#david zed

Mr. Zed | R. O. B. O. T. | 1980

DAVID ZED - “R.O.B.O.T.”

During the recent Christmas break I had a lot of free time to just surf around and I came across two videos that have been running through my mind on an alternating basis for 2 weeks.

The first is Mr. Zed (a.k.a. David Zed), an American actor based in Italy whose gimmick is performing as a robot singer and stand up comic. He had a big hit in Italy in the 1970s with "R.O.B.O.T." but in the late 80s he also did a version "Witch Doctor":

And then I found this video by a South African musician named The Kiffness who created this unforgettable (seriously, it won't leave your head) tune based upon one of those talking cat videos:

Even the most mainstream of Italian pop music often has a tinge of the absurd to it, but David Zed’s uniquely bizarre “Zed” character went well beyond the outer limits of mainstream sensibilities. The perfect encapsulation of this character (which was created by an American born mime active predominantly in Italy) is the Sanremo featured song “R.O.B.O.T.”

    The music video is a psychedelic, effects laden clip of Robert performing the song as the Zed character, who is singing an absolute nonsense song that veers from Kraftwerk’s more hard sci-fi descriptions of robotics, to describing the kind of meatballs he eats. The video is presumably from some sort of televised performance, since in the middle of the song (during the “input, output” part) a very Italian sounding man announces the name of the song and pronounces the word “robot” in a distinctly Italian way (without the T at the end).