I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  ANDY MORAHAN, director: The American acts of that era wanted to wear what they normally wore, or be shot holding guitars. The British acts saw music video as a new art form in a way American acts didn’t.

  TOM BAILEY: English people found it easier to jump on the idea of videos and exploit them. Americans talk to each other readily, whereas we English people communicate by putting on our feathers. There’s always been extraordinary street fashion in London.

  DAVE HOLMES: All the men took dressing very seriously. I longed to dress like Spandau Ballet in those rich, burgundy suits and jackets with epaulets.

  JULIEN TEMPLE: The New Romantics were all about looking at themselves in the mirror, so they absolutely adored the idea of someone sticking a camera in front of them.

  HOWARD JONES, artist: It was a very liberating era. I felt that men are so tied up in a straitjacket of how they’re supposed to look, so their sexuality won’t ever be questioned. The ’80s broke that down a bit. Just because you’ve got brightly colored clothes doesn’t mean you’re gay. Surely that’s one of the functions of pop culture, to show people that there are many options out there and you can choose which one is right for you. MTV was socially progressive in that period.

  LIMAHL: I loved making videos, 100 percent. “Too Shy” cost £30,000, which back then was a huge amount of money. MTV played it in quite heavy rotation. The girl in the video who plays a waitress, she’s probably on camera more than any of us—her name is Ali Espley Miller, and she’s now married to the American comedian Dennis Miller. I had a very identifying hairstyle. It seemed logical to stand out from the crowd. Yeah, I had a mullet. There was a book published called The Mullet, and they gave me a full page. I think they called me a “duo-toned spikey mullet man.” In a way, it was theater.

  JUDY McGRATH: I remember the first U2 video I ever saw, “I Will Follow.” When it arrived at MTV, we gathered around the television like it was the invention of fire. I was like, Oh my god, who is this singer in the mullet? And listen to that guitar!

  PAUL McGUINNESS, manager: U2’s campaign in America pretty well started at the same time as MTV, and it became important for us extremely early on. There was a bit of snobbery about video—some rock acts thought it was tawdry. We liked making videos. And we didn’t do it in any bashful way. We wanted to be on MTV, no doubt about it.

  MEIERT AVIS, director: U2 wanted to be bigger than the Rolling Stones, and videos were a big part of how they set out to do it. We went to Sweden to make “New Year’s Day.” There was a director of photography named Sven Nykvist, who was Ingmar Bergman’s cameraman. We wanted to use him, but he was old and couldn’t travel, so we went to Sweden. As it turned out, he wasn’t well enough to shoot for us, so his camera operator shot “New Year’s Day.” We started in Stockholm and then went off looking for snow. We wanted big mountains, but Sweden’s fairly flat, so we went up toward Norway. U2 was in the middle of touring, and they couldn’t get insurance to cover them to ride horses in the video, so we got teenage girls to dress up as them and do their riding. You can’t tell it’s not them.

  PAUL McGUINNESS: There are no members of U2 who can ride a horse. But in the end, it was a good little film. MTV was really quite a small organization, and you could get somebody to watch your video and have the pleasure of seeing it on air a few hours later.

  BOB PITTMAN: Because we didn’t have enough videos, we’d play unknown British acts: U2, Madness, A Flock of Seagulls, Duran Duran. We ushered in the second British Invasion.

  MARTIN FRY: The record companies weren’t pressuring anyone to look a certain way. That came later. For “The Look of Love” we wanted to cross the visual style of Benny Hill, a really crude slapstick comedian, with An American in Paris. I don’t think Kurt Cobain would have ever put on a striped blazer and sung to a wooden crocodile. There’s a parrot on my shoulder at one point. We were pushing it to the limit, seeing how embarrassed we could get. Art is what you get away with.

  BRIAN GRANT: Martin Fry and I both loved old Hollywood movies. There was no Look at us, we’re a serious rock band. They just wanted to have fun.

