Olivia's rock venture ranks as punk junk
NEW YORK (AP)
Evidently, when you get to be as big a name as Olivia Newton-John, a net-work like ABC will finance your ego trips and inflict them on America. Tonight’s “Olivia Newton-John: Let’s Get Physical” is a musical non-variety hour that will baffle all but her most fiercely loyal fans.
Miss Newton-John casts off her country-and-western refrain for a prurient, hard-rock motif that can best be described as punk junk. “These are the ’80s, and times change and people have to change with them,” Miss Newton-John explains at the beginning of the show.
It’s more revolution than an evolution, since Mins Newton-John says she’s never liked rock music before. Besides, her wispy voice doesn’t have the range for some of these numbers, and an hour of Olivia Newton-John and her fantasies, without any other acts, wears thin very quickly.
Ed Sullivan always understood the value of lots of acts for different tastes, and it seems strange that ABC wouldn’t book somebody else on the show just to hedge its bets.
It isn’t just that Miss Newton-John has gone heavy metal; it’s that she also turned her kittenish cooing, so prevalent in the movie “Grease,” into some kind of kinky sexuality.
This special is a series of bizarre, punk productions loosely constructed around Miss Newton John’s songs, most of them from her latest album, “Physical.” It’s totally her showcase, presenting her in more wardrobes than most people own in a lifetime.
There’s very little soft or emotional in the new album numbers. In the first two songs, “Landslide” and “Physical,” images punctuate the screen that will make you forget she once won a Grammy award for best Country Vocalist. All the major exploitation seemed to be here: bondage, black chains, taunting bodies (the sleek and the slack), and a lot of sexual suggestiveness.
One radio station in Salt Lake City created a bit of a stir several months ago by refusing to play the song “Physical” because of its provocative lyrics. Camera shots of Miss Newton-John and her fellow sex kittens tonight enlarge quite a bit on those words.
Tonight’s version of “Physical” is identical to the sung being seen and heard on Warner Amex Music Channel, an example of narrowcasting for younger audiences on cable TV. But at 9 p.m.. “Olivia-Newton John: Let’s Get Physical” will have to rely on an older audience, and it remains to be seen who will be watching Miss Newton-John sing to a bunch of young men in tuxedos, imprisoned in a square cage in the middle of the desert.
Miss Newton-John said in a recent interview that she couldn’t figure out all the images in the production numbers, either, but she knew she wanted a more sophisticated image, so she selected director Brian Grant to match the video to her new singing style.
By Fred Rathenberg
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