Men Without Hats is Ready to Dance Again
October 29, 2025
By Steve Spears
Ivan Doroschuk loves the 80s as much as we do. That’s why we’ll all be dancing alongside him when Men Without Hats performs their new song, “I Love the 80s” when the Royal Caribbean Adventure of the Seas heads out this coming spring.
“We had a blast recording it,” Ivan told me during a Stuck in the 80s podcast interview. “The hardest part was cutting it down to 3 minutes and 30 seconds. It could have been 3 hours long with all the 80s references.”
Why such an anthem about our favorite decade now, I asked.
“It just seems that 80s music is trending upwards these days, and it brings back a lot of great memories for people,” he said. “It was a great musical decade. There are a lot of great songs. The new generation seems to be into it as well. I hear a lot of 80s influences in contemporary pop music.”
Ivan and I talked about growing up in Canada, his music influences, the iconic “Safety Dance” video, and more during our half-hour chat. Here are some highlights.
Listen to the full interview here.
Steve: Taking you back to the old days when you formed the band in Montreal, what were your influences?
Ivan: I grew up in Montreal, and prog rock was big–bands like Genesis, Pink Floyd, King Crimson. These were the big bands in Montreal. And disco was also really big in Montreal. And I’ve always said that 80s music for me, new wave music, was a blend of progressive rock and disco. I was going to school. I was in university. I was in film and communications and meeting a lot of artists and people trying out new things. To be in a band, you just needed a good idea and a good haircut and a cool pair of shoes and you were on your way. It was kind of a rebuttal to the dinosaur rock that classic rock had become.
That was the time of punk music too. How did that influence your early sound?
We started off as a punk band, as an all-guitar punk band. We were doing Chris Spedding covers and Contortions covers and things like that. At one point, I just wanted to reach more people. Since I was classically trained on piano, I had the skills to move into synthesizers. Synthesizers were the new thing.
For the 2026 voyage of The 80s Cruise, you’ll be joined by fellow Canadian bands Glass Tiger and Aldo Nova.
Both of them, we play with them quite often. Aldo we played with quite a few times, Glass Tiger as well. So, it’ll be a homecoming.
You also performed on the second voyage of cruise back in 2017. What do you remember about that week?
It was great. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’d never been on a cruise before, actually. It was my first cruise ever. It was very well organized. The fans were gold. They were just brilliant. It was just a great experience for us. A week of fun and great shows.
We can’t have an interview and not talk about the “Safety Dance” music video. Did you know there’s a Facebook group named “The Girl in the Safety Dance Video” where everyone was obsessed with finding out the identity of the girl who is in the video for 30 seconds?
Yeah, yeah. She was outed a few years ago. Her name is Louise Court, and that was the only time that she’s ever performed in anything, in a rock video or on screen or a band or anything. She ended up being a big-time publisher with Condé Nast, publishing UK Cosmopolitan, among other things. Yeah, she kept it a secret for quite a while, though.
I wouldn’t have done that. That would have been my top resume line if I had been her. The other thing that you recently confirmed is the real lyric that she’s singing, because everyone had it wrong.
Yeah, a lot of people have heard something different, and a lot of people heard her say “and sing!”
That’s what I hear.
Yeah, and that’s even what Glee, the TV show, had on their lyric sheet. But what she’s saying is “danser,” which is just French for “dance.” It was back in the days when a lot of bands were putting French lyrics into songs, like Talking Heads and Visage. It was considered chic to put French lyrics in. But we were coming from Montreal, we felt we had a legitimate claim to the language anyway, so it was natural for us.
It has to be one of the top five most iconic videos, if not of all time, but at least of the decade.
It served us well. You can look back on 80s videos now and chuckle a bit with the hairdos and the clothes, the zipper clothes and pointy shoes and whatnot. But that video is timeless. You can still watch it now. It’s like watching a Western. You can’t really date it. That’s one thing that’s sort of helped us cross generations too. We’ve been really fortunate.
“I Love the ’80s” was released as a single this summer. Is there more new music coming?
Yeah, it’s all done. The album is just waiting to be released. We’re going to put out another single in the fall, and then the album is going to drop, I think, end of October, November. It’s called “Men Without Hats on the Moon.” It’s got seven or eight songs, brand new songs, totally 80s tinged. We’re looking forward to it. It was a lot of fun to do.”
Steve Spears is the creator and co-host of Stuck in the ’80s, which just celebrated its 20th year of podcasting. Find out more at sit80s.com. Steve and co-host Brad Williams are the hosts of Big 80s Trivia onboard each voyage of The 80s Cruise.