MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  STEWART COPELAND: Was that the one with the face coming out of the soup? Face coming out of the beans. That's the image that endures. They were great, I was a big fan of Wall of Voodoo.

  STAN RIDGWAY: I guess it's bittersweet. I thought we made a pretty good video in "Mexican Radio" for them. They played the hell out of it. It was really when we made that video, I was thinking Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp, their movies they made in the early parts of the Parisian avant-garde or something. So I was from that angle.

  -- Squeeze --

  GLENN TILBROOK: We did a video for "Tempted," and the record company wouldn't let us use it. It was an excellent video. So we ended up with a very dull performance on stage, at some gig in Manchester, I think it was. It was a fair enough reflection of where we were as a band at that point. But I have to say, it's a pretty dull video. [The original version] was absolutely ahead of its time. It looks contemporary now. I haven't even got a copy of it. There's a copy of it in Australia that someone played me. It was directed by Barney Bubbles, who did the cover for East Side Story. And he was jump-cutting a lot, before anyone had done it. Also, he replayed the images through a TV screen and then messed about with the tuning of it, so it looked like it was fading in and out. It was a remarkable video, and someday it will be recognized for the genius that he was. By the time "Black Coffee in Bed" came around, it was the beginning of spurious plots with no meaning. I think that "Black Coffee in Bed" is a true kitsch video classic, in that it's absolutely devoid of meaning, but it caught the spirit of the time perfectly. I experimented with make-up on that video perhaps more than any other time. [Laughs]

  -- U2 --

  MICHAEL SADLER: Basic, straightforward — the way that they were trying to put themselves across at the time. A little political in the beginning. I think the band wavered from that at the right time. I think if had they pushed that political thing too long, they wouldn't be who they are today. They would have been dismissed fairly early. Because the music — quite honestly — is slightly unremarkable from a musician point of view. But it works for them. It works because it's built and built and built.

  STEWART COPELAND: U2 were slightly different. We saw them in Dublin, and they played in the afternoon. They were way low down on the bill. But just hanging out backstage, they had a charisma about them. They had a buzz, even though they weren't on the charts. I don't even know if they had recorded an album yet, but U2 kind of stuck in our brains, just the vibe of them. I think we had a lot of affinity with them, as a matter of fact. I can't remember any of [U2's videos]. You get to the top, and particularly when the band broke up, we weren't really in that business anymore. I just stopped watching MTV. I became a film composer and was watching movies. I had sort of "been there/done that" with that world and really couldn't be bothered to watch MTV videos. Sort of didn't see any of them. I mean, if you talked to the people that came before me, none of them saw any of our videos. It's sort of a disrespect that is not meant disrespectfully, if you know what I mean.

  ALAN HUNTER: When U2 first came along, I was watching a video, as we often were watching a new video in the green room down in the studio. I think it was Mark and I sitting around, watching "I Will Follow." I think it was kind of a live concert clip — Bono in his loose-sleeved, sort of French-cut shirt, looking very styled. But very passionate. I thought it was kind of lightweight. Mark thought it was fabulous. He said, "This is going to be huge." I was like, "Really? You think this guy is going to be huge?" I was not a hit-maker. I had no real feel for it. I thought Madonna and her "Borderline" song was lightweight. I didn't understand what was coming, to be honest. Mark was in the music business longer than I was, for sure. So he kind of understood the ebb and flow. But I got to interview Bono and the Edge first. Again, when new bands like that came along, and the interviews got divvied up, I used to get the new guys, and Mark and JJ got the Paul McCartneys and Rod Stewarts and Robert Plants of the world. I liked the new wave, from Depeche Mode to Ultravox to the bands from the U.K. Anyway, Bono and the Edge came on, and I introduced them. As the cameras rolled, "Today with us in the studio, from U2, it's the Edge and Bow-No." The producer stopped and said, "It's Bono."

  JON ANDERSON: I think I grew into U2. I went to see them play, and then I realized how good they were. It wasn't until Zoo TV [that] I started to [think], "Hey, they're making really good stuff. They're making really good movement and capturing the world in that period," the sort of late '80s/early '90s visual art on stage, capturing it on video. And the music fits perfectly. That's why they're still the big band.

  DAVE MARSH: There was a fund of money, usually that got charged back to the act, that helped younger bands that didn't have a touring reputation to go out and work. And the reason I bring it up is what happened when MTV came in is the video budgets — every dollar in them — came from the touring. And what happened was you created a bunch of bands that didn't create "road reputations." You see it even now...you see it even more now. U2 was one of the last bands to benefit from that type of support. And that's why U2 was one of the last bands with staying power. One of the things that MTV did was reorient the recording industry — not the music industry — much more intensively than ever, to hit singles rather than album projects.

