Here’s Icehouse’s ecstatically edgy crossover single “We Can Get Together” from 1980, which never fails to give me that particular New Wave frisson that results from just the right ratio of synthesizers to spiky guitars complemented by a sublime angst-in-my-pants vocal style.
And oh yeah, they were still called Flowers when they made this video, though they were Icehouse by the time the song started turning up on fine American album-rock stations like WWCT “The Home of Rock ‘n’ Roll” in Peoria, where I heard it as a high school freshman clutching my first David Bowie, B-52’s, and Cars albums to my bosom, and carefully wrote down the name of the band and the title of the song in blue ink in my spiral-bound notebook once the goosebumps had subsided.
Of course, if you saw the American video on MTV in the early 80s, like I did, you remember an entirely different video, with a snappy animated look and lots of energetic geometric patterns.
In fact, you probably remember it looking a lot like the video below, for an entirely different Icehouse song called “Love in Motion.” I’m not sure which video came first or why the treatment for one was grafted onto the other, but if you listen to “We Can Get Together” while watching this video with the sound turned down, it’ll open a magic door back to 1981.
Oh, and A-ha pretty much ripped off this look for the “Take On Me” video, too.
If you don’t already have them, you can find both songs on this compilation.
Thanks, again, for the help, Dave. We found the A-Ha video on Youtube. I remember the “We Can Get Together” song, but not the “Love in Motion”. Opened the magic door, but slammed it closed again quickly. There’s scary stuff back in the eighties- hairstyles and zits not least among them.