TELEVISED

PAUL LESTER CELEBRATES THE 24/7 POP ESCAPISM OF MTV’S GLORY DAYS – WHEN MUSIC VIDEOS RULED THE WORLD

MTV may not have given birth to the pop video – everyone from The Beatles to Bowie, The Rolling Stones to Queen can lay claim to producing pioneering music clips before the channel existed – but the emergence of the new channel helped make the video the pre-eminent music format of 80s pop’s golden age, one every bit as valid as the single and album.

And this sea-change in music consumption couldn’t have better suited the artists of the day. The success of the sort of stars written about in these pages – ABC, Adam Ant, Culture Club, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, The Human League, Spandau Ballet – would have been unthinkable without the cable and satellite channel formerly known as Music Television, certainly in the US, where it was launched on 1 August 1981 (see our box-out on page 43).

The timing was impeccable. The fast-moving British music scene saw punk cede to post-punk and the dark, forbidding experimental sounds of Joy Division, PiL, Gang Of Four, Wire and their peers.

But already, by the end of 1980, you could tell there was a desire for something different again, something more glamorous and fl amboyant. Likeminded people across the globe were having similar thoughts. Just as the creators of MTV at their New York HQ were envisioning a vibrant, more visual future for pop, in Sheffi eld the urge to shift from dour grey to colour was being felt by purveyors of electro noise Vice Versa, then in the process of metamorphosing into ABC. As they famously declared: “We’re through with matt, and into gloss.” Influenced by funk and disco, James Brown and Chic, they could see a change coming in the guise of ‘new pop’.

Après ABC, le déluge: throughout late 1980 and 1981, a slew of new (and sometimes not-so-new but cognisant and adaptable) acts emerged for whom the video was the natural milieu: Adam and the Ants, Bow Wow Wow, The Police, Madness, and most videogenic of all, Duran Duran. “I think videos have certainly worked to our advantage,” said Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes, who found the medium perfect for capturing his androgynous prettiness. “Video to us is like stereo was to Pink Floyd,” he refl ected in 1984. “It was new, it was just happening. And we saw we could do a lot with it.”

Rhodes was far from the only one who immediately seized the opportunities provided by MTV, seeing it as the ideal vehicle for the new sounds of a young generation of musicians – or rather, non-musicians. One Christopher Hamill, later known as Limahl of Kajagoogoo, acknowledged that MTV could have been specifi cally designed for the peacocks and fashionistas of new romantic and synth-pop and their shared flight into fantasy. “Punk,” he said, by contrast, “was pain and spitting and swearing.

New wave and the great synthesizer explosion – everybody wanted to forget the previous five years. New wave was optimism, colour, escapism, and running a million miles an hour from reality.”

MTV offered nothing short of 24/7 escapism for a new visually literate pop generation, just in time for a new wave of brilliantly fl ash and fancy pop kids such as Madonna and Prince. Not everybody was able to make the transition; there were pitfalls for anyone who couldn’t make the grade. As The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards put it: “A good record could be killed by a bad video.”

“VIDEO TO US IS LIKE STEREO WAS TO PINK FLOYD“

NICK RHODES

Still, MTV’s usefulness far outweighed any diffi culties involved, and by the end of the 80s, video had become the ultimate form of artistic expression and the essential way to reach an audience.

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