Pink Floyd video, despite enjoying some of their music. Roger Waters is simply too odious a figure for me not to feel conflicted about sharing any video that he was involved with. Fortunately, Waters wasn’t involved with Learning to Fly, which was the first video that Pink Floyd released after Waters left the band and David Gilmour took over.
In fact, the song is almost a middle finger directed at Waters. Waters claimed that Pink Floyd was moving too far away from being about the music and expanding minds so what did GIlmour do? He composed a song about how much he enjoyed flying his private airplane. Oh, I know that a lot of people will tell you that this song is also about Gilmour learning how to lead the band in Waters’s absence but come on. We all know that it’s ultimately about David Gilmour having his own plane while you don’t.
The video, which features a Native American shaman and a man turning into an eagle after jumping off a cliff, is just pretentious enough to fit in with the Pink Floyd’s work during the Waters era.
For those of you in an area that celebrates Daylight Savings Time, remember to make sure your clocks are set back an hour.
This is the last of the Thorgerson/Kershaw music videos that I can find. It also means that along with The Riddle, Wouldn’t It Be Good, and Wide Boy, we’ve done all the songs that Kershaw performed at Live Aid.
I have never read Don Quixote or even come close by seeing Man Of La Mancha, so I can’t really speak to what it has to do with it beyond a few things like the tilting at windmills bit. But that’s something that has become a saying independent of the book. He’s asking Don Quixote, among other things, if we are seeing imaginary enemies. This song is from 1985.
If you read the lyrics while watching the video, then you can see what they were going for with this. Especially tying television to delusional thinking about ourselves and our actions. After reading a couple sentences from the Wikipedia article on Don Quixote, I can see why that is the name of the song and the person the song is addressed to.
I would love to know who that is at the beginning of the video. My best guess is that it’s supposed to be Salvador Dali since he did at least one painting based on Don Quixote. That would explain the inclusion of the clock too.
I’m not sure what the dancers are there for, but I’m willing to bet that’s a Man Of La Mancha connection.
It has come to an end. When I started this “30 Days Of Surrealism” thing, I really had one video in mind. This is that video. Nik Kershaw breaking into someplace, and getting pushed down into a giant question mark by The Riddler with nothing but surreal things around him as he tries to make his way to the end of it.
I could walk through the video pointing things out, but I don’t need to. Kershaw himself does that in the video below. It seems to be a truncated version of something where he did the whole video. It’s stil pretty good, and he talks about the song as well. The video should be there. It is just one of those that doesn’t want to show its thumbnail for some reason.
Most of the things in the video are easy to spot after a couple of watches. There is one that took me many viewings to spot. The teapot with multiple spouts. The first time you see it, it appears to only have one of them.
But when he passes by it, you can clearly see that there are two of them.
I wonder if it is covered up the first time or if they switched out the pots. I wouldn’t be surprised if they switched them. Maybe The Riddler did it.
Enjoy the video, and keep your eyes pealed because there’s something everywhere. Even the words on the head that Kershaw runs his hands over.
From what I can tell, this is the first time Kershaw and Thorgerson made a music video together. They would end up doing at least four of them. It’s not often that you come across a music video where the Wikipedia article describes the whole thing in detail. I guess it makes it easier for me.
The music video for “Wouldn’t It Be Good”, directed by Storm Thorgerson, was released in 1984 and received heavy rotation on MTV, which helped the song reach No. 46 on the US charts. It used chroma key technology to achieve the alien suit’s special effects.
The video opens with two men talking, followed by heavy breathing. Nik Kershaw, wearing a vintage white suit, crosses in front of an antique car, carrying a briefcase. He enters ornate doors, and the music starts to play. Kershaw climbs stairs inside the building, enters a room and leans against the door. He opens his hand and lets a rock fall. His clothing and haircut transform, becoming 80s fashion, and the suit plays vague scenes. He crosses to a bank of equipment, adjusts dials and then looks out the window. He begins to sing. Sitting down, he presses buttons on a bulky remote, and more definite video scenes begin to play on his white clothing, showing people, shoes, grass, a satellite dish and other items that illustrate what he sings.
