Licensed to perform sex and ecology pop, Physical videogram review
Ian Penman sees "Tommy" square up to 'Performance' as Blondie take a video KO from Olivia Newton John
“These are the ’80s and times change, and people have to change right along with them. Not that we have to throw away everything from the past, just that we have to learn to look at old things in a new way”. So stated Olivia Newton John, sweetly, in the recently broadcast TV version of her Physical (EMI Video £34.50). Musty old Rolling Stone recently called Olivia “rock’s Farrah Fawcett Majors”, and I’m sure a lot of positivist prannies in our pop culture press would have the same idiotic, worm’s eye view.
She’s moved from her early cherubic Ovaltine pop (remember the sketches with Cliff on his Saturday teatime show?) through creditable C&W crossover success, to her current high-toned tongue-in-cheek sex-and-ecology pop (to sort of balance out things, energy conservation wise, as it were). Her pop is a sensual pop. crafted, crafty, possibly a bit cynical but more likely in love. Unlike the Debbie doll, Olivia on video isn’t a one-view sex object who contorts to your specifications: she’s firmly in control (you can tell which side I display my handkerchief on). She’s a provocative agent, rather than a fixed image, and both in voice and projection explores a contradictory tension between what’s threatening and what’s yearning, in tone and gesture.
Physical, taken totally, has to be one of the best pop videos yet marketed, suffering neither from a surfeit of men-playing-guitars shots, nor from the embarrassing metonymy of the Literal school of video song interpretation (ie, there is no landslide in ‘Landslide’; no air-sea rescue helicopters in ‘Recovery’, and so on). The songs are turned into elaborate visual puns, abstract stories crammed full of little indulgences, meaningless motifs - pure visual pleasure.
Olivia knows how to move her head and eyes, just how long to hold a stare. The videos exploit every gaze; between the actors, between actor and camera, between actor and us. Olivia also knows how to walk and dance to the beat of a song, and the choreography meshes perfectly with how the camera wants to set up a scene. Even in the three songs which are straight Singer and Band, quick cutting and puzzlework editing ensures interest - cut to the beat of the song, so simple, but something that isn’t attempted once in the Blondie tape, for instance.
The individual “Landslide” and ‘Physical’ videos, you TOTP habituees will remember (only the Julien Temple-produced video for ABC’s ‘Poison Arrow comes close). In ‘Recovery’ a red cross marks the - eek! - movement of desire in the unconscious no kidding folks, Olivia’s been swatting up her Lacan. The song is fractured into a are sliding-signifier slideshow Nic Roeg would be proud of, where all the stop-frames pulled out and tangents touched in the dreamiest fashion.
Similar games with memory and identity when their resistance is lowered by love occur in “Stranger’s Touch”, where a private eye from Chandler wanders into Orson Welles via an Escher stairwell and a hallucinatory backstreet peck on the cheek. The song itself has a great pun: “I’m caught up in a triangle/No future in this shape I’m in.”
The Physical video was wholly conceived and directed by Brian Grant - take a bow, Bri. Can’t wait for your first feature.
VIDEO TOP 20
1 (1) Siouxsie & The Banshees (Spectrum)
2 (2) The Best Of Blondie (Chrysalis)
3 (4) Abba Music Show Vol 2 (Intervision)
4 (5) Adam & The Ants (Home Video Productions)
5 (3) Olivia Newton-John-Physical (EMI)
6 (6) Queen Greatest Flix (EMI)
7 (7) Rock Flashback-Deep Purple (BBC/3M)
8 (8) Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii (Spectrum)
(10) Abba Music Show Vol 1 (Intervision)
10 (9) Elvis Comeback Special (Mountain Video)
11 (11) Elvis-King Of Rock ‘n’ Roll (World of Video 2000)
12 (12) Paul McCartney & Wings Rockshow (EMI)
13 (13) ELO Live in Concert (VCL)
14 (-) Alice Cooper in Concert (20th Century Fox)
15 (17) Videostars (EMI)
16(-) Jethro Tull-Slipstream (Chrysalis)
17-) The Kids Are Alright-The Who (Spectrum!
18 (15) Iron Maiden (EMI)
19 (18) Elton John In Central Park (VCL)
20 (16) James Last Live In London (Spectrum)
(Chart courtesy HMV)
By Ian Penman