It's My Life

It's My Life was the first single from the album of the same name, released in January 1984 with Does Caroline Know? on the B-side. Hollis wanted animal sounds on the record and sent the road manager to Regent's Park Zoo with a cassette recorder; in one interview he said the tape was useless and they made the noises in the studio, in another that they paid the keepers and went back after closing time. He told Oor that John Coltrane's A Love Supreme was the ultimate album title, because it said everything music should be, and that It's My Life came closest to that idea: what more could you say about his music?

In 1984 it reached thirty-one in America, their only top-forty hit there, and topped the American dance chart, while peaking at forty-six in Britain. On reissue in 1990, promoting the Natural History compilation, it reached thirteen, their highest British placing. It has gone platinum in Britain and New Zealand.

The video

Tim Pope's video is built mostly from footage of the BBC series Life on Earth, intercut with Hollis wandering London Zoo with his hands in his pockets and his mouth taped or scribbled out, a pointed refusal to lip-sync. EMI commissioned a second version in which the band mime deliberately and comically badly in front of the first. Hollis said that because nobody saw them mime, the clip became a self-contained film. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official 2019 upgrade.

Covers

No Doubt's 2003 version reached ten in America and seventeen in Britain, won two MTV Video Music Awards for David LaChapelle's video, and its Thin White Duke remix by Stuart Price won a Grammy. Talk Talk played it about sixty times, second only to the song Talk Talk, and a six-and-a-half-minute version from Hammersmith Odeon in May 1986 is on London 1986.