I Want My MTV (17 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOR A HUGE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE IN THE 1980s,
radio was the only delivery system for music. And radio had not evolved much—with few exceptions, American stations ignored punk rock, and hadn't changed their playlists in years. AOR (album-oriented rock) radio was based on tradition and legacy, and a belief that young audiences wanted to hear familiar music—Led Zeppelin's “Stairway to Heaven” and Lynyrd Skynyrd's “Freebird”—drawn from an unchanging canon. Rock was in danger of becoming as ossified as ballet, with its repeated repertoire of
Swan Lake
and
The Nutcracker
, and classical music, with its endless performances of Beethoven's fifth and seventh symphonies.

If there had been videos for Bad Company and Deep Purple, MTV probably would have played them—during the early days, they were still committed to an AOR playlist. But to fill time, they played new wave bands, mostly from England, who dressed in outrageous finery and adored the camera. “Video to us is like stereo was to Pink Floyd,” Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes said in 1984. “It was new, it was just happening. And we saw we could do a lot with it.”

When Duran Duran or Eurythmics videos aired in the same hour as Journey or REO Speedwagon, it was the Brits who seemed brighter, bolder, and more captivating. The lipsticked, cross-dressing audacity of these bands did not go unnoticed by an older generation. Bob Dylan, also in 1984, said, “I mean, now you can wear anything. You see a guy wearing a dress onstage now, it's like, ‘Oh, yeah, right.' You expect it.”

LIMAHL, Kajagoogoo:
In the UK, we'd come out of a period of depression in the late 1970s. We'd had electricity strikes by the miners and it was a real anarchic atmosphere. There was a movement of punk and skinheads and violence. Punk was pain and spitting and swearing, and I didn't like it. When we arrived at new wave and the great synthesizer explosion, everybody wanted to forget the previous five years. New wave was optimism, color, escapism, and running a million miles an hour from reality.

 

MARTIN FRY:
It's hard to explain to a younger audience, just how fucked up it was in 1982. You could get beaten up for wearing mascara, if you walked into a bar full of old guys playing dominoes, but that was part of the appeal. It was like saying “Fuck you.” Long may that spirit exist.

ABC used to antagonize bands who wore leather jackets and leather pants. They'd say, “What the hell are you doing?” There was a war between bands who thought there was authenticity in wearing denim, and newfangled bands like Duran Duran, Eurythmics, and Culture Club. We were all children of Roxy Music anyway.

 

JOHN TAYLOR:
In the first year or two, videos primarily were coming out of Europe, with a very sophisticated milieu. And they were dropping like bombs on the suburbs of Ohio and Texas, places that were so conservative. For people that were a little different—maybe they didn't yet know they were gay, or didn't know they were into art—the kinds of things that were on MTV were like life changers. All this stuff like Culture Club was the result of an underground, progressive, liberal, London art-school sensibility.

 

TOM BAILEY, Thompson Twins:
A golden age of pop music had started in England. It began with the Human League and ended with Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Brits were using lots of electronics and synthesizers, and people in the American music scene were very suspicious of us.

 

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!”