Artist: Daryl Hall & John Oates
Album: Abandoned Luncheonette
Song: "She's Gone"
November 1973 Atlantic Records
July 1976 RCA Records



Rob Thomas & Daryl Hall




Original video for "She's Gone"



This video is great once you know the backstory. It's like one big middle finger to the people forcing them to make it. John O's performance is poetry in motion. Here, they have one of the most passionate, emotional songs of the decade, or the rock era, and they're dead-panning it to death. And whoever thought of tossing play money while devil walks by, deserves a Grammy.

The Story: Shot for cheesy pop show Summertime On The Pier, it features John in a vest and bow tie, Daryl in a bathrobe, a kazoo and their co-writer Sara Allen – immortalised in Sara Smile – walking past chased by a lurex devil.
John takes up the story: “The show was hosted by Ed Hurst, a real dweeb who used to be an insurance salesman. We said we just couldn’t lip-sync on it, but got told that we had to do the show.
“My sister Diane was in film school, so we wrote a script. We took all the furniture from our apartment – the big armchair that Daryl sits in
– and drove to this square, straight TV station. They expected us to lip-sync and as Diane was a young college girl, they didn’t want to listen to her at all.”
Reluctantly, the duo got their way. “And once they saw that wacky video, that TV station got real pissed. They went to our record company and said, ‘These guys will never perform in Philadelphia again! We’ll blackball them on the radio! Their career is over!’ I think it might be the best video we ever did.”
It also kickstarted Diane’s career – she became a producer for ABC TV, won an Emmy and has overseen TV coverage of three Olympic Games.