Spandau Ballet - Paint Me Down

JUL 01 1981 · 12:00

Spandau Ballet - Paint Me Down (1981) Director: Russell Mulcahy Era: New Romantic / Post-Punk Transition (1981) - Early British new wave era marked by avant-garde visual experimentation, funk-inflected production, and the emerging MTV promotional clip economy A rare example of a commercially underperforming single whose video outlasts the chart result in cultural significance. The BBC ban, the body-paint production spectacle, the documentary-within-a-promo structural experiment, and its position in Russell Mulcahy's pre-Hollywood career arc all make it a high-value archive object for scholars of music video history, British new wave visual culture, and early-80s broadcast censorship. Context: Released 2 November 1981, 'Paint Me Down' arrived at a pivotal moment for British new wave: Spandau Ballet had broken through with 'Chant No. 1 (I Don't Need This Pressure On)' but were under commercial pressure to sustain momentum for their second album, Diamond. The single peaked at only number 30 on the UK Singles Chart, representing a commercial disappointment that the band itself acknowledged. The video's banning by the BBC for nudity and rejection by Top of the Pops as 'too sexually suggestive' made it a minor cause célèbre of early-80s UK broadcast censorship, illustrating the tension between the emerging art-directed pop promo and conservative broadcast gatekeepers. It also documents the band's transitional aesthetic moment: moving from the sparse post-punk Blitz-club new romantic image toward a funk-inflected, more sensually ambitious visual language. Director notes: Mulcahy was Spandau Ballet's recurring video director, having also helmed 'Muscle Bound' and later 'True' (1983). For 'Paint Me Down', he fused an epic large-scale visual approach with a documentary recap aesthetic, inspired by the 1981 UK documentary series 'Years of Lightning'. The production incorporated brief archival clips from earlier Spandau Ballet videos and a London Weekend Television documentary, tightly edited together with new footage shot at King's Cross railway station and Heathrow Airport. A central visual thread involved lead singer Tony Hadley filmed lying in bed ostensibly naked surrounded by flying paint, requiring repeated clean-up and sheet changes between takes. The BBC banned the completed video citing nudity; Top of the Pops separately rejected it as 'too sexually suggestive', meaning neither the promo nor the pre-recorded studio performance for the show ever aired.