Men At Work – “It’s A Mistake” (1983)
“Is it on then? Are we on the brink?” Colin Hay sings at the beginning of “It’s A Mistake.” Both the song and its video depict the footsoldiers on the ground level of this whole mess, speaking to their leaders and asking, in effect, when all this Cold War tension was going to finally burst and spill over into total conflict. At the end of the video, a commander accidentally puts his cigarette out on a trigger button instead of in his ashtray, and the other military men all react by plugging their ears and waiting for what comes next.
