63TV is a Sky Digital channel that plays a "mix of the greatest music videos of all time that make up the Soundtrack of our lives." Its selection of contemporary crap soft rock and crap soft rock from the 80s and 90s makes it the TV equivalent of More FM and the channel is always playing at Burger Kings across the land (perhaps they won BK's lucrative Audio-Visual entertainment tender).
The other place that 63 makes a frequent appearance is at my work's gym. I am often there at ungodly hours of the morning pumping iron or training for marathons but no matter how early I get there, there is always someone who beats me to the remote control and decides that 63 is perfect for working out to.
Sometimes 63 unearths a little gem of a video that accompanies a kick-ass tune (the other day it scored a trifecta by screening Devo, Talking Heads and The Cure videos within a twenty minute window) but most of the time its crappy 80s soft-rock, or mum-friendly drivel from the likes of Jack Johnson, Brooke Fraser et al.
Twice in the last couple of months however, they have screened something that literally made my skin crawl. Something eyeball-gougingly horrible that not only assaulted my ears, but left my eyes glued to the screen in paralytic, abject terror.
The video was for the song STAY by Shakespeare's Sister.
I have a personal history with the song which I had long since buried; it was one of the tracks on a series of tapes that were on constant rotation at a supermarket I worked at when I was 15. Each tape was only about two hours long and was continuously looped thru the shop's PA system for about six months at a time. As a result, by the time I left the supermarket in 2000, I had heard Shakespeares Sister's STAY roughly eighty-six thousand times.
But…
I had never seen the video until 63TV regurgitated it onto the gym's TV screen.
My God. What the hell is this shit?
Why is she fawning over the comatose naked guy? What planet is she on so close to the moon? Whats with the haircut that presumedly inspired Nick Carter's 'do in his Backstreet Boys days?
And good Lord, where the hell did the other chick come from? She looks like shes on her way to audition for a bit part as a supporting demon in a CHARMED episode (and manages to ham up her performance with the manic intensity of Deborah Reed in TROLL 2). This is the stuff of nightmares.
With art direction that looks like a low-budget Total Eclipse of the Heart video in Space, and a soundtrack that effectively uses the repeated whiny, drawn-out delivery of three words as the foundation for a whole song, STAY gets my vote for the worst video of the 1990s. If not all time.
And after a little wikipedia-based research (born out of the same morbid curiosity that makes people read serial killer biographies) I also discovered an additional two facts that terrify me. One is that the video won awards (*shudder*) and the other is that "after a 13 year hiatus, Shakespeares Sister reformed in 2009"
AAARRRGGGHHH!!!
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