“Obsession” perfectly captures the zeitgeist of mid-Eighties pop. Animotion’s signature hit marries sinister human emotion and ominous state-of-the-art production to generate synth-pop soap opera precision-made for the ascendent MTV.
Animotion grew out of a self-described “retro science-fiction band” called Red Zone, led by singer Astrid Plane and featuring Paul Antonelli on keyboards, Charles Ottavio on bass and David “Frenchy” O’Brien on drums. The group was a fixture at Madame Wong’s, the Chinatown establishment at the heart of the Los Angeles punk and New Wave scene, but was on the verge of breaking up when CBS Records executive Larry Ross (later Animotion’s manager) suggested bringing on Bill Wadhams, vocalist of another Madame Wong’s favorite, the Billy Bond Band. “Red Zone was really popular in all the clubs, and some of us didn’t want to stop,” Plane told The Washington Times in late 2016. “We just re-evolved ourselves. We had this idea of putting a male and female singer upfront. Which was different.”
So different, in fact, that in March 1984 PolyGram Records A&R exec Russ Regan visited Animotion’s rehearsal studio on the strength of the band’s demo tape. “When he looked at us, he said ‘You guys could be like a Fleetwood Mac for the Eighties, because you are a guy and a girl, you sing some songs together, you sing some songs apart. I think we could go someplace with this idea,’” Wadhams recalled in a 2015 interview with PopMatters. “So he signed us on that concept — the guy-girl thing.” Animotion (a name suggested by Plane to convey energy and movement) added lead guitarist Don Kirkpatrick and recruited session keyboardist Greg Smith to record its self-titled debut LP, produced by John Ryan at no fewer than four different L.A.-area recording studios, most notably Sound City Studios and the Village Recorder. Wadhams wrote or co-wrote seven of Animotion’s nine songs, with the exception of “Tremble” (authored by Jason Ball) and the album’s first single, “Obsession,” originally written and recorded as a duet by Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight.
Knight towers among the most successful songwriters of the modern pop era, winning 13 ASCAP Awards and entering the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2013. But prior to “Obsession,” she was the keyboard player in Spider, a little-noticed New York rock band managed by KISS svengali Bill Aucoin. After a pair of LPs for RSO-distributed Dreamland Records, Knight was poised to leave Spider when Dreamland president, songwriter and producer Mike Chapman convinced her to relocate to Los Angeles to pursue a songwriting career. Chapman paired Knight with Des Barres, the English singer and actor who first surfaced in the glam rock band Silverhead, which issued a pair of albums for Deep Purple’s Purple Records before dissolving in 1972. Des Barres also headed for L.A., where he formed the band Detective, which Jimmy Page himself signed to Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song Records. Detective split in 1978, not long after Des Barres performed a handful of the group’s songs on an episode of CBS’s rookie sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, where he appeared as a member of the fictional punk band Scum of the Earth.
“Holly Knight and I were signed to Mike Chapman, who produced my solo album, I’m Only Human,” Des Barres told Songfacts in 2015. “She was then a fledgling songwriter, and Mike thought it might be cool if he put us together. I had just gotten off heroin, and was the obsessive person that I remain to this day. It’s just that now I’m obsessed with good vibes and wheatgrass, so my obsessions have changed. But I’m still a compulsive. In those days, I was getting off narcotics, so the word ‘obsession’ was being thrown about a lot in my life. How do you deal with an obsession? Which gave me the idea for this lyric. I had an outline of what I wanted to say, but it just so happened it coincided with what Holly had also in her vault of ideas. So we put this together real quick. It was the first thing I laid on her and she picked it up. If she hadn’t, we would’ve gone somewhere else.”
Des Barres and Knight wrote “Obsession” on guitar and keyboard, respectively, although Knight also picked up a guitar long enough to contribute the song’s urgent bassline. “She’s a very interesting guitar player because when she does write on guitar, she’ll just play the bass string, the low E-string. So she just gets a beat,” Des Barres said. “She played the bass line on the low E-string, I played the guitar, and we got that groove, which is so catchy. There was no struggle, no argument. None of that. I think the best work I’ve ever done as a singer or an actor is in one take. Because you’re not thinking, you’re just doing it. And as a result there’s a great deal more honesty and authenticity to that song and that moment and that feeling.”
Chapman produced Des Barres and Knight’s original version of “Obsession,” which appeared in the 1983 film A Night in Heaven, leading to a single release on A&M. The record went nowhere, and Knight teamed with Chapman to write the anthemic “Love Is a Battlefield,” one of two studio tracks included on Pat Benatar’s 1983 album Live from Earth. When it was released as a single, “Love Is a Battlefield” sold more than a million copies, and earned Benatar her fourth consecutive Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance — a streak broken the following year by Tina Turner’s “Better Be Good to Me,” also co-written by Knight and Chapman in partnership with Nicky Chinn. Des Barres, meanwhile, was tapped to tour as lead vocalist with the Power Station after the Duran Duran side project’s original frontman, “Addicted to Love” hitmaker Robert Palmer, dropped out; Des Barres is arguably best known for his work on screen, however, most notably as Murdoc on ABC’s long-running action-adventure series MacGyver.