  CLIFF BURNSTEIN: ABC never would have sold a record in America if it weren’t for videos. Same was true for many English acts: Duran Duran, Tears for Fears, Thompson Twins . . .

  SIR MIX-A-LOT, artist: Devo, Gary Numan, the Fixx—I liked all the new wave bands. But I didn’t like any of ’em so much that I tried to style my hair like the guy from A Flock of Seagulls. And I never tried to hold one key on a synthesizer for as long as he did in “I Ran.”

  MIKE SCORE, A Flock of Seagulls: Frank, the bass player, and I were both hairdressers. We were doing hair for models and photo shoots. We wanted to have a more distinctive look than every other band, so I created my particular hairstyle. You want all the young girls to see you and go, Ooooooh!

  The record company said, “We’ll do your video on Wednesday.” Like it was nothing. They didn’t explain to us what MTV was. We had no idea what we were doing. “I Ran” cost £5,000. To us, that was a lot of money. I remember my manager arguing with the record company: “Who’s gonna pay for it?”

  They gave us money and said, “Get yourselves some clothes that will look good on-screen.” The whole thing took maybe six hours—probably three of them in hair and makeup. The next thing we know, it’s on MTV every hour. It put us in every living room from Kansas to Seattle to Miami. We were famous before we ever got to the U.S. Other bands immediately imitated the way we looked. There was one Flock of Seagulls and ninety-nine copies.

  When we did gigs in New York, we would go in and do an interview with MTV. We’d talk about my hair, and talk about my hair, and talk about my hair. I was annoyed—we weren’t really there to talk about the band and the music. We were there to talk about my hair.

  GARY GERSH: MTV created a market in America for videos, so all of a sudden the quality went up. David Bowie, who had been making videos for a decade, was making more complex and expensive videos. We signed Bowie, and his first album for us was Let’s Dance, which was gigantic worldwide.

  DAVID MALLET: “Let’s Dance” was Bowie’s big comeback, pretty much a straight pop song as opposed to introverted, darker stuff. It was a superb gamble on his part and it paid off handsomely. He said, “I want to go to Australia and film videos.” He came up with this concept of two Aborigines in the modern world who were a bit lost. The videos has these mystical red shoes—if you had them on, you could dance. He got that from the Emeric Pressburger film The Red Shoes, an early Technicolor film that’s haunting and surreal.

  We shot in a bar in the morning and it was one hundred degrees outside. The people in the bar hated us, absolutely hated us. We were faggots from somewhere, and they were horrified that we had a young, attractive Aborigine girl in there, because they thought Aborigines were lower than dirt. She was dancing, and in order to show their hatred they started imitating her. I said, “Quick, film them.” It looked as if they were enjoying themselves. Actually, it was a dance of pure hatred.

  Why do the two Aborigines stomp the red shoes at the end of the video? People have asked me forever. I don’t know! Because it’s a music video, that’s why. End of story.

  NICK RHODES: I don’t think videos have to make sense. They only have to be really cool-looking.

  DAVE STEWART, Eurythmics: At the start of the Eurythmics, I became very ill. I had an operation because my lung kept collapsing. I had just gotten out of surgery, and they must’ve given me tons of morphine or something, because my head started to explode with the idea of visual imagery and making music. From then on, I was obsessed with videos.

  Just before that, a weird thing happened: I was walking down the street in Australia and stepped on something quite hard. I looked down and it was a solid gold bracelet. I picked it up, and as I turned the corner, I saw a pawnshop. I swapped the bracelet for an 8mm cine camera. From that moment on, I was always filming. I started to understand about putting imagery together with music.

  The first
Eurythmics video is “Never Gonna Cry Again.” Annie comes out of the sea backwards and I come out of the sand and there’s a tea party on the beach and everything is on fire. It’s totally surreal.

  JON ROSEMAN, producer: Dave had a tremendous feel for images. People often ask me, “How did you come up with idea of the cow?” I tell them, “Dave just said, ‘Let’s have a cow.’”