Kershaw opens French doors and exits to a balcony, leans against a column to sing. Below him, a vagrant has built a fire in a steel drum to keep warm. Kershaw goes back inside the room, and something lights the window. He takes a tube from his equipment, leaves the room. In the hallway, a woman is amazed at the scenes playing on his suit. He meets a little girl with ponytails, bumps into a man on the stairs, while scenes related to them play on the suit. Outside, he looks around, sees a woman walking a dog and the two men who opened the video. He falls in the street and a crowd gathers around him. He crawls away, manages to get up and run. The scenes on his suit have stopped playing now, and the crowd watches him run away. The white clothing stands out as he runs into darkness toward a horizon that is only faintly lighted. He sees the transmission from a satellite dish, runs toward it. He stops at the dish and dissolves into static.
Q: What did your parents think about you leaving halfway through your A-levels? A: I had one conversation with my father about it. He said: “Are you sure?” I replied yes and he just said: “All right then.” He knew I wanted to be in the music business and he himself was a frustrated architect working for the local council. He would have run away to the circus if he could. I ended up as a pop star and my brother ended up training dolphins.
The part about this song and others paying his kids way through school is more relevant, but I like that story. Yay, my father didn’t have a problem with me leaving mid-schooling. So, I ended up doing a music video where I was followed around a giant question mark by The Riddler and my brother went into training dolphins. I think I was also an alien who wore a bright white suit that was connected to a rock in another video.
I love his answer to the question about whether a “jetset lifestyle” came after his high period died down considering some people probably know him via Doc Hollywood:
No, I’m a country boy at heart and was never flash with money. I didn’t have a flash car until my mid-life crisis when I splashed out on a Porsche. I hate waste and hate having the p‑‑‑ taken out of me. That’s what happens when you have money: people take the p‑‑‑ out of the high fashion accessories and flash cars. I never felt the urge to go out and blow money.
I can also add that according to The London Salad, the video was shot inside the St. James’s Hotel. At the time it wasn’t in use, but it appears to be up and running again.
If you recognize the song, but not the video, then it’s probably because it was on the soundtrack for the movie Pretty In Pink (1986).
I wanted to hold off spotlighting a Nik Kershaw video for a bit, but I might as well polish off this surreal thing I started months ago with some of his videos.
I swear I must have heard this song as a kid. I just can’t find any evidence to support that memory. My best guess is that since I did watch Doc Hollywood (1991) a lot as a kid, even though Chesney Hawkes was the one to sing Kershaw’s The One And Only, I still recognize the style. That song was also used in a movie called Buddy’s Song. I haven’t seen the film yet, but this song seems to fit the plot summary on IMDb as well as that one:
Buddy is an aspiring teenager who is a very good musician and has pressure to go further than his Dad’s teddy boy rocker days. However when his father is sent away for a year for covering up for criminal Des it puts further strain on the family relationship. When Terry is released things get steadily harder while Buddy’s career gets rosier.
Like other Kershaw videos, it’s ambitious. The song doesn’t start till 2:20. Up till then, we see Kershaw sitting in an apartment drinking when we hear what sounds like the TARDIS before revealing a guy who appears to be there to claim his soul. I guess Kershaw’s character sold his soul to have overnight success we see in the rest of the video. At least that’s my interpretation of this version of the video, considering the chorus.
There’s a slightly different version posted below.
There is some change with the color, but the big difference is that it cuts out the beginning of the video and has an alternate ending. We see the doctors walk away and the video ends. In the other one, they pull the Nik Kershaw headshot away from their faces, and we see the man from the start of the video carrying Kershaw’s body before Kershaw fades into the ever growing pixels. I’m not sure why they changed it other than that people might be confused as to who he is if they had already edited out the start of the video for runtime.
And no, I didn’t pick out this song because it technically ties together yesterday’s post of a Huey Lewis & The News horror-themed music video with this one. The connection is that Roger Daltrey was in Buddy’s Song, and he and Huey would go on to be in .com for Murder (2002) together.
Thorgerson of album art fame directed this, and several other Kershaw videos.
Prolific art director and production designer Nigel Talamo was an art director on the video along with Caroline Greville-Morris who has also done a fair amount of work as an art director. She also worked on feature films as a production designer.
Can I milk Twin Peaks some more? I hope so, because I’m going to do 30 days of surreal–or at least weird–music videos. Twin Peaks being back on TV is totally the reason I’m doing this. It’s not just a flimsy excuse to do some videos I’ve wanted to do for awhile that share a similar quality.
You probably recognize the name of the director. That is thee Storm Thorgerson. If the name doesn’t sound familiar, then some of the album covers below should look familiar.
He also did the cover for the album this song is on called Bent Out Of Shape.
What you may not know is that he also directed around 50 music videos. I would love to know if mvdbase is accurate when it comes to the release date of this video. I say that because according to them, it first aired in August of 1983. If you’ve already listened to the music video, then you might of heard something that was new in 1983: dialog. According to mvdbase, Love Is A Battlefield by Pat Benatar aired in September of 1983, making this the first music video that used dialog. Then again, if the music video for Dead Ringer For Love by Meat Loaf & Cher did come out in 1981, as it appears it did, and wasn’t part of the 1981 movie Dead Ringer, then that one proceeds both of them by two years.
The last time I did a Rainbow music video, it was for Since You’ve Been Gone where I spent most of the time talking about the different covers of Roger Glover’s song that have been done over the years. I didn’t really talk too much about Rainbow.
Groups like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple are household names. The first is obvious, but if you need proof of the second one, then just watch 2016’s Hush, and you’ll notice that the female lead is wearing purple for the length of the movie. Hush being one of Deep Purple’s best songs. It was also used in I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). They may have also done something about smoke and water.
Rainbow is what I think of as a pet project for a bunch of heavy metal icons of the 70s and 80s. The group was created by Richie Blackmore after moving on from Deep Purple. He joined forces with Ronnie James Dio’s band Elf, and soon Rainbow was born with Dio fronting the group. He eventually left, and would take Ozzy Osbourne’s place fronting Black Sabbath. Then Graham Bonnet came in for a short period of time. This song was done with Joe Lynn Turner on vocals. He would front the group till their first break-up in 1984. You can think of him as the MTV-face for Rainbow. That amuses me since between Ronnie James Dio, Graham Bonnet, and Joe Lynn Turner, I would pick Bonnet in a heartbeat to usher my group into the age of music videos.
The video itself features a woman being locked in a room while her boyfriend gets hypnotized onto the sets of a music video. In the end, someone gets caught in the dreamworld. I’m not exactly sure who it is: the male lead or the psychiatrist. I wanna say it’s the second one, but the body moves so fast that I can’t tell. Also, as the boyfriend is freeing the woman, you can still hear water in the background.
My favorite part of this music video is what I have to imagine is an in-joke about music videos. One of the things the guy says is that the band he sees is always playing the same song. A surreal music video for a good song is like a repeating dream–except swap sleep for watching MTV and swap repeating for a video in heavy rotation.
There seems to be some disagreement between whether this aired on MTV in the first place. I’m inclined to believe that it did. Blackmore apparently said it was banned. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t ever aired. The reason this seems to be in dispute is that a Dr. Radecki said the following in a report on MTV for the National Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV):
“Street of Dreams” by Rainbow has a psychiatrist dominating a man through hypnosis intermixed with male-female violent fantasies including a bound and gagged woman.
Then again, based on the Wikipedia article on him, he doesn’t sound like the most reliable source on anything. However, he had to have seen it somewhere back when it would have come out. It’s kind of funny that about thirty years later, he would get arrested and sentenced for one to two decades for an opiates scandal. He appears to have had a checkered past in the field of medicine in general. In other words, it sounds like he sorta became the psychologist in the very video he chastised. It’s coming across weird stuff like this that helps to keep me motivated to continue doing these posts.
Anyways, enjoy the video! It is there. It’s just one of those videos that doesn’t like to show the thumbnail when you embed it.
Through the Shattered Lens 