MEN WITHOUT HATS, “THE SAFETY DANCE”

Welcome to The Minute of Spin, a bite-sized music segment in which we explore a single song that came to define an entire band. Unfortunately, I can't afford the rights to the songs we spotlight, so you won't actually hear the song. But you’re welcome to listen to it here.

The dominant sound of early eighties rock was the synthesizer, and no band put the instrument to catchier use than Montreal’s Men Without Hats. Formed as a punk band in the late Seventies by brothers Ivan and Stefan Doroschuk, the Men self-released an EP to little acclaim in 1980. Then they added their brother Colin to the mix, along with drummer Allan McCarthy, and a couple years later hit the big time with the album “Rhythm of Youth.”

The standout track on the album, was, undoubtedly, “The Safety Dance,” a song apparently written in response to bouncers who routinely tossed pogo-ing new wave dancers from the floor. The song made it to number 3 on the Billboard charts, partly on the strength of its music video, in which a long-haired Ivan Doroschuk, a spirited blonde woman, and a dwarf cavort around the English countryside, leading a village in an orgiastic Morris Dance. The time, the setting, the villagers’ S-shaped dance pose, it’s so completely incongruous with the music, and compulsively watchable.

There’s no mistaking the era in which “The Safety Dance” was recorded. The synthesizers and drum machines take care of that. Yet there’s something undeniably bouncy and anarchic about the song that transcends the era’s trappings. It’s no wonder the tune showed up in the first season of the Fox TV show GLEE, as part of a fantasy sequence in which paraplegic character Artie gets up and boogies out of his wheelchair.

As for Men Without Hats, the band released several more albums in the Eighties and one in the Nineties before hanging it up. Only one song, 1987’s “Pop Goes the World,” approached the success of “The Safety Dance.” Recently lead singer Ivan Doroschuk put together a new version of the band and as of January 2011 had decided to launch a “Dance if you want to” tour.