Their 80s hits are now hitting the billion-streams mark, but the duo’s genre-resistant pop often chafed against the zeitgeist. They recall the triumphs – and makeup choices – of the past 50 years
I’m half an hour into my interview with John Oates when he insists I need to look at YouTube as a matter of extreme urgency. “You’ve never seen this?” he says, incredulous, down the phone from his home in Nashville. “My friend, I don’t know you very well, but you’re missing a great moment in music history. Your life will change. Your perceptions of us will never be the same again.”
This is the 1973 video Daryl Hall & John Oates made for She’s Gone, the standout track from their album Abandoned Luncheonette, and a staple of their live sets to this day. It’s certainly striking viewing. The pair are slumped, poker-faced, in armchairs (“That’s the furniture from our apartment,” notes Oates). Daryl Hall is resplendent in a pair of platform sandals; Oates is wearing a bow tie and dress shirt with no sleeves. A woman walks in front of the camera – this, Oates informs me, is the songwriter Sara Allen, Hall’s former partner and the co-author of a string of Hall & Oates hits – followed by a man with a moustache wearing a sparkly devil costume. The latter helps Oates into a penguin suit dinner jacket with an enormous pair of flippers attached to the arms, in which he listlessly mimes a guitar solo. All three march around the armchairs together, then walk off.
