Rob Masters

Let's get one thing out of the way straight up. The 80's were an awesome breeding ground for genre music videos, and I believe that it was not until the late 2000's that we saw that level of greatness return. That's about 20 years. So here we have the one band playing the mid 40s, 60s, and 80s. About 20 years apart. And all in the same bar, with the same waitress ... and no one seems to notice that they don't fit in. Would they be playing the 2000's as well? And what are they? Time-travellers? Immortals? Either way they have some sort of SEP field going on. Let's take a look at our mysterious band and waiter, shall we? Here's Kajagoogoo, and 1983's "Too Shy".

Duran Duran are a band we shall revisit in the future. Today, we're going to look at a spin-off project - Arcadia, and their hit "Election Day". Full of all the excesses and fetishes of the 1980s New Romantic movement, this is, to my mind, the quintessential video of the genre - beating out Spandau Ballet's "Vienna" by a carefully mussed whisker. But is it genre? This is one of several videos I've had to consider carefully, and, in the end, it just  falls on the SFF side of the fence. Throughout the video there is a sense of odd - little things, like the game being played (and the implied effects of said game). There are other hints as well - for example there are the horse-men, who appear to be tightly bound by some unbreakable force that they are in a constant struggle against. On top of that is a certain desperation to all the sensuality - an impending doom of some kind. (I'll conveniently skip over the fact that it was made at the height of...

Back to the 80's and Thomas Dolby. Is it SpecFic? It might as well be. So there.