Sometimes I hate myself for the stuff I remember. I know so much rock trivia that I wonder if my heart is made of garbage.
Case in point: “Cradle of Love.” It’s a mediocre song I have no personal connection to. But for some reason I know everything about it. The following paragraph was all written from memories I kind of wish I didn’t have.
It was on the soundtrack to the Andrew Dice Clay movie Adventures of Ford Farlane. I think the video was released around the same time as the movie. Billy Idol was injured while they were filming (I think in a motorcycle accident, and if I turn out to be right about that, I will feel like God is laughing at me), so instead of featuring his spiky hair and signature fist bump, the video starred a lithe and bubbly female model who dances in a Eugene Levy-type nerd’s apartment to a cassette tape (haha) of Billy Idol. When it first aired, footage from Ford Farlane was interspersed in the video. They took it out after the movie flopped and cut in more scenes of the girl.
The girl was a big part of what made the song a hit. Dudes were really into her. Watching it now, it seems ridiculous. The fleeting shots of her in a bra and a skirt writhing on a bed are interrupted by long reaction shots by the nerd. She crawls and I guess that was a big deal at the time but over all, it’s more stylish than lurid. Compared to Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” video, you could show “Rock the Cradle of Love” at a Sunday school field trip.
About that stylishness: David Fincher directed the video. The future director of Zodiac packed the video with unnecessarily artful composition. A high heel sinking into a fish tank gets as much screen time as Billy Idol.
It’s Billy Idol’s worst hit song. Say what you will about “Mony Mony”; it believes in its own worth as a song with enough conviction to be annoying. “RTCOL” is a lazy attempt at an ‘80s ZZ Top song rip off. The song starts with the chorus and never significantly deviates from it. It sounds like everyone involved with its composition and performance was hung over and on deadline.
The girl from the video’s is Betsy Lynn George. If you google “Cradle of Love,” you’ll stumble on an interview with her where she sounds pretty traumatized about the sexual nature of her performance in the video. Also, according to the interview, she later went out on a date with Billy Idol that almost seems like a scene from Entourage.
Billy and I [did go] to dinner once. We got along well, but it was not exactly a match. I rarely wore makeup and did not dress sexy in real life. I was wearing shoes that he did not like, I was later told. We went to his house and sat by the pool. We kissed, but it was not going anywhere. I asked to be driven home. His driver and right-hand man told me when we got in the car that he “could not believe” I didn’t stay, that “all the woman stay.”
She’s a gymnastics teacher now, according to IMDB. Billy Idol would never have a hit again.
