The Chauffeur.

Gather around, children. I'd like to tell you a tale that goes all the way back to the early 1980s, when the "M" in MTV stood for a little something historians like to call "music." Five young lads in the faraway (well, not too faraway if you live there) land of Birmingham, England decided to form a pop band. Taking their cue from the 1968 Roger Vadim-directed cult film Barbarella, they named themselves after the character Doctor Durand-Durand (yes, they removed the lower-case "d"s), and a cultural juggernaut was born.


From the very beginning, Duran Duran knew they wanted to be at the forefront of the world of music videos, and they dove into it with energy and zeal. For their second album, the 100% enjoyable 1982 hit-fest Rio, they decided (along with noted Australian film director Russell Mulcahy - director of Aussie schlock horror flick Razorback) decided to record a video for just about every song on the album. So it was that Mulcahy directed the videos for "Lonely In Your Nightmare," "Rio," "Hungry Like The Wolf," "Save A Prayer," and "My Own Way," along with many other Duran Duran singles from their first four albums. (Hell, Simon le Bon almost got killed during the filming of the post-apocalyptic "Wild Boys!")


But one video from that album that will stick in my memory forever was one that wasn't filmed by Mulcahy. That track would be "The Chauffeur." Directed by British animator and film director Ian Emes (if you've ever seen Pink Floyd perform live, his animation plays behind the band), I think the video for "The Chauffeur" stands out not only as a fine accompaniment to one of Duran Duran's most atmospheric songs, but also as a brilliant piece of art. Yeah, I said it. A Brilliant Piece of Art.


For one, it's the only video that doesn't feature the band in it. (Also, "The Chauffeur" is the only song on the album that doesn't have the title in the lyrics). Shot in a sumptuous black-and-white sheen that brings to mind the photography of Anton Corbijn, Herb Ritts, and the fetishistic BDSM work of Helmut Newton, the short film follows two hauntingly beautiful women as they dress up in revealing lingerie and traverse the London night by car and by tunnel on their way to a hot lesbian encounter in a parking garage. Once there, they're met by a third woman, a female chauffeur in an open-busted corset, whose erotic dance was designed to emulate Charlotte Rampling's freaking hot dance of the seven veils in the 1974 film The Night Porter.


Everything in this video rings awesome. The cinematography is crisp and clear, the framing is artfully efficient, the pacing matches the song's quite well, and - let's face it - the actresses are stunning.


Just a friendly note, kids, that this video is definitely NSFW. And in case you've ever wondered about that rather sinister voice in the background of "The Chauffeur"'s final coda (a wonderfully intense aural experience in its own right) - it's not Simon le Bon saying those things. It's simply an old nature show, with the narrator intoning seriously about "insects in the grass." So now you know.
Enjoy, then, 1983's "The Chauffeur" from Rio. You'll be glad you did.

Duran Duran - The Chauffer (uncensored)
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Electro Classic Jukebox: Icehouse.

Even though I just finished working on this Icehouse essay on their debut album Flowers, it unfortunately got back-logged to the month of May, so some new readers might not get a chance to read it. However, there's always room for more Icehouse, so I'd like to share with you one of my favorite tracks of theirs.

Originally released in 1982 on the album Primitive Man, "Great Southern Land" was subsequently re-released in the United States in 1989 on the compilation album also known as Great Southern Land. It is also, to this day, the single most popular song from Icehouse's oeuvre. It was also featured in a really really really terrible Yahoo Serious film called Young Einstein. Have you seen this "film"? I truly and deeply love and respect Australia and its citizens (in fact, I've plans on moving there later this year), but seriously (haha) - their export of Yahoo Serious should be investigated by Interpol as one of the more atrocious international crimes ever committed. He is that unfunny.

But I digress. The song in question is quite good - filled to the brim with chunky guitar riffs, hypnotic drumming, spacey sound-effects, and a beautiful, soaring synth that nicely dove-tails the whole thing, coloring everything the shade of an Australian sunset (which are quite beautiful). Iva Davies' falsetto voice finishes things off nicely as he sings of his lovely island home and of how it's been ravaged over and over again ever since it was a "prison island."

Great Southern Land, Great Southern Land

You walk alone, like a primitive man

You walk alone with the ghosts of time

And they burned you black,

Yeah, they burned you black.

Anyway, with no further ado, here is Icehouse and the gorgeous desert-set video for "Great Southern Land." Just like with INXS' "Kiss The Dirt," there are fires in the desert at night! Sounds like a great party. Enjoy, my friends. And check out that awesome goanna!

It's Always Cold Inside The Icehouse...

... though the rivers never freeze."

Thus begins the first track off Sydney, Australia-based band Flowers' debut 1980 album, Icehouse. The track, also called "Icehouse," turned out to be quite the blessing in disguise - after Iva Davies and company released the album, they found out that there was already a Scottish band called The Flowers (don't you hate it when that happens?). So they renamed themselves Icehouse (named after a particularly drafty flat Iva had lived in that seemed to always be freezing), and the album is now known as Flowers. Got all that?

Formed in 1977, Flowers - wait, sorry, Icehouse - consisted of Iva Davies (a talented multi-instrumentalist, he was (and still is, I reckon) fluid with guitar, bass, keyboards and - get this - the oboe), Keith Welsh (bass), Michael Hoste (keyboards), and Don Brown (drums). They played the pub circuit in Sydney zealously, performing covers of their musical heroes, such as Bowie, T-Rex, and Roxy Music. After having amassed a rather large following, Brown was replaced on the drums by John Lloyd, the drummer for Paul Kelly and his band at the time, the Dots. Flowers got themselves signed to a record label, released a corker of a first album, changed their name to Icehouse, and proceeded to become one of the most popular Australian bands of their time.

After their tour promoting the new album, Icehouse unfortunately split up, relegating Iva Davies to recording the follow-up album, Primitive Man, largely on his own.

But I'm not going to talk about Icehouse post-Flowers (though I will probably do so sometime in the not so distant future). Instead, I'd like to focus on a couple of songs off of that legendary debut recording that, to this day, I still find to be absolute masterpieces.

Whoosh. Masterpieces. That's not necessarily a word that should just be thrown about like so much confetti. But I'd like to share with you, dear reader, two songs off of Icehouse - oops, I meant Flowers - that are stunning in their rousing melding of moody atmospherics, introspective lyrics, and general rocking-out-edness. (And yes, I know that is not a word. But I like it.)

First off, the song known as "Icehouse." It's always nice, I think, to hear a song that delivers on the promise of its title. Sure enough, the song itself is just so damn chilly and desolate, it almost makes me shiver when I listen to it. Beginning with just the faintest of cymbals tchk-tchk-tchking over a sinister synth loop, it grows in volume and stature as Davies' voice, mildly filtered through some sort of distorting mechanism, joins in and begins to tell the rather spooky tale of a young woman waiting and waiting and waiting for her true love to come to her - though it's bound to be quite a long wait indeed. Davies sings:

"And now she's dreaming of a new love

And she hopes he'll be there soon

She says she's got no time for winter nights

She doesn't notice as the days grow colder

She can't remember getting any older

There's no love inside the icehouse..."

It's a powerful song from start to finish - multi-layered and menacing, with just the right ratio of cold electronics and amped up guitar toward the end. Does our heroine find her new love? I don't think she does, and one thing "Icehouse" does perfectly is to convey her hopelessness through the music. We feel what she feels, and frankly it feels quite cold indeed. Longtime 80's video director Russell Mulcahy (whose bizarre 1980's monster flick Razorback was scored by Mr Davies) directed the video for "Icehouse," with his trademark slapdash imagery - and it rather works, I think. This is the director who also filmed Duran Duran's "Wild Boys" - see if you can spot any resemblance!

Second up is the rousing and rollicking track "Sister." Gosh, this is such a fun song to listen to! Imagine, if you will, a cyborg pieced together from the best bits of Icehouse's heroes that they used to cover in Sydney pubs back when they first started playing. You've got some Roxy Music in there; along with T. Rex, Bowie, and Ian Durie. There are a lot of influences coming through in "Sister," and the fact that the song itself reads as something of a science-fiction story doesn't hurt matters, either. Based around the conceit of a robot woman programmed to love and be loved, "Sister" is a blast, with its mixture of lyrics concerning flesh-and-blood relations and the clinical examples of the circuitry of a humanoid replicant. I find myself thinking of Darryl Hannah's "basic pleasure model" character from Blade Runner, Pris.

"Behind the scanners and tapes

She's programmed for perfection

But sometimes simple mistakes

Get by without detection

Her figures need correction!"

I wonder if the model Iva Davies is singing about is as dangerous as Pris! The music is fast, the keyboards are flawless and exciting, and it's probably the closest to punk that Icehouse ever got. Awesome track. Here is Davies and company performing it live in 1981. Enjoy, friends!