Hall and Oates have made no secret of their reluctance to become video-age stars, having emerged from the roosty, and rooted, folk scene. That likely was why they played so many of them for camp value, displaying their ambivalence with a series of impish, patently outrageous turns.
Unfortunately for Daryl Hall and John Oates, this ironic approach was largely lost on television audiences, both then and now. It took years for the duo’s songs to break free of that preposterous, but also long-gone, imagery.
“I am going to be brutally honest, I didn’t care for any of those videos,” John Oates tells the Houston Press. “I never wanted to be an actor, messing around in stupid costumes in front of a curtain.”
At the time, however, MTV was as important as radio had ever been in getting music to the masses — for new bands, and legacy groups like Hall and Oates, too. The same videos some critics point and laugh at most assuredly helped propel them to greater fame. And, if pressed, Oates admits that it wasn’t all bad — selecting “Out of Touch” as his favorite clip — because it was “so weird and over the top.” That seems to confirms everything a close observer might have guessed about the fiendishly sardonic approach Hall and Oates always took, doesn’t it?
Time has been kind to those songs, even if the original experience as budding video stars wasn’t. And Oates — like his busy partner Daryl Hall — remains focused on the present. When they’re not on the road as Hall and Oates, Hall is the star of Live from Daryl’s House, while Oates has just released a multi-faceted solo project called Good Road to Follow.
“I’m not a nostalgic person who lives in the past,” Oates adds. “I’m way more interested in writing new songs and doing new things — and I have so much positive stuff going on right now, I can’t even absorb it all.”
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