Song of the Day: "When the Lady Smiles", by Golden Earring

Despite the fact that Viacom is sueing the hell out of YouTube and a lot of good videoclips had to be consequently removed, the show must/will go on! Long live YouTube! The artists I propose for today are Golden Earring (Wiki entry in English and Wiki entry in Dutch, more complete; an autobiography here), an amazing, incredibly long-lived, Dutch rockband (singing in English all their songs)- btw, I talked previously about another great Dutch band, on this blog- , highly underrated everywhere else except in The Netherlands (Golden Earring is the best Dutch rockband ever!)- and I still do not understand why. Their most famous piece that probably most of you know (and my second favourite from them) is of course the masterpiece Radar Love - here with the original video from 1973 (unfortunately the 10 minutes long live version from their early years, that I had seen before was removed because of the Viacom scandal; but here is a shorter live version from Ahoy Rotterdam, in 2006!) and yet another big hit was Twilight Zone (here in an amazing unplugged version). And a few other very good pieces (unfortunately I could not find all those I was looking for; two such examples are "Devil made me do it" or "Vanilla Queen") I really recommend: Quiet Eyes, Mad Love's Comin' or Gypsy Rose and Love is a Loser- this one might offend some "conservatives"- just check out the lyrics- but the value of the song is and should remain unquestionable (the last two selections are played recently).

But the song of the day and my personal favourite from Golden Earring is When the Lady Smiles (here with the original videoclip that created them many problems at the time of the release- 1984-, many countries simply refusing to broadcast it or broadcasting an edited version, because of the alleged "violation"/"molestation" of a nun... which makes us wonder again what was freedom of expression like, then, and what it is now: to be very clear, I simply think the videoclip is great, a perfect company for this great song). The lyrics are here.