From Billy himself...
Your now-infamous video for '84s hit "Rock Me Tonite" featuring you dancing flamboyantly around your apartment is often credited with harming your career. Is this an overstatement or an understatement'!
I'd say it's an understatement! I think that's probably the most damning four minutes of video ever shot in history! Well, from my perspective it is!'
Were you even happy to do it at the time'
'No, not at all! But, often times you'll get caught up in a sequence of events. There's a sequence here after it's done ' but you don't see it clearly while it's going on ' but here's what happened. I was making 'Signs Of Life' in England and we knew it was going to be a hit. We knew that 'Rock Me Tonite' was going to be a bit hit - as well in as much as you can tell ' so we went through a lot of directors for that video. Directors who wanted to push a particular moralistic stamp onto my music. We started off with one high profile director, but the situation deteriorated rather quickly, Then we got another director who was very successful, but started doing the same thing and so we suddenly found ourselves in June, the record was coming out in July and the record company already had an exclusive MTV air date. And so here you are without a video! So then appeared this fellow who was a very well known choreographer who had what seemed to be a pretty unique idea about taking me away from the band and cataloging all my moves. So I thought that it sounded very interesting, the fact that we were exploring a different aspect of my performing persona. And so that's how I went into it. But then what came out of it was clearly something different in terms of the way it ended up being staged. The look of the video had not even been what I wanted. It had not been set out like I'd have wished. And again, this was all happening at the 11th hour. And so, the rest is now history! It knocked me right off the top of the mountain and I never got back! And it wasn't for a lack of trying. I made four records after that all of which were up to the previous standard if not higher. But, nobody cared. People saw the video and just decided that I'd lost the plot and ' next!'
That being said, my favorite Squier album is Hear & Now, released in 1989 (five years after "Rock Me Tonight"). Rock radio around here played a few songs from that album for several months. So I don't think it ended his career, but it took him down several notches in the biz.
