Genesis – Land of Confusion
1986 · Directed by John Lloyd and Jim Yukich
195K Likes
Best comments
1.“One of my clearest childhood memories is sitting on my dad's lap watching this video, absolutely terrified of the puppets.”
More comments
- 2.“As a child, this video terrified me superficially. As an adult, it terrifies me substantively.”
- 3.“They didn't make a Phil Collins puppet – that's really him.”
The story
Phil Collins saw his own rubber face on Spitting Image, the British puppet satire show, and decided to hire the people who made it. Creators Peter Fluck and Roger Law built puppets of the whole band and a small country's worth of world figures. John Lloyd and Jim Yukich directed.
The setup: Ronald Reagan goes to bed with Nancy and a chimp (a nod to his old movie Bedtime for Bonzo) and has a nightmare. In stroll Thatcher, Gorbachev, Gaddafi, Khomeini, Mussolini and Kissinger, plus Johnny Carson, Rambo and Mr. Spock. There's a Live Aid spoof with Springsteen, Sting, Michael Jackson, the Queen and Pope John Paul II shredding on electric guitar. At the end Reagan reaches for the button marked Nurse and hits the one marked Nuke. Boom.
Mike Rutherford wrote the words, and the single from Invisible Touch hit number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1987 while MTV played the video to death. It won the Grammy for Best Concept Music Video and lost VMA Video of the Year to Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer, which, fair. Cold War dread never looked so squishy.
