I Want My MTV (36 page)

 

DAVID ROBINSON:
My own mother saw “Magic” and said I wasn't in it. I had to play it for her, pause the video, and say, “Look look look,
that's me
.”

 

VALERIE FARIS:
A lot of bands would get what we called shot counters—that's our phrase—where every guy in the band counts how many shots he's in and there's a whole negotiation: “I'm only in fifteen shots and you're in twenty.”

 

BRUCE ALLEN:
Guys would sit there with stopwatches to make sure they got enough camera time. The drummer wanted as much camera time as the front man.

 

STEWART COPELAND:
I grew to understand that videos were mainly about getting our singer's face out there. Because it was so pretty. That's the way it goes. Drummers learn that lesson pretty early in life. Guitarists never quite learn that lesson. Drummers and bass players, we're over it.

 

JERRY CASALE:
It got to a point where the contract would say, “You shall feature the lead singer 35 percent of the time in medium close-ups or close-ups.” And when you're hiring extras, you might be told that the singer's girlfriend didn't like the girl you're putting in the video because she's too pretty. She's jealous and thinks the singer's gonna screw her, so you can't have that girl. Or, if you put guys in the video, they couldn't be better looking than the band. These are all things I was told.

 

KEVIN GODLEY:
I gave a vitriolic speech at the 1985 VMA awards, slamming the fact that everything was becoming predictable, and saying we must hang on to this beautiful thing we'd created and not bow down to commercial pressure. Big music videos were starting to look the same. It wasn't as quite adventurous as it had been. I wouldn't say the rot had set in. But the beginning of the rot had set in.

 

NIGEL DICK:
When I worked at Phonogram Records, I commissioned a video for Tears for Fears called “Mothers Talk.” The band
hated
the video. Just hated it. Their next single was “Shout,” and we all decided that I'd direct it. The label was happy I was now producing
and
directing, because they didn't have to pay the 15 percent production company fee or the 10 percent director's fee. I made “Shout,” and the U.S. label rep hated it. He said, “Well, this is a piece of crap, isn't it? We're gonna have to remake this for America.” As you can probably deduce, that never happened. It became a big hit.

 

CURT SMITH:
The downside of videos is, they're a reminder of all the bad fashion you went through. Our videos are kind of embarrassing, especially “Shout,” but they're an endless source of amusement for my children: “Oh my God, you've got
braids
in your hair!” They laugh hysterically. It's not like we looked worse than anyone else. There were people who looked even worse than we did. So on a scale, we were somewhere in the middle.

“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was like an American driving song, one of those things you'd hear on the radio. So we went to LA, to the desert, we got a car—an Austin Healey 3000—and we drove. That's pretty much the whole concept. The shoot was a disaster. I remember Nigel being in tears on the second night. He had to lug equipment around. He couldn't get anyone to clean the car, so he was there with a sponge cleaning the Austin Healey.

I slept in a camper bus out in the middle of nowhere for a couple of nights, and I had to be up at 4 A.M. so we could get the sunrise shot. We had an accident while we were filming the dirt bikes and four-wheel off-road vehicles, and one kid flew off and smashed his head. He was out cold. The video producer, an American girl, stood there and chanted some Buddhist stuff. We're frantically trying to find an ambulance while she's chanting.

 

NIGEL DICK:
Roland Orzabal told me what he envisioned for “Head Over Heels”: “I see myself in a library, there's a beautiful girl, we'll grow old together, and there's all this random stuff like a rabbi and a chimp.” And I'm rapidly scribbling on a piece of paper: “Chimp. Rabbi.”

 

CURT SMITH:
When Roland pulls out the drawer and all the cards fly out at him? That was a ripoff of
Ghost Busters
. We were in the middle of a huge tour, and the album was getting more successful. I remember I was asleep in the dressing room and someone woke me up to say that “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” had gone to number one in America. Then we finished the video. It was hard to find time to celebrate.

