- Lindsey Buckingham performs in the music video for "Go Insane" from his album "Go Insane" recorded for Elektra Records. After walking through a mirror Buckingham is surrounded by deranged imagery included a floating globe, floating goldfish, and several different sized versions of himself.—Shatterdaymorn
- Go Insane is the title track from Lindsey Buckingham's 2nd solo album, Go Insane, which was released in 1984. This song was the first single and first video from the album to be released. The album was dedicated to Carol Ann Harris, with whom Lindsey had just ended a seven year long relationship.
The video shows Lindsey's descent into madness as he experiences delusions including encountering multiple versions of himself and disassociation from reality.
The video opens with Lindsey, dressed in a stylish white tail coat with black trim, a white button-down shirt and pants with suspenders, enters a room carrying a guitar and shaking a white box to hear what is inside it. He leans the guitar against the wall, and goes to a wall mirror, where he puts the box on a shelf. In the mirror he sees the guitar being played by disembodied arms, but as he turns to look at it, it is simply a guitar.
He turns back to the mirror and reaches out to touch it, but his hand goes right through the glass. Curious, he climbs through the mirror and finds himself in a chaotic room with debris everywhere.
On the other side of the mirror, Lindsey is now dressed in a garishly striped jacket with a black button-down shirt and jeans. A small globe appears and circles his head, much like a planet in orbit. The globe then changes to a sun and then again into a goldfish. As the camera pulls back, the room is filled with goldfish swimming through the air.
Lindsey then sees another version of himself, and yellow beams come from his eyes, striking the other Lindsey, who then disappears. As Lindsey explores his surroundings, he finds two boxes like the one in the opening scene and picks them up. As he sings about there being 2 kinds of trouble in this world, when he says "living", a jack-in-the-box Lindsey springs from the first box. When he sings "dying", a marionette skeleton springs from the other box.
Lindsey's head starts to spin vertically, and then transforms into the globe. As we look at the version of Lindsey with a globe for a head, we realize that he is inside the box, while a much larger Lindsey opens the lid and looks inside. Over and over, a new, larger Lindsey appears looking inside the box.
Finally the view changes so we are looking at the Lindsey outside the box, as his head goes through a series of transformations, from metal head-shaped sculptures to disembodies eyes, a giant fist then a foot.
Lindsey is then shown running through the room, appearing in great distress as he sings about going insane. As he runs, he goes behind a still-life painting, but as the camera closes in on the painting, Lindsey is now trapped inside. As he lights the candle in the painting, he is transformed first to a young boy, then back to himself, and then becomes an old man, still dressed I the same clothes.
The old man blows out the candle, and starts to blow photo bubbles, with pictures of multiple Lindseys. The box from the first scene reappears, tumbling across the screen until it fills the frame. The scene then cuts to inside the box, where Lindsey is pounding on the wall, trying to get out. This final scene cuts to a view of static, like on old-fashioned TVs.
In song introductions, Lindsey has said that he left Fleetwood Mac in 1987 to regain his sanity. This song and video are precursors to that. When Stevie broke up with him in 1976, Lindsey had to continue working with her every day, arranging the songs that she wrote, which were mostly about him. He has said that the only way to survive was to push his feelings into one corner of the room and simply not deal with them, which is not a mentally healthy thing to do. The fact that their physical relationship continued for over a decade after their break-up made this more difficult. The band members and Lindsey's girlfriend were all taking cocaine and drinking heavily during this time, particularly Stevie and Mick. Over this period, until his departure from the band, Lindsey experienced increasing feelings of being out of control and "going insane".
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