Men Without Hats – The Safety Dance (1983)
One of my personal favourites from the eighties, The Safety Dance is a song I’ve known for years and do recall hearing when I was growing up. However, it wasn’t until a few years ago that I heard it again on the radio. During my bachelor days I would head home on a Friday after a week at work, have the whisky in and sit back either writing or gaming while listening to 4 hours of 70s and 80s music to begin the weekend in style. This ritual helped me find other gems from my childhood such as Nik Kershaw’s The Riddle and Peter Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers, but The Safety Dance remains one of the best.
Lead singer Ivan Doroschuk is said to have written the song in protest to bouncers that didn’t like people pogoing in nightclubs. The song has been open to other interpretations but it is clearly about the freedom of expression, in this case on the dance floor. The music video has been compared to Middle Earth gone wrong and in some respects you could imagine this to be the case. In an almost Medieval-esque setting Doroschuk wanders into a village where a large group of people come to join the festivities.
The bizarre movements that make up the Safety Dance are purely comical and you might wonder how those bouncers could have deemed Doroschuk’s dancing as too dangerous for the clubs, though I imagine pogoing could prove nasty if a lot of people were doing it. Doroschuk had the last laugh though with this fabulous song, the group’s biggest hit to date, and memorably spoofed by Turk in Scrubs. This one of the eighties’ finest songs in my opinion.
Tweedlers’ Jukebox Song of the Week – The Safety Dance | Thank you for reading Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dave