DAVID MALLET:
The Queen video where we really nailed it was “I Want to Break Free,” where they're in drag. We didn't stop laughing for three days. We were ill from laughing. Freddy Mercury was desperately shy. It was a hell of a job to get him out of the dressing room. I'd say, “Come on, Fred, don't be silly, let's go.” He'd say, “All right darling, all right.” He called me Mistress Mallet. He used to shout, “Come on girls, Mistress Mallet's here.”

 

MICK KLEBER:
David Mallet is one of the top video-makers of all time. He directed Heart's “What About Love?,” which was a
huge
video with a lot of killer imagery—big explosions, cauldrons pouring molten steel into molds while Nancy Wilson played a guitar solo.

 

ANN WILSON:
David Mallet had a nickname: Miss Mallet. He was a perfectionist, and he wanted things his way. I think that video may have been the moment when the idea of feminine naturalness was at an all-time low. The heels were at an all-time high, the corsets were at an all-time tightness. That was when we got our first hair extensions. The idea was to transform us into porn kittens.

 

NANCY WILSON:
We took our clothing cues from
Purple Rain
and from
Amadeus
, which we watched a million times. I was rocker-cising on top of a fiery spiral staircase. We had so much hair and hairspray, and there's fire coming at us. It's like,
Why did we say yes to this again?

 

LIMAHL:
I'm going to tell you something, but I'm not going to name names. In one of my solo videos, the director came to my hotel while I was in Sydney, to discuss the video, and we ended up having sex. He was a famous director and he was considered very important. I was thinking,
Oh my God, I'm having sex with him
. I mean, at that point I was pretty famous all over the world.

Of course, when he was directing me on the set with lots of people around, there was a twinkle in his eye, and in mine, because we knew what had happened a few nights before. The video was great.

 

KEVIN CRONIN:
“Can't Fight This Feeling” was directed by a guy who married my seventh-grade girlfriend, Sherry. Her husband, Kevin Dole, was an aspiring video director and she suggested that he contact me. Kevin had been doing commercials and was very into pixillation. All the big-name directors wanted this video, but I wanted to give him a shot. Everybody around me was like, “Oh great, you want to hire your first girlfriend's husband to do this huge video?” When I saw “Can't Fight This Feeling,” I was mortified by my hair. I was like, “We can't release this. I'll be a laughingstock.” There was casual footage of us at the piano, in T-shirts and jeans, and they used that for the video.

 

KEVIN DOLE, director:
“I Do' Wanna Know” was a fun song, so I wrote a goofy video in which all the REO members dressed in wacky outfits, acting as the family of a loony kid—who, for better or worse, Kevin asked me to portray. So I shaved my head, donned makeup, and did my best. It turned out to be a big hit on MTV.

 

LOL CREME:
We wanted to give the Go West singer an image for “We Close Our Eyes.” He had a great voice, great presence, but terrible teeth. We said, “You have to get your teeth fixed.” We were brutal. We thought this was the sort of thing despot directors did. He fixed his teeth, we styled him, gave him a grease-monkey look, and it helped enormously.

 

HOWARD JONES:
When I was playing clubs as a one-man synth band, I had a mime, Jed, who danced onstage. That's about as un–rock n' roll as you can get, really. Jed's in the “Things Can Only Get Better” video, doing a Charlie Chaplin character, and I also had a magician—people had never seen
that
before.

 

JERRY CASALE:
The best story is the Jane Siberry video I directed, “One More Colour.” She wanted to walk a cow on a leash. This was her demand. So we went to a cow wrangler in Simi Valley, California, and settled on one cow she seemed comfortable with. The location was way out in Saugus, where they shot Roy Rogers westerns. It's time for the cow to be there and the guy doesn't show up. He's MIA, nowhere to be found. We're pissed off. Suddenly we see dust in the distance of a long dirt road, he's driving very fast, and his truck has an animal trailer hitched to it. He jumps out of the truck and he's really mean, like, “Don't even fuckin' talk to me.” He's sweating and he looks crazed. As a guy who had done coke myself, I knew he was totally coked up.