  DAVE STEWART: I drew the “Sweet Dreams” treatment in little blocks, like a comic book. Every scene, from beginning to end. I presented the treatment to the label, and they could not understand the bit with the cow. The cow was complicated, because we were in London, and the cow had to go down an elevator into a basement. The farmer who owned the cow was really agitated.

  ANNIE LENNOX, Eurythmics: “Sweet Dreams” was shot in a basement studio in the middle of London. There was an elevator big enough to take the cow down from the ground floor. That was one of the most surreal moments I’ve had—being in a building with a cow walking around freely. In a way, the video is a statement about the different forms of existence. Here are humans, with our dreams of industry and achievement and success. And here is a cow. We share the same planet, but it’s a strange coexistence.

  During the scene where Dave is sitting at a prototype computer, tapping the keyboard, the cow’s head came really close to him. I could see that happening and I thought, Oh shit, what is the cow going to do? It was almost nudging him. And Dave is so intuitive, he just rolled his eyes, so it looks like there was some kind of understanding between him and the cow. Like the cow had been told, “Right, so you do this and then Dave’s gonna do this. And . . . ACTION!”

  DAVE STEWART: “Sweet Dreams” prompted a big argument with the record company. They were pissed off when Annie and I turned up in matching suits, with Annie’s hair cropped off. They wanted her to wear a dress. They were like, “We don’t understand. Annie is such a pretty girl.” Then MTV got the video and it just went mad. It didn’t look like anything else. Annie’s hair was so different, and the colors in the video looked amazing. It was shot on 16mm film, but it was very rich. It became a phenomenon.

  STEVE BARRON: I believe Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” was the first music video shot on 35mm. Everyone was shooting on 16mm; 35 felt like something that was only allowed for the movies.

  At the time of “Don’t You Want Me,” I was really into the Truffaut movie Day for Night. I was intrigued by his idea of a film within a film, and I thought, We have to go further. What about a film within a film within a film? Phil Oakey was going out with Joanne Catherall at the time, the dark-haired singer. But it was Susan Ann Sulley who did the vocals, so she had to be the lead character. She walks into an editing room and hangs up her trench coat, and she’s basically playing a girl I had a crush on, one of the assistant editors where I was working. That coat became iconic.

  LIMAHL: Videos were so exciting. I remember watching Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” and making no sense of it. It was just a lot of pouting and shoulder pads.

  JEFF AYEROFF: I saw the “Don’t You Want Me” video and said, “Who is this director? I want him to do all our videos.”

  CURT SMITH, Tears for Fears: When Steve Barron directed “Pale Shelter,” that was the first time we worked with a serious director. The label said, “Steve Barron is the guy. He’s doing all these great videos.” And if I look back on it now, it’s the cheesiest thing. The highlight of the video comes at the end, when a paper airplane lands in Roland’s eye. That’s the good bit.

  JEFF AYEROFF: Joe Jackson ended up selling many more records than Elvis Costello did, mainly because of the videos he did with Steve Barron.

  JOE JACKSON, artist: Music videos weren’t even discussed when I made my first album in 1979. By 1982, there’d been a distinct shift. I made videos with Steve Barron for “Real Men” and “Steppin’ Out,” and by the time we got to “Breaking Us in Two,” I said to the label, “I don’t think this song should have a video.” I was told I had to make a video, whether I liked it or not. “Breaking Us in Two” was a crappy video. I was embarrassed. So I decided in my great wisdom that not only would I no longer make videos, but I would write an anti-video editorial for Billboard magazine. I mean, I’m not such a miserable bastard that I won’t admit that some videos are great fun. But I believed MTV was beginning to have a negative effect on music.

  I’m well aware that refusing to make videos accomplished nothing whatsoever except—how should I put this?—to make my next record less successful. It damaged my career and it never fully recovered.

