It was in the late 60ies, that Richard Anthony Hewson started his work arranging songs for other bands and he soon came up with quite a portfolio, working with such illustrious names as The Beatles, The Bee Gees, Herbie Hancock, Supertramp, Diana Ross, Chris De Burgh and many others. So we’ll forgive the sign of a slightly inflated ego that shines through when he named the band with which he was going to produce his own music after himself – RAH band – especially given that he was, in fact, the band’s only actual member.
Founded in 1977 the band’s first hit was “The Crunch”, an instrumental involving no synthesizers in which Hewson played all the instruments himself. Their biggest hit, “Clouds Across The Moon”, however, involved quite a few machine-generated melodies, as well as vocals provided by his wife, “Dizzy Lizzy”. Can’t stray too far, now, can we?
They obviously spared no expenses in the costume department, did they?
Fifty-Three years, two weeks and five days ago Neil Armstrong uttered his famous words as he first set foot onto Earth’s big satellite. Some people to this day are certain that it was all staged, using studio photos and computer generated graphics.
Thirty-five years and one week ago MTV Europe went on air, with Dire Strait’s “Money For Nothing” being the first video that flickered into European music lovers’ homesteads. It featured lines Mark Knopfler – who had work-experience as a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post – had picked up from a guy standing next to him in an electronics store in New York City in front of a wall of TV’s (all playing MTV) and a guest performance by Sting (“I want my Em-Tee-Veeee….”). Most notably though it displayed breathtaking state-of-the-art CGI, depicting not one but two working-class men watching and commenting on music videos.
Knopfler was rather unimpressed, as he considered videos to be beneath his dignity, destroying the purity of the music. Luckily for us his girlfriend chimed in, finding the concept quite brilliant, and while Knopfler was supposedly not at all convinced he at least did not interfere with proceedings.
The video was supposed to have more details, like buttons on the shirts, which couldn’t be implemented as they ran out of budget. It still won the Video of the Year awards though.
But just think about what might have been possible, if only they had asked NASA, instead of having it directed by Steve Barron (whom we already know from A-Ha).
Some songs come into this world, delight us for a breathtaking moment and fall back into sweet oblivion in as little time as it took them to appear. Others take on a life of their own, gain new meaning against the backdrop of a changing zeitgeist and reinvent themselves repeatedly over decades. Marvin Gaye is a particular master of (co-)composing the latter, as exemplified by the Motown signature song “Dancing in the Street”.
Released in 1965 by Martha Reeves, the song was originally simply inspired by people cooling themselves off during a hot summer in the streets of Detroit by opening fire hydrants. However, it was soon picked up as a civil rights anthem by young black demonstrators demanding equality. But it’s metamorphosis would not stop there, many different famous versions would be recorded over the years:
Shortly after the initial release the British “The Kinks” were recording their own version, branded as being far too boring by critics. A year later The Mamas & The Papas followed suit and they would end up finishing their famous (and last) live performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 with the song. Grateful Dead, Little Richard, Van Halen – the list of artists covering the song is long and contains many famous names. Since we’re so far focusing on Music Videos we’re going with the 1985 version by David Bowie and Mick Jagger here.
As part of the big “Live Aid” famine release cause of that year the two English rock stars originally planned to sing the song together – live, from two separate stadiums: Wembley in London and John F. Kennedy in Philadelphia. Unfortunately while both of these two were certainly great musical artists, they happened to be slightly less brilliant data transmission engineers and when they realised that one of them would have to be not-quite-so-live due to the two seconds delay of the (at the time quite revolutionary) satellite transmission involved neither of the two was prepared to give in and be “that guy”, so it did not happen.
They ended up recording the song in Abbey Road studio and – certainly helped by the popularity of the Live Aid movement – it would become the most successful of the many recorded versions of this song, reaching top spot in the charts of many countries.
In the early 1980’s a new musical – or perhaps more accurately: cultural – subgrene began to emerge, following the Post-Punk and New Wave movements: Gothic Rock was at the beginning of a whole subculture that would go on for many years, up into the 21st century.
One of the most prominent representatives of the genre was The Cure, with their frontman Robert Smith (the only band member to stay on over the course of the bands 44 years so far) steering the group to a slightly more pop-influenced course from about 1982, which greatly increased the commercial success of the band.
And while the video, featuring the band members stuffed into a giant wardrobe and playing various toy-instruments representing their actual individual craft, looks like it would have been fun to make, apparently it was hugely uncomfortable. Just imagine being confined to an extremely cramped space for twelve hours and then being thrown into a tank filled with 5000 litres of water…
A popular fad of the 80ies we already covered in our first episode was combining live videos with animation. However, while “Sledgehammer” was certainly setting a standard, the title of “best Music Video of the 1980’s” in my opinion goes to a different representative of the genre. One and a half billion views on the remastered version on YouTube alone tell me I’m not the only one to think so.
While there had been a (rather boring) video for A-Ha’s “Take On Me” before, Warner Brothers saw much more potential in the song and so a second version was created. Produced by rotoscoping 3000 frames over the span of 16 weeks the video manages to tell a thrilling story over the course of it’s four minutes, complete with a boy-meets-girl beginning, two menacing villains and a heart-stopping climax where the life of the hero hangs in the balance… Ok, I might exaggerate a bit, but decide for yourself:
