Robot Claw

One of the best shows on VH1 Classic is called ‘The Vault’, and we love it because it shows very obscure videos from obscure bands. Including, apparently Alphaville. So the other night I got to see, for the first time in my life, the video for The Jet Set

The third photo shows the line ‘Lets go to the moon’, which is a lyric from the song. Only those of you familiar with the song probably have never heard it, and I only know it from a live version. However, it turns out the single version of The Jet Set (or at least the version in the video) is significantly different from the album version, even to the point of containing new lyrics. I have seven different versions of the song on CD and yet I don’t own this one 🙁

Later in the same show we saw perhaps the worst music video in history:

All I know of Zebra I know from this video. For instance, the lead singer is a cheeseball:

The lead guitarist is fat and prone to doing a sort of weird, shuffling chicken dance:

And the band, no doubt in an attempt to stop viewers from turning off their TV and throwing it out the window in kneejerk reaction to the mind-boggling awesomeness of the song, sung entirely as it is in a falsetto that prompted KLS to comment that the lead must have had a ‘Helium supply built into his microphone’, has no compunction about inserting into their video (and I mean insert, since these sequences are completely separate from the shots of the band) some abso-frigging-lutely classic scenes of 80’s ultra-objectified video vixens:

And yes, she’s topless.

Seriously, this was capital-A Awful. Not just the video, but the song as well. Bad music, bad lyrics and bad delivery. And yet I feel strangely bad bagging on the band given the love people have for them based on the album reviews on amazon. Truly bad song/video, or just a snapshot of how times have changed since 1983? You be the judge…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 6:41 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.