That time Olivia Newton-John gifted us with a totally gay music video for “Physical”

Olivia Newton-John, March 2017
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Legendary actress and pop star Olivia Newton-John has passed away at the age of 73. RIP.

With a massively successful career that spanned music, film, television, and environmental activism, Newton-John’s work has brightened lives ever since she first began performing as a teen.

For many, she’ll be forever associated with the 1978 smash-hit film adaptation of the musical Grease. Newton-John played transfer student Sandy Olsson as sunshine personified, but with just the right amount of edge so that, when she makes that last-minute metamorphosis to a leather-clad vixen, you believe her when she purrs, “Tell me about it, stud.”

Others will point to her transfixing work in Xanadu, the panned roller-disco fantasia that nevertheless has gone onto become a quintessential cult classic. Seriously, how can you pull off a number like this and not become a gay icon?

But for our purposes today, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on her award-winning music career, and particularly the song and video that changed its trajectory forever: “Physical.”

Much like Sandy at the beginning of Grease, Newton-John’s public image was pretty squeaky clean through most of the ’70s, and her music followed suit. It was romantic, folksy, and sweet. Take, for example, her first song to top the Billboard charts in the U.S., “I Honestly Love You” (from her fourth studio album), which was a breathy ballad all about professing a pure and innocent love.

Related: Olivia Newton-John Is Still The One We Want

But, in her first solo release post-Xanadu, Newton-John surprised her fans and shook up the charts with “Physical,” the pop-forward lead single from her 1981 album of the same name.

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