  JOHN TAYLOR: One reason we were able to make the medium work for us better than a lot of our peers was Simon, who had a background in drama. He was much more open-minded and less self-conscious playing a role than, you know, Rod Stewart.

  SIMON LE BON: I did a lot of commercials, a BBC TV program, amateur and professional stage work from age fourteen.

  NICK RHODES: We shot “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Save a Prayer,” and “Lonely in Your Nightmare” on a trip to Sri Lanka. When I arrived there, I was dressed from head to toe in black leather, because I’d come from London and it was cold. I felt this intense heat and thought, I’m not really dressed properly, am I? I see this guy holding a sign with my name on it, and I think, it’s okay, I’ll take the limo to the hotel and have a shower, it’ll be fine. He leads me to a flatbed truck. It’s about three hundred degrees and I said, “How far is it to the hotel?” He said, “Five hours.”

  We finally arrived and it was like a mirage—the most beautiful beach you’ve ever seen. As I was walking up to the hotel, an elephant passed me on the street, I thought, It can’t get any stranger than this.

  The people that look after the elephants were completely smashed. They drink this stuff called arrack. For “Save a Prayer,” John and I were on an elephant, Simon was on one with Andy, and Roger was on one of his own. And they brought a female elephant who let out this enormous noise, which one of the guys in the crew was taping. He thought, Oh, this will be funny, and he played it back through the speakers. Nobody knew that it was her mating call. So the elephant with Roger on its back charges down the swamp and mounts this other elephant. Roger’s hanging on for dear life, and all of the mahouts are rolling around, thinking it’s hilarious. If he’d fallen off, he could have been trampled to death. It was funny as hell, but also quite hairy for a moment.

  RUSSELL MULCAHY: In one shot, the band was standing atop an ancient fortress called Sigiriya. It’s a sacred site, so they were in bare feet. It’s about 140 degrees out, their backs are to the camera, and while the audio track is playing, “Save a prayer for me now,” they’re going, “Fuck you, Russell! Fuck yoooooooou.” Their feet were burning.

  SIMON LE BON: As soon as Russell said, “Cut,” we started hopping around on the hot stairs.

  NICK RHODES: All three videos were made for something like $30,000. We pulled every favor we could from the Sri Lankan authorities. It was cheap to work there, but it was like a SWAT team. Simon and I got dropped from a helicopter onto the top of a monument, because they couldn’t land the helicopter. I must have been entirely insane.

  SIMON LE BON: “Hungry Like the Wolf” demanded a lot of acting. When other bands made videos with stories to them, you’d see them smirking and giggling. Whereas I acted as though I truly was being chased in the jungle. There’s a scene in “Hungry Like the Wolf” where the rest of the band are chasing after me, and it’s absolutely convincing.

  JOHN TAYLOR: “Hungry Like the Wolf” had a vague plot. Simon was Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, going up the jungle. And we were searching for him. “Hungry Like the Wolf” was like Apocalypse Now, and “Save a Prayer” was like Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  RUSSELL MULCAHY: We shot “Hungry Like the Wolf” in a city called Galle. The first shot was going to be set in the marketplace, with Simon coming through the market. The night before, Simon decided he wanted some highlights in his hair, but the girl did it all wrong, and Simon’s hair turned bright yellow. He
came out the next morning nearly in tears. Luckily I was wearing an Indiana Jones–type hat, and I said “Okay, stick my hat on him, and pull it down a bit.” If you watch the video closely, when he’s coming down the marketplace, his hair is bright yellow under that hat.

  SIMON LE BON: I wanted to have blond highlights in my hair, as we did in the 1980s. The hairdresser bleached it orange. The first scene we shot that day was in a busy Sinhalese market—spices, vegetables, legs of lamb with flies buzzing around them. The locals had gathered around the camera in a semicircle. I’m striding along the market with real purpose in my gait, and one of the eaves on a roof caught the hat and knocked it off my head. And I’m not joking, this crowd of three hundred people took two steps back with a sharp intake of breath. I was scrambling to put the hat back on my head.