Songoftheday 8/27/14 - Take the children and yourself and hide out in the cellar, by now the fighting will be close at hand...

Mike + The Mechanics - "Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground)"
from the album Mike + The Mechanics (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #6 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 11

Today's Song of the Day comes from a side-project for progressive rock trio Genesis' guitarist Mike Rutherford, Mike + The Mechanics. Like drummer Phil Collins, Rutherford released a couple of solo albums in the early 80s, but besides a top-40 rock radio hit with "Maxine" in 1982, there wasn't much interest in his non-Genesis work. In the mid-80s Mike, along with producer Christopher Neil and songwriter Brian Robertson, started a project called Mike & The Mechanics, with a band formed with journeyman singers Paul Young (not the "Everytime You Go Away" one) and Paul Carrack, who went from a stint with Squeeze to a top-40 hit of his own with "I Need You" in 1982. The first single released from the act was used in the movie On Dangerous Ground, renamed for American audiences as Choke Canyon (a porn movie name if I ever heard one). With Carrack on lead vocals for "Silent Running", the sci-fi lyrics of this track didn't really fit the movie (in fact they were inspired by a Bruce Dern film of the same name), though the paranoiac musical theme did the job in its own way...

"Silent Running" became the first top-10 pop hit for the group in March of 1986. The single also went all the way to #1 on Billboard magazine's Mainstream Rock radio chart. Internationally, while the record went top-10 in both Canada and Germany, in Rutherford/Carrack's native Britain the single stopped at #21.

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


The band also released a 15-minute video including an enhanced version of "Silent Running" which included scenes from Choke Canyon, as well as follow-up singles "All I Need Is A Miracle" and "Taken In"...

First I'll start with Mike & The Mechanics miming "Silent Running" on Solid Gold, included for maximum Carrack cuteness...

 Now here's the band performing the song live for TV in 1999...

And from a live show in 1995/...

Up tomorrow: Minneapolis funksters drop the analog screen.