STAND AND DELIVER by Adam & the Ants (1981)

Dandy:
/ˈdæn.di/ n [C]
A man, especially in the past, who dressed in expensive, fashionable clothes and was very interested in his own appearance.

Where have all the Dandies gone?

Long time passing…

These days, when it’s common to see men stepping out for the evening sporting the same Hot Pocket-filling-stained t-shirt they slept in the night before, we may need a return to Dandyism more than ever. O where art thou, Adam Ant?


In early 1981 Adam and his band of merry Ants crawled all over the music video scene with STAND AND DELIVER, an ode to Dandyism that blasted the drab, unkempt 1970s to bits.

Like all Adam and the Ants videos, STAND AND DELIVER – co-directed by Mike Mansfield and Adam himself – is cheeky modern social commentary, arrived at in this case by placing the early 1980s in the context of Georgian England.

The clip features Mr. Ant in fully made-up glory as a dashing “dandy highwayman” who robs the elite, only to find they have nothing much worth stealing. Their clothes are dull and their record collections hopeless. What’s a poor highwayman to do?

Instead of a gun or a knife, he strikes his victims with the most painful weapon of all: the mirror! Yes, forcing them to view their own boring reflections is his diabolical (and dashed clever) scheme to shake up the establishment.

Armed with his looking-glass ammunition, the Dandy Highwayman next leaps right through a window (getting bonus points for actually performing this stunt!) and lands smack in the midst of a stuffy dinner party.

This of course infuriates the nobleman at the head of the table, who sentences Adam to hanging. In a rescue stunt worthy of Will Turner and Jack Sparrow, one of Adam’s Ants cuts the noose in the nick of time, and our Fairbanks-esque hero is free to roam the countryside once more, boldly confronting the fashion-challenged with their own inadequacy.

Though Adam became a huge star in both the UK and the US, and despite a truly noble effort, he never fully succeeded in bringing Dandyism back to the mainstream. In fact, he was often condemned by his peers for playing dress-up.

“At the time,” he has said, “there was quite a lot of criticism for groups using video, or people thinking that video was getting too important. They didn’t like the idea of musicians acting.”

Personally, I sense just a twinge of jealousy on the part of his fellow musicians because Adam looked like this:


When they looked like this:


But maybe Adam Ant was just born a century or two too late. His dramatic flair, his sense of whimsy, his killer style, his Oscar Wilde humor … his, well, Dandyism, would have all gone over swimmingly in the Scarlet Pimpernel days.

The good news is that Adam has recently been reported happy, healthy and poised for the next phase in his colorful career. Fine and dandy by me! Stand and deliver, Adam.

I'M GONNA FOLLOW YOU by Pat Benatar (1980)

I’m a sucker for anything that reeks of Lonely Big City at Night. Maybe it’s the film noir freak in me, but give me a guy with a saxophone on a fire escape… no one else around… a neon sign flashing… a distant clock chimes midnight… and I’m pretty much happy.

It’s kind of ironic, considering if I ever get caught downtown by myself after dark I typically pretend I’m out for an evening run and break into a brisk jog – even if I’m wearing a dress and heels. I guess it’s just watching other people by themselves after dark in a big city while I’m tucked safely in front of the TV that I enjoy.

So I’ve selected Pat Benatar’s I'M GONNA FOLLOW YOU clip as our discussion piece today based on the following Lonely Big City at Night (LBCN) criteria:

Lonely? Check. Pat is practically the only living person in this video.

Big City? Check. Doesn’t get much bigger than the Big Apple!

Night? Oh yeah. Lots of it.

Yet the video works on more levels than merely fulfilling my weird noir fantasies. Like VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR and ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN, it’s another one of those pre-MTV clips that demonstrates a post-MTV sensibility, but this time without the use of colorful animation or special effects. It’s a less-is-more video that draws the viewer in with its streamlined simplicity and relevance to the song.

I'M GONNA FOLLOW YOU, one of the small handful of videos that veteran director Keith MