Mindless Youtube Mention

SPIKE: Come on! Sing along - it's our song!
JACK: We don't have a song! And if we DID have a song it WOULDN'T be this song!
SPIKE: You're no fun...

While prowling the internet I grew disenchanted at the sheer number of blogs that seem to think linking to random youtube vids was a valid use of bandwidth. Not like old Johnstone, who after all MAKES the vids in question, but just "huh, that's funny" look at this. It makes me fear some kind of 1984 conspiracy to destroy language and have human beings left unable to communicate in any way other that youtube video recommendations. A clue: doubleplusungood.

But if I were ever to compromise my prinicipals and follow the heard (no, the last time I was uploading a video off my computer) completely different, it would be this.

I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper by Hot Gossip.

Why link to it? Because it is the single most ridiculously disturbing vid I have ever seen. Before I saw it, the wierdest youtube had to offer seemed to comprise of Gary Glitter teaming up with KLF - whereupon he changed the lyrics of "Doctor'n the Tardis", had KLF dress up as members of the KKK and then chewed the scenary in an outfit that screamed Space Rat Offspring. But this...

Well, I stumbled across it following finally downloading The Musical History of Doctor Who - basically a clipshow of the Classic Series backed by the chart toppers for a given story, often with amusing irony ("Walk Tall" for Planet of Giants, "Dizzy" for The War Games, "I Don't Like Spiders" for Planet of Spiders, etc.) Starship Trooper was, oddly enough, the song for The Androids of Tara and, mildly entertained by the bubblegum chorus, I prowled youtube for the rest of the song (when youtube was working, naturally). I was expecting disappointment. After all, the bit for City of Death had a beautiful choir-like tune which turned out to be the ONLY bearable part of Are Friends Electric?

But the rather disappointing pop culture lyrics, 2001 riffs and random "communications" talk were not what shocked me. For I finally understand why Spike/Captain John and many others in the decadent 51st century love this song. I finally know why Izzy Sinclair knows the lyrics by heart, but I'll be generous and assume she just fancied the singers, because anything else suggests she's too kinky to be a magazine children read.

Because this is something else.

Frankly, had everyone been in leather masks with whips and spikes, I would have found it more wholesome. When Not The Nine O'Clock News did their Blatant Pornography single (Rowan Atkinson, Gryff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith wearily vogue as scantily-clad prostitutes sexually assault them), that was a sanitized version for this.

It starts off with lots of swirling dry ice and a black man, stripped to the waist, chained to a table and painted silver, mouthing to some 'NASA astronaut talk', staring blankly ahead as we zoom in between his splayed legs.

And then it just goes downhill.

Lots of women in ridiculous silver bathing outfits doing strange haka-like mating dances, erotic gymnastics and dodging the mirrorballs dangling around the place. Odd how by 2000s standards they are pretty well covered up, but somehow putting them in glittery silver body stockings and wigs screams exploitation. They then limber up with Incredibly Camp Black Guy, throwing glitter around the place while the backing singers seem to have retreated into the Dark Places of the Inside to escape this humiliation. None of them make eye contact, presumably out of shame. The fact they have to all molest each other while not looking in the same direction shows this was choreographed by someone with WAY too much time on their hands.

The woman presumably in charge of this, Sarah Brightman, scares me as her eyes seem to be the sort that turn people to stone. Well, actually, I'm not even sure that's her, but there's one lady whose eyes seem ever bigger than her eye sockets, unblinking and bright yellow.

I watched this with kind of enthusiasm that comes from getting spam emails promising to provide me with images of my daughter naked with a trained chimpanzee - ie, very little. She'd never settle for anything less than a baboon, anyway. That add withn all the full frontal nudity on The Gruen Transfer was a breath of unpretentious fresh air compared to this, and several other strapping black guys in chains turn up, as if trying to degrade themselves even more than the white women who walk robotically around the chorus holding dumbbells level with their breasts (last of the girls is Spooky Eyes at 1:34 - seriously, how fucking disturbing is that? Vashta Nerada WISHES it could be as disturbing as this...)

Yet, as what happens when you do something ridiculous long enough, I started to laugh hysterically. If LBC and Nigel Verkoff got in charge of a sci-fi lesbian orgy and a tank of laughing gas, they couldn't come up with something as downright naughty and ridiculous as this. Even pubescent teenagers full of raging hormones must have marvelled as they managed this entire film clip without Graham Chapman turning up in a Brigadier outfit and pointing out that everything's gotten a bit silly and things need sorting out.

I haven't laughed so much since Frank Woodley tried to bare his nipples on national television and managed to get a completely different part of his anatomy out in front of the Australian public. It is the Rob Shearman "Jubilee" of 1970s sexploitation disco music video clips, accept no subsitutes.

Seriously... WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT THIS UP?!? WHAT WERE THEY SMOKING? AND HOW MUCH IS IT?!?



And now your brain is left bleeding and bruised, this is the only other version of said same song I can find from some truly demented late night entertainment show called Rodge and Podge - the titular Irish muppet perverts. Wait for a few seconds before the music starts and marvel at the sight of the singer - exhausted, drunk and not a hundred per cent sure of what she's supposed to be singing - put in front of a microphone.

Yet, for some reason, I like this version better than the original.