“Weird Science” by Oingo Boingo

Danny Elfman wrote "Weird Science" for John Hughes's film of the same name, and in 1985 Oingo Boingo put it out twice: on the film's soundtrack, and in a longer mix on Dead Man's Party, their fifth studio album, on MCA. The way Elfman tells it, Hughes called asking for a song, and by the time Elfman had driven home to Los Angeles the whole thing was playing in his head; he bolted into his studio to get the demo down before it could get away.

You can hear that fever in the finished record. It's new wave as a mad-scientist lab, all clanking rhythm and jittery chants, with Johnny "Vatos" Hernandez whacking drums and percussion, John Avila's bass bouncing underneath and Mike Bacich's keyboards bubbling like beakers. The horn section, Sam "Sluggo" Phipps and Leon Schneiderman on saxophones and Dale Turner on trombone and trumpet, blasts in like a fire alarm. Elfman and Steve Bartek played the guitars and produced it themselves, Avila added his voice to Elfman's, and David Leonard recorded and mixed it.

The video dropped the band into an abstract laboratory and ran in several different cuts, some with footage from the Hughes film and some without. It went on to be the most successful single Oingo Boingo ever released.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.