The Safety Dance

Below is a video of The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats, from the 1980's.

This video features dwarves, gnomes, and fairies and an ancient village setting. A classic 1980's video!

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The Safety Dance

That's a great video!

It shows a man and a gnome and a girl dancing their way through wheat fields to a village, where a festival is taking place.

The writer/lead singer Ivan Doroschuk has explained that "The Safety Dance" is a protest against bouncers prohibiting dancers from pogo-ing to 1980s new wave music in clubs when disco was declining and new wave was beginning its popularity.

Unlike disco dancing, which is done with partners, new wave dancing is done individually and involves holding the torso rigid while thrashing about; pogo-ing involves jumping up and down (the more deliberately violent evolution of pogo-ing is slamdancing).

Clubgoers doing the newer pogo dance were perceived as posing a danger to disco dancers on the dance floor, and so club bouncers would tell pogoers to stop or be kicked out of the club. Thus, the song is a protest and a call for freedom of expression.

In 2003, on an episode of VH1's True Spin, Doroschuk responded to two common interpretations of the song.

Firstly, he explained "The Safety Dance" is not a call for safe sex, and that this interpretation is "people reading into it a bit too much".

Secondly, he explained that it is not an anti-nuclear protest song per se despite the nuclear imagery at the end of the video. Doroschuk stated that "it wasn't a question of just being anti-nuclear, it was a question of being anti-establishment."

Characters in the video!

The music video for the song (which uses the shorter single version), directed by Tim Pope,is notable for its British folk revival imagery, featuring Morris dancers, Mummers, Punch and Judy and a maypole.

It was filmed in the village of West Kington in Wiltshire, England. Ivan Doroschuk is the only member of the band actually to perform in the video. Doroschuk, and others in the video, can be seen repeatedly forming an "S" sign by jerking both arms into a stiff pose, one arm in an upward curve and the other in a downward curve, apparently referring to the first letter in "safety".

The Morris dancers seen in the video were the Chippenham Town Morris Men. The little person actor is Mike Edmonds, whose T-shirt in the video shows the Rhythm of Youth album cover.

The identity of the blonde-haired woman by the name of Jenny seen dancing in the video remained unknown until 2013 when she was identified as Louise Court, a journalist who was editor-in-chief at Cosmopolitan and became a director at Hearst Magazines UK in 2015.

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