  --Thomas Dolby --

  THOMAS DOLBY: "Europa and the Pirate Twins" was mainly shot on a beach in front of a nuclear power station in the east of England, and featured my friend who was a still-photographer and his girlfriend, who got dressed up in a bandage for that song. [Laughs] And "Airwaves" was sort of a post-apocalyptic, underground survivalist kind of thing, and was shot in the Docklands of east London, which, in those days, were very desolate. Now, they've all been tarted up. "Radio Silence" was in the studio, in front of a white site, with various artifacts of the radio age — fragments of giant radios and things like that. When it came to "She Blinded Me with Science," I actually wrote the storyboard before I even had the song finished. It was kind of like the song was a soundtrack for the video. I managed to persuade my record company to let me do it myself, because I wanted Steve Barron to do it, but he wasn't available, because he was making "Billie Jean" at the time for Michael Jackson. But the budget had already been assigned, so I talked the record company into letting me do it myself. And I think it made a big difference, because the personality of that video is a very single-minded kind of a feel to it, and I think that results in the fact that it's all me. "She Blinded Me with Science" wasn't on the album [The Golden Age of Wireless]. I recorded it as a single after the album. And then when the American record company heard it, they wanted to repackage the album with "Science" on it. We shot it over a day. We had a budget of £10,000. So that gave us a day's shoot, a long day. I left early in the morning, and it was a location in the middle of Regent's Park in London, which is not actually a home for deranged scientists. [Laughs] It's some sort of building that we rented for the day. It was quite hard really, being in front of the camera and behind the camera. I was still pretty new to the whole language of film. But what would happen was the crew community for videos in the U.K. at the time were basically feature film crews, who would work cheap because you would upgrade them. So like a key grip could become a camera operator, or a camera operator would become a director of photography, and so on. And they would work cheap, so they could get some work on their resume, in the slot above them. There was a sense of fun about it. You had to work quick and improvise things. You didn't have the luxury of going back and reshooting and getting lots of coverage. You had to get your shot and move on. And there was music playing all the time, which was nice [for the crew]. Usually when they do films or commercials, there's no music. So it had a party feel to it. Dr. Magnus Pyke was a TV celebrity scientist for the BBC. He was a real personality, a real English personality. And I'd hired him to do the voiceover on the recording and said, "Would you come do the video as well?" He was willing to do that. He'd never been asked to do anything like that before. He seemed to enjoy himself, although the next ti
me I saw him a couple of years later, he kind of cursed me, because he said every time he went to the U.S.A., people would sneak up behind him on the sidewalk and go, "SCIENCE!" And my father was in it. He was one of the "mad scientists" — he had on a pair of jet-propelled rollerskates. I think the rest of the scientists I picked out of an extras catalog, including "Miss Sakamoto." She just had the right look. I just thumbed through a bunch of 8 x 10s and picked people out.

  -- The Fixx --

  CY CURNIN: There was an Eastern religious sect that had predicted the end of the world on the day we made this video ["Stand or Fall"] — April 12, 1982. We had great fun running around on the beaches of Dorset, trying to look like many. When I say many, I mean that we needed to create a battle scene, but we were a small army of five. Shot in 35mm, it looked — and still does — amazing. Jeanette Obstoj and Rupert Hine did us proud. Those guys always put passion into everything they do. I think it was an enormous part of our success. ["Red Skies"] was taken from a live performance for the BBC at the Riverside studios. I am actually singing live over the backing track. That's why I'm the only one who looks like he's concentrating. We had Brian Grant chosen for us to shoot ["Saved by Zero"] by the record company. By this time, MCA had woken up to the fact that videos were important. They had been penny-pinching our earlier efforts, but now opened the vaults and in came the "professionals," with huge expense accounts that afforded us lunches, massages, and fourteen stylists to make us look like proper rock stars! The aftershock of the huge pricetag to the "Saved by Zero" video was that the record company agreed that Ostoj and Hine were in fact very talented at a third of the cost [for "One Thing Leads to Another"]. So with very clever storyboards, Jeanette was able to create a very memorable montage that still sits in people's minds. Goes to show that a good idea costs nothing. Superbly edited by Rupert Hine, who knew the song backwards, because he produced it, too!

