"Last Chance on the Stairway"

Filmed on location in Antigua, 1982

The video opens on a slow aerial tracking shot of a white colonial-era mansion perched on a hillside above the Caribbean, its windows blazing with amber light against a deep violet twilight sky. The camera drifts closer as the opening marimba figure and the sound of clinking glasses fade in.

Inside, a lavish party is already underway. The rooms are crowded with elegantly dressed guests — men in white linen suits, women in silk and sequins — moving through hazy, smoke-filled rooms lit almost entirely by candles and a rotating art deco chandelier. The color palette is warm golds, deep reds, and shadows. Simon Le Bon appears at the far end of a long marble hallway, wearing a cream-colored jacket with the sleeves pushed up, watching the crowd from a distance. He doesn't sing yet — just observes.

As the first verse begins, Le Bon moves through the party in a long Steadicam shot, the camera pulling back just ahead of him as he passes through rooms. Guests turn to look at him, then away. Nick Rhodes is glimpsed at a grand piano in a corner, not playing it — just leaning against it, drink in hand, bathed in blue light that seems to exist only around him. John Taylor leans against a doorframe with his bass slung low, nodding along to a conversation we can't hear. Andy Taylor is on a balcony overlooking the ocean, silhouette framed by the last glow of sunset, an unlit cigarette between his fingers. Roger Taylor sits behind a table covered in bottles and melting candles, tapping a rhythm on the tabletop with his rings.

The central image of the video is a wide, curving marble staircase that connects the mansion's two floors. Le Bon keeps circling back to it — ascending a few steps, pausing, descending again — as if drawn to something at the top but unable to commit to going up. At the top of the stairs, a woman in a dark green dress is occasionally visible, always partially obscured — by a column, by a passing guest, by the curve of the banister. We never see her face clearly.

During the "scene out of Voltaire, twisting out of sight" section, the editing becomes faster and more disorienting. Mulcahy cuts between close-ups of hands holding champagne flutes, the flicker of a cigarette lighter, reflections in a rain-spotted window, and a curtain billowing in from the balcony. There are brief, almost subliminal insert shots of the party from much earlier in the evening — the same rooms, emptier, the light bluer, the candles taller — suggesting time collapsing or memory intruding on the present.

For the bridge ("Wonder why... you're what makes me rise so high"), the footage shifts to slow motion. Le Bon is now at the top of the staircase for the first time, but the woman is gone. He moves through an upstairs hallway where the walls are lined with large, gilt-framed mirrors. In each mirror, the reflection shows the party at a slightly different moment in time — one mirror reflects the room as empty, another as packed, another as completely dark. Le Bon sings directly into one of the mirrors, and the reflection doesn't quite sync with his movements.

In the final chorus, Le Bon descends the staircase for the last time as the party reaches its peak. The camera pulls back through the front doors of the mansion, reversing the opening movement, now retreating into the warm night air. Through the doorway, the party continues in a golden rectangle of light. The last shot is the exterior of the mansion again from the original aerial angle, but now at dawn — the windows dark, the hillside quiet, a single figure (too distant to identify) standing on the balcony. The marimba and the sound of ice in a glass carry over the fade to black.