“Obsession” arrived on Animotion’s doorstep via John Ryan. Color Wadhams unimpressed: “Our producer received it from a publisher,” he recalled in 2016. “He called me up and said ‘Bill, I wanna play you a song over the phone. I think it could be a hit for you.’ He played it for me. I’m listening to it, and I said to someone in my office ‘They say it could be a hit for us, and I’m not even singing. I’m speaking.’ I just didn’t know. When it was first on the charts, I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, we’ve got a song on the radio and I didn’t write it.’ But by the time it got to 17 with a bullet, I didn’t care who wrote it because I knew we were about to go on the ride of our lives. It went from 17 to 11 to six [on the Billboard Hot 100]. We were swept up.”
The dark, dramatic “Obsession” follows in a long line of New Wave-era hits exploring its titular theme, including the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” (the biggest American hit of 1983), Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night” and the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” (Animotion’s most direct musical and philosophical antecedent), and like those records, its sleek, ultramodern surface belies the primal forces brewing within. The protagonist of “Obsession” is consumed with unrequited lust and plunging headlong into madness: “I’d seen a movie called The Collector about this man who kidnapped a girl and kept her,” Des Barres told Songfacts. “So hence the line ‘I will collect you and capture you/Like a butterfly.’” But although individuals with obsessional attachments, romantic or otherwise, have been a staple of popular fiction for centuries — sometimes portrayed heroically and/or comically — the term “stalking,” the subject of “Obsession” in all but name, wouldn’t enter the popular lexicon until more than a decade after the song climbed the charts.
“During most of the 1980s, several national magazines called attention to ‘women being followed or harassed with letters, telephone calls and unwanted gifts,’ but the term ‘stalking’ was rarely if ever invoked; rather, these behaviors were interpreted as ‘sexual harassment,’ ‘obsession’ or ‘psychological rape,’” scholars Robert M. Emerson, Kerry O. Ferris and Carol Brooks Gardner write in a 1998 study. “But the 1989 murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer generated great public and media attention for ‘celebrity-stalking,’ as repeated followings, harassment and threats came to be linked to incursions (some violent) on a number of high-profile entertainers, including David Letterman, Jodie Foster and Theresa Saldana.” California Penal Code Section 646.9, revised in 1994, was the first U.S. state law to grant law enforcement and prosecutors greater ability to intervene and protect stalking victims; many other states soon passed similar legislation, and increasingly the public recognized stalking as “a women’s issue, a widespread precursor to serious violence, typically committed by men against former lovers or spouses,” according to Kathleen S. Lowney and Joel Best’s Stalking Strangers and Lovers: Changing Media Typifications of a New Crime Problem, published in 1995.
Animotion’s version of “Obsession” arrived alongside a deliriously decadent music video that entered heavy rotation on cable network MTV, which by the time the clip premiered in October 1984 reached close to 25 million households nationwide — a remarkable 43 percent year-over-year increase. The “Obsession” video, shot on the grounds of a Hollywood mansion, features the members of Animotion miming and dancing to the song while dressed in various costumes, including Plane and Wadhams as Cleopatra and Mark Antony — a creative decision that led many MTV viewers to assume the singers were lovers offstage. “There was kind of this tension between us,” Plane confessed to The Washington Times. “You could see that playing out onstage. It’s difficult to have two front people and not have some back and forth about that.” (Plane instead dated and later married an altogether different bandmate, bassist Ottavio.)
Animotion supported “Obsession” by touring the West Coast, followed by a tour of the U.S. and Canada in support of synth-pop superstar Howard Jones. The follow-up single from the Animotion album, “Let It Go,” reached number 35 after it was remixed to sound more like its predecessor, but the group’s 1986 sophomore effort Strange Behavior tanked at home (overseas markets including Germany and South Africa held steady). Wadhams, Plane and Ottavio all left Animotion in the midst of recording its third album, but for reasons unknown the sessions continued without them, and with Dirty Dancing alum Cynthia Rhodes and former solo artist/Device member Paul Engemann installed in their place, the group recorded a second self-titled effort, informally known as Room to Move to distinguish it from Animotion’s debut LP, which really seems like something that should have been addressed before the third album went out without a title, doesn’t it? The single “Room to Move,” a remake of a 1988 song by the group Climie Fisher, climbed to number nine on the Hot 100 thanks to (or perhaps in spite of) its inclusion in the box-office bomb My Stepmother Is an Alien, but the album itself sold poorly, and Animotion screeched to a halt.
Plane and Wadhams eventually patched up their personal differences, and in early 2001 they reformed Animotion to play a sold-out show in Portland, Ore. The reunion stuck, and in 2017 the group released Raise Your Expectations, its first new LP in three decades. “[‘Obsession’] does overshadow everything. It’s big, [and] we embrace it,” Wadhams said in 2016. “It’s like owning a classic muscle car you have in the garage. You’re not going to drive it every day. But when you pull it out of the garage and around the block, everybody goes crazy.”