  -- Romeo Void --

  DEBORA IYALL: What was exciting was we hired a filmmaker [for "Never Say Never"] who was used to shooting in film, and he wanted to shoot in black and white. He was slightly doing a take-off on Godard in the video, but it only comes up at the end, where there's a little gesture of rubbing the thumb across the bottom lip, which is a lift directly from Godard. I think we thought it should be artistic, and the person who does it should be someone who knows how to make an artistic statement out of it, and see that in the band. I think it turned out quite beautifully, and it served us quite well all these years later, because it captures us as individuals making our sound together and obviously having a good time doing it, in our environment. We filmed that video in San Francisco, in our rehearsal studio. We got the local cafe in on it, because we had that scene where we walked by the cafe, and that's the cafe I used to hang out in all the time. And we filmed one of the scenes in my bedroom. It was sort of that "homegrown thing." ["A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing)"] was filmed at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Valencia, and the director was Julia Hayward. She had also worked on the "Burning Down the House" video, which featured the projections on the house and the projection on the road, where it looks like the road is going into his mouth. I had met her through the San Francisco Art Institute, where I went to school. She was a lecturer there. So I said, "We've got to use her, because I think she's got a neat vision." It was fun to collaborate with the art students on that, and we got a lot of art student interns to help make the "starry sky" and things like that. It was actually a pretty fun experience. Originally, I wanted to have the skateboarder as the girl in the video, because they wanted us to have another lead girl. We went along with it, because it was, "Get your video made...or not." That's because they didn't think I was attractive enough to be the only girl in the video. So I thought, "OK, we can go along with that, but let's have a girl who is fierce." So I had arranged to have this girl skateboarder be the other girl in the video, and then at the last minute, she just didn't show up for the shoot! So we were literally at the shoot, with everybody — all the crew and everything — and it's like, "We don't have another girl...what are we going to do?" So we went running around the school, looking for people. We did a couple of little tests, looked at them, and decided on the girl, who in some ways, has some resemblance to me. She's not white, and she had big, fluffy dark hair. I think Julia is just amazing for being able to think on her feet, and we did that whole mirror sequence, where I turn into her and she turns into me. That was done by using a one-way mirror, somehow. Sort of early special effects. Also, the last scene I always loved. I loved filming that scene, seeing the golden California hills and oak trees in our video. I've always really identified with California. I grew up here and looking at the foothills all the time. It was nice to integrate that.

  -- X --

  JOHN DOE: We worked with Ray Manzarek on that video ["The Hungry Wolf"], because he had some film experience, at least film school. I remember going into a soundstage, setting up, and playing. And our roadies up in the rafters, pulling a string with a bat on the end of it. We thought that was very "B-movie" and "kitsch." We had some grand ideas. I actually thought of a much more cinematic [idea], having a wolf coming down through the Hollywood Hills, and having this sort of horror element to it. But we couldn't afford that. We had one day, we sang it four or five times, they edited it, we made some notes, and [we] tried not to be embarrassed. [Manzarek] had the cameraman on roller skates, rather than having a dolly, because it was cheap. Rather than the wheelchair trick, he used the roller skate trick. Elektra was not willing to put the money into making a big production.

  -- The English Beat --

  DAVE WAKELING: "Save It for Later" was at a crypt club in London, an underground crypt club to try and keep teenagers off alcohol. They made coffee bars under the churches, and filled up the coffee awfully strong, because the teenagers were all taking speed but not telling them! That "espresso culture" was born, and it wasn't just too much coffee. It was the burgeoning birth of mod in the '60s with these crypt clubs. And one of them had actually had groups that played there. So we had it done up as part of the budget of the video, and Julien Temple recreated this kind of '60s beat ambience. Messing with the other "beat," the Beat poets of the '50s and '60s. So there is a guy reading Jean-Paul Sartre upside down. And a little dance bit that was in that video ended up being a big dance for the band. You sort of wave your hands and wiggle them as though they're wet. We did the same sort of live thing with Julien Temple again with the song "Doors of Your Heart," a couple of days before the Notting Hill Carnival in London, with a float that had been made for that year and a rent-a-crowd. Edited the video together and brought it straight out. So people were amazed that we brought a video out of the Notting Hill Carnival like the day of the carnival.

  -- Fishbone --

  ANGELO MOORE: "Party at Ground Zero"...the video...I remember it was somewhere in L.A. The band was together, we got ourselves painted up, and it was fun. I think it was the first [Fishbone] video that may have gotten on MTV, but it wasn't the first video that we did, though. The first video was "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." There's always some waiting around between shots, with video preparation and all that kind of stuff that goes on. How is it filming a video compared to how Fishbone plays live? When we play live, there ain't no waiting. We blast right through the set. There's no time to get the camera ready, set the tripod, focus, or make-up, or any of that shit. That's live.