It’s A Devilish Video You Deserve Today…
We know you hate Mondays. We all do.
Sorry Mondays, but it’s true.
And so, every Monday, we give you a music video. A fun, funny music video. Something that’ll make you smile, make you laugh, make you reminisce, and make you realize that back in the day, music video creators were probably either insane or heavily intoxicated. But were also incredibly entertaining.
We call this feature, The Video You Deserve, and you can find it every Monday on your site for fun, free entertainment and features, QuadCities.com.
And today’s video is one which shows you just how far music videos have come.
It’s a common misconception that music videos weren’t invented until the 1980s. In actuality, bands had been making conceptual videos to accompany songs (not including just video of live performances) going back to the ’60s, as acts like the Beatles and Bob Dylan put together videos for songs like “Strawberry Fields Forever” that were actually pretty cool. David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” was an awesome clip, as was George Harrison’s surreal “Crackerbox Palace,” which was shown on an early episode of “Saturday Night Live.”
But the imagination and strangeness of those very early videos was superseded in the late ’70s by clips which meant to take advantage of new technological advances in the medium, to make the videos look “hip” and “cool,” but which now look “very dated.” For a few years in the late ’70s, until the advent of the MTV age in 1980-81 when awesome new vids like “Cars” by Gary Numan, “Planet Earth” by Duran Duran and “Don’t You Want Me” by the Human League began to show a new vibrant imagination and creativity, many of the music videos were cokey enterprises in star wipes and other “new, cutting edge video tech.”
Consider our Video You Deserve today, by the man called “the British Elvis.”
Cliff Richard had been having hits in Britain since he burst onto the scene in the ’50s with his band The Shadows. Richard was actually one of the first ever rock stars in the UK, and to this day is still the third most successful rock act in Britain behind Elvis and the Beatles. The guy was tremendously huge in Great Britain, as well as various spots across the world like Australia.
However, in America, he only had a very brief window of huge success. From about 1976-1981, Richard scored all of his about a dozen top 40 hits, with many of them being huge smashes, top 10 hits like “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” “Dreamin” and “Suddenly,” which still show up today on the playlists of radio stations you hear in your dentist’s office.
But his biggest hit was one with an incredibly cheesy video, and, quite frankly, some incredibly cheesy lyrics. It was a massive smash worldwide, and still gets a lot of airplay on US easy listening stations for its “devilish” lyrics.
Of course, I’m talking about “Devil Woman,” which features Cliff Richard’s amazing green sweater (quite stylish for a late ’70s rock star, I guess) and some of that cutting edge video technology of the late ’70s.
And here it is, your Video You Deserve…
