Various profound and personal experiences and issues as well as hedonistic abandon predominated in many of the most well known and loved Australian videos from the second half of the 80’s. With the video for their big hit, ‘Out Of Mind, Out Of Sight‘ in 1985, Models took a comparatively simple club performance video and its director, set and costume designers gave it a very effective presence by infusing it with so much energy and stylistic consistency from the patrons’ clothing to the mood lighting of the club. Models created a similar impact with the equally loved video for follow up single and second big hit in 1985, ‘Barbados‘. Semi-comical, semi-nostalgic, the video intercut home video footage including south Pacific Islander singers adding to its tropical feel with a story about the band visiting a lively seaside bar and performing the song on a mop and pool cues. The video for ‘Barbados’ very effectively complimented the haunting melancholy of the song.

1986 brought us one of the biggest Australian songs in the history of chart music, ‘You’re The Voice‘ by John Farnham. Its video is also one of the biggest and most popular in our history, for the simple fact of its richly coloured set design and an emotionally powerful and impassioned performance from Farnham. Another important Australian song and video appeared in 1987 in the form of ‘To Her Door‘ by Paul Kelly. In it, a young, apocryphally Australian working class man and woman were shown in the process of a relationship break up, at their house and riding in their taxi. It struck a chord with audiences across the country for its honest portrayal of real people in their gritty but warm-hearted reality. INXS and Jimmy Barnes recorded a cover of ‘Good Times‘ for the US teen vampire film, ‘The Lost Boys’. While another basic band performance clip, this time just in a recording studio, it captured people’s imaginations with its raw, impassioned performance and became something of a benchmark for middle class teen rebellion at the time, uniting Aussie national heroes Jimmy Barnes and INXS for a song and video with a decidedly pun spirit of defiant hedonism.

Later that year INXS released the first single from what would become a monster hit album ‘Kick‘ in 1988 that would prove to be their biggest ever and jettison them into international superstardom, ‘Need You Tonight‘. The video proved a very effective and visually striking affair involving multiple streams of footage of the band superimposed over each other in a blacked out studio, some of which were colour tinted by computer software. On a very different end of the spectrum came INXS frontman Michael Hutchence’s future lover, ‘Neighbours’ soap star Kylie Minogue’s debut single, ‘The Loco-Motion‘ in late 1987, a cheery and energetic video with Minogue and dancers performing over a graffiti street art backdrop. ‘Loco-Motion’ was a smash that, made Minogue an instant pop star and became one of the best loved Australian videos of the late 80’s. It also showcased rather remarkably that Minogue became the only Aussie to join UK dance pop superstars Dead Or Alive and Bananarama in being managed and produced by the golden songwriting touch of Stock Aitken and Waterman.

One of the major releases of 1987 was Midnight Oil’s classic, ‘Diesel and Dust’, spawning the two legendary songs about Aboriginal displacement and the legacy of debt European civilisation owes to the Aboriginal people whose land we took and civilisation we destroyed, ‘The Dead Heart‘ and ‘Beds Are Burning‘. The former of which is shot around Uluru and intercut with animations of indigenous art not unlike Goanna’s ‘Solid Rock‘ in 1982. The latter of which is also filmed largely in the Australian desert at times superimposed with computer treated Aboriginal faces in tribal paint but also ends up in Sydney showing indigenous people dancing while Midnight Oil performs. Both videos are compelling, powerful and two of the most important in the history of rock music. They also profoundly bookend Australian rock and pop music’s thoughtful and sensitive take on indigenous themes and concerns from one end of the 80’s to another.

Kylie Minogue’s star continued to rise in 1988 with second single, ‘I Should Be So Lucky‘, producing another equally iconic song and video as ‘The Loco-Motion’. INXS had two more major songs and videos with ‘Devil Inside‘ and the famous ‘Never Tear Us Apart‘ clip shot in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Daryl Braithwaite had a big comeback in late 1988 after years in the wilderness since the heyday of Sherbert in the 70’s with the beautiful but melancholic ‘As The Days Go By‘, accompanied by a clip filmed on a stylish studio set with a silhouetted ‘Bond girl’ dancer, creating a powerful impact mixing style with melancholy. Australia had come a long way since the early 80’s, here and internationally the entire decade having been an incredible rollercoaster and a fantastic voyage of colour, light, humanity and passion.