An Interview with Ivan Doroschuk of Men Without Hats

Roger Crow talks to the man behind one of the most infectious songs of the 1980s, ‘The Safety Dance’, and how he can’t get their new album On the Moon out of his head either.

Ivan, can you take us back to the early days before ‘Safety Dance’, and when you were forming the band, I guess, in the late 70s? What was the inspiration?
Well it was the beginning, the birth of New Wave and punk rock, and there was a real DIY kind of attitude amongst everybody. Classic rock had turned into a dinosaur, and it was the dying days of disco, and you didn’t have to be a virtuoso on your instrument anymore to form a band. You know, everybody was just doing it. You just had to have a cool hairdo and some cool shoes, and you were on your way, and it was it was ideas over over sort of being being proficient on your instrument, I guess. And that was it.

And you guys really knew your stuff musically.
Well, my mother was a music teacher at McGill University in Montreal. When we grew up, my brothers and I all took music lessons. So I was a classically trained pianist. And when synthesizers finally became affordable in the 80s, they had been in the realm of huge, huge bands. You had to be like Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman to own a synthesizer. But in the 80s, they became affordable. And so everybody had a chance to sort of buy one and experiment with them. And that’s when we started. We started, you know, the band actually started as a punk rock band. We were an all-guitar band right at the beginning. But I made the conscious decision that I wanted to reach more people. I just wanted to have a larger audience. And having grown up with the Beatles and stuff like I had a good mentors. I had a good template for writing songs. And so that was it.

What was the genesis of ‘The Safety Dance’?
Like I say, it was the dying days of disco. But every now and then the DJ would, in the club, would slip in the odd new wave song, like B-52’s ‘Rock Lobster’ or Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’. And so we’d get up on the dance floor and start pogo dancing, which was basically just jumping up and down, bouncing off each other’s chest. Since nobody had ever seen that before, it was brand new. It was the precursor to the mosh pit and to slam dancing, but nobody had seen it yet. And the bouncers and the DJ thought we were fighting or trying to cause trouble, which we kind of were. And so they would kick us out. So after having been thrown out of a few clubs, I just went home and did something about it. And I wrote a song that told people that they could dance if they want to. Glad to say it’s been safe to dance ever since.

Men Without Hats, 2025

Did you have any idea in your wildest dreams how infectious it would be, how popular around the world?
Well no, but I must be honest that when you’re a young songwriter, you think that everything you do is destined for stardom and you can’t understand why people aren’t lining up to throw their money at you. But no, it wasn’t even the first single that we released off the album in Canada. And when it did break internationally, we were in the studio recording the follow-up. We were stoked that the record company had deemed the whole first album worthwhile to put us into studio for a second one. We thought we had made it. We were over the moon already. And then the record company phoned us up and said, ‘You guys have to do a remix of ‘Safety Dance’. You have to do a 12 inch club mix of ‘Safety Dance’.That’s the new thing. Everybody’s doing it’. So we did. And we just sent it off and thought nothing of it. And went back to recording the follow-up record. And and then it hit number one on the Billboard Dance charts. So that was a game changer. And we were yanked out of studio and put in a tour bus and sent off for a couple of years to promote it. It was the combination of the 12 inch and the video were two things that were very instrumental in having the song do what it did.

I love the video. How was it recording that? Was that in Wiltshire?
Yeah, that was in West Kington. It was a great experience. I was on tour in the States. They flew me there and back on Concorde actually, because I had to get there fast and back fast to not disrupt the tour schedule. I’d never done a video before in my life. I’d never acted in anything. So it was, it was all very magical. And the fact that Tim Pope, the director, and I had communicated before about what the script should be. Obviously it was pre-internet, pre-email. So we actually wrote letters to each other, and our letters crossed the pond at the same time. And we both realised that we had come up with the same script. I had also come up with the Pied Piper type of thing. And even the locations, I had chosen locations in North America, obviously, and the eventual locations that he had chosen in West Kington were very similar to what he had chosen too. When we met, we were like old friends already. We got along famously and he ended up doing most of our videos after that. So he was a great director.

And of course, Mike Edmonds was in the video, wasn’t he? Was he from Time Bandits?
He was. And he was in Star Wars, yeah. He was the back end of Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars (Return of the Jedi). And we still communicate.

Where’s the most unusual place you’ve heard your own songs?
We went to South Africa, somewhere I never thought I’d get to go. So that was pretty amazing. Since we put the band back on the road in 2010, we’ve been to more places and played way more concerts than we did back in the 80s. We’ve been to Scandinavia, South America, Australia. These are places that we never went to. We never had a chance to go to in the 80s. So it’s been great. There’s a real resurgence. There’s a new love for 80s music now.

Men Without Hats’ new album On the Moon is released on November 14.
The full version of this interview can be heard at podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/nostalgiahhh

Roger Crow( Writer )

Adopted Yorkshireman Roger Crow developed a passion for film and TV in the 1970s and 1980s. He has been a published film and TV reviewer since the 1990s; a world travel and restaurant critic since the noughties, and for the past decade has assessed the pros and cons of live gigs and theatre productions around the UK. His ideal day would involve reviewing a performance of Bat Out of Hell, followed by a Pad Thai while being serenaded by Texas on a cruise around Europe.
crowsfeat.com; nostalgiahhh film podcast

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