![]() ![]() Many of their 70s peers struggled in the new world of music videos and synthesisers, but Hall & Oates thrived: if you’d been filmed marching around a set of armchairs wearing flippers, you were ready for MTV. And for another, as Oates suggests, it helps to explain why the duo so successfully navigated the 80s. For one thing, it points up the sheer oddness of Hall & Oates in the 1970s, of which more later. Perhaps understandably, the local TV show for which they recorded the video declined to show it (“They called our record company and said: ‘Who do these guys think they are? They are mocking us! They will never appear on TV again!’”), but you can see why Oates has chosen to exhume it. All three march around the armchairs together, then walk off. The latter helps Oates into a penguin suit dinner jacket with an enormous pair of flippers attached to the arms, in which he listlessly mimes a guitar solo. A woman walks in front of the camera – this, Oates informs me, is the songwriter Sara Allen, Hall’s former partner and the co-author of a string of Hall & Oates hits – followed by a man with a moustache wearing a sparkly devil costume. Daryl Hall is resplendent in a pair of platform sandals Oates is wearing a bow tie and dress shirt with no sleeves. ![]() The pair are slumped, poker-faced, in armchairs (“That’s the furniture from our apartment,” notes Oates). This is the 1973 video Daryl Hall & John Oates made for She’s Gone, the standout track from their album Abandoned Luncheonette, and a staple of their live sets to this day. Your perceptions of us will never be the same again.” “My friend, I don’t know you very well, but you’re missing a great moment in music history. “You’ve never seen this?” he says, incredulous, down the phone from his home in Nashville. I’m half an hour into my interview with John Oates when he insists I need to look at YouTube as a matter of extreme urgency.
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