9/11/2023 0 Comments Olivia newton john physical“Physical” was first penned by Steve Kipner and Terry Shaddick for Rod Stewart, and it’s not surprising that it was originally envisioned from a male perspective - women rarely got to play the hunter and not the prey in turn-of-the-’80s pop. And just as she does with her workout buddies in the clip, Newton-John slithers around the beat with sly but unmistakable intent, not so much seductive as lascivious as she remarks with increasing impatience, “I took you to an intimate res-tau-rant, then to a suggestive movie/ There’s nothing left to talk about, unless it’s… ho-ri-zon-tal-ly.” There’s a hint of stalker-movie suspense to the verse, an obvious tension lurking beneath the surface of those guitars and Olivia’s repeat “You know what I mean” insistences. The “Physical” groove, anchored by storied studio drummer Carlos Vega’s muscular shuffle and flecked with longtime ONJ producer John Farrar’s guitar pops, is as slick and taut as one of its video’s hairless bare chests. It helped the song’s case that it was an undeniable winner. She donned spandex, a headband and a more economical, Princess Diana-reminiscent haircut in the video, while the motivational speak of aerobics classes informed - and offered plausible deniability for - the song’s otherwise sexually forward chorus hook, “Let’s get physical, phy-si-cal… let me hear your body talk.” Other lyrics in the verse were less ambiguous, but the song’s workout framing provided just enough double to the entendre for most programming directors to look the other way on what one PD referred to in Billboard as “an uncomfortableness” that the song produced in their listenership. It was the era of Richard Simmons, Jane Fonda and Jazzercise, and both the look and language of the moment proved an inspired fit for Newton-John’s comeback. She found inspiration for both in a relatively unlikely source: the fitness craze that was sweeping the globe, particularly America, in the early ’80s. She was in need of a new sound and a new image to mark a new phase of her career. 1 - with the soundtrack to Xanadu, the film musical fantasia that marked her first feature role since Grease, but the movie itself was such a commercial and critical failure that it was essentially a wash for her momentum-wise. Newton-John found greater success - including her fourth Hot 100 No. 3-peaking “A Little More Love,” and her 1980 duet with fellow solid-gold ’70s hitmaker Andy Gibb “I Can’t Help It” had missed the top 10 entirely, stalling at No. Totally Hot tread water commercially, reaching the top 10 of the Billboard 200 albums chart but spawning just a single Hot 100 top 10 hit in the No. This was uncharted territory for Australia’s sweetheart.īut a reinvention was perhaps necessary for the ’70s superstar at the onset of a new decade. The “Physical” video, on the other hand, ends with Newton-John’s scantily clad iron-pumpers mostly coupling off together and leaving the gym hand in hand, perhaps headed to a different kind of workout. But that was still throwback family entertainment at heart, closing with her and John Travolta’s Danny literally driving off into the sky together. Her Sandy character’s famous “tell me about it, stud” pivot to cigarettes and black leather at the end of 1978’s cartoonishly successful Grease - a visual transformation continued on the cover to her Totally Hot album later that year - had presented her in a more adult light. She had spent the ’70s as the wholesome good girl at the heart of AM radio, soft and gentle and certainly inoffensive. Of course, none of this is what anyone was expecting from Olivia Newton-John in 1981. In other words, it was perfect - particularly from the vantage of early MTV, where the golden rule was quickly established: Ensure that nobody can ever hear your song without also picturing the video again. It’s campy, it’s sexy, and it’s totally incomprehensible from a narrative standpoint. Set in a gym that looks more like the final level of an early arcade game - the kind of sharply geometrically defined, impossibly shiny-surfaced room that only seems to exist in ’80s music videos - Newton-John leads a group workout with a bunch of oiled-down muscle men, who inexplicably turn into overweight klutzes (and then back again) over the course of the video. So did the rest of its parent LP of the same name, actually: Physical was released as a whole video album, a pioneering practice in ’81, which earned Newton-John a primetime Let’s Get Physical TV special (and, eventually, the second-ever video of the year Grammy.) But the title track’s clip was the crown jewel. “Physical” debuted on September 28, 1981, less than two months after the seismic launch of MTV, and oh boy did it have an accompanying visual ready for the occasion.
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