He goes to the trailer and at least thirty of us are watching him. We see him looking into the trailer, and he goes, “Fuck! Goddamn it! Fuck! I lost the fucking cow!” And he jumps back into the truck. When he'd turned off the highway, into the dirt road, the cow flew out the back of the trailer. Eventually he comes back with the cow, and the whole left side of it is skinned and bleeding from pavement burns, like if you had a bike accident. He goes, “It'll be okay. Just shoot the cow from the other side and the blood won't show.”

 

ANTON CORBIJN, director:
I had a low opinion of music videos. I had no desire to make them. Photographing musicians was my first love. But bands said, “You do our photographs and our album covers, why not do this, too?” U2 had done a video for “Pride” with Donald Cammell, who was a proper filmmaker. The band was afraid it was too cinematic, almost too devoid of street vibe. So Bono asked me to have a try. I had to do it near Heathrow Airport, before they boarded a plane to Japan. I was given a couple of hours in the basement of a hotel. I did it in one shot, mostly close-ups of their faces. It's terrible. Island Records sent it out and then recalled it. And the manager, Paul McGuinness, swore that I would never be allowed near U2 again with a film camera.

 

PAUL McGUINNESS:
Anton made one video where he shot U2 in a photographic homage to the cover of
Meet the Beatles
, where the band are lit only from the side. When we looked at it, we immediately realized it was really terrible.

 

BRYAN ADAMS:
“Heaven” was Steve Barron trying to be sci-fi, I guess. Televisions represent people sitting in seats, stacks of video monitors represent each member of the band. Everything I did with Steve was kind of nonsensical. They didn't have the computer technology we have now. It was, like, a couple of carpenters and an electrician.

The whole budget for the “Run to You” video went into building a tree. Lightning was supposed to hit the tree, and create a big, long lightning storm. Imagine the shock and horror on set when the fucking thing burns in about a minute. We stood there, looking at this tree up in flames. And Steve Barron's going, “Oh.
Shit.
” That is probably my worst video.

 

STEVE BARRON:
I worked with Jeff Ayeroff when he was commissioning videos at A&M, on Bryan Adams and a couple of other things. When Jeff got to Warner Bros., the label had released a single called “Take on Me,” by a new Norwegian act A-ha. The song had failed miserably: No radio play, no MTV play. Jeff said to me, “I need an amazing video for these guys. You can have as much time as you'd like. And I'm going to give you £100,000 to do it.” Which was an unheard of amount, especially for an unknown act.

 

JOHN BEUG, record executive:
I came across an animator named Michael Patterson, who was studying to be a medical illustrator at the Chicago Circle campus of the University of Illinois but decided he wanted to become an animator instead. He'd made a short film called
Commuter
. I showed it to Ayeroff, and eventually that film turned into a-ha's “Take on Me.”.

 

JEFF AYEROFF:
Commuter
was great. I paid Michael Patterson $2,500 to give me a six-month exclusive on his services, so I'd get to use him first. Soon after, I heard a-ha's “Take on Me” and fell in love with the song. Then I saw a picture of the band, and it was like,
Do people actually look like this?
Morten Harket was one of the best-looking men in the world.

 

STEVE BARRON:
I'd been obsessed with animation from an early age—I loved all the Disney films—and I decided to do frame-by-frame animation for “Take on Me.” No video director had ever had the time or the money to do that. I was in a hotel in New York, working on a Toto video, and I had an image flash through my mind of an animated hand reaching out of a comic book. I literally got a little tingle.

 

RUSSELL MULCAHY:
Steve Barron's a-ha video was absolutely groundbreaking. Just extraordinary. Probably the most creative video I'd ever seen.

 

STEVE BARRON:
The technique we used is rotoscope animation. In rotoscope, you shoot everything first as a live-action film, and then it's reanimated, frame by frame. The animator, Michael Patterson, did eighteen hundred drawings.

A-ha were grateful to be given this big shot. They were all quite young, and Morten, the singer, was sort of sweetly naive. His first real relationship was with the girl in the video, Bunty Bailey. When we started shooting, I told him I wanted him to take her hand and lead her into the comic world. And by about take four, they would carry on holding hands even when we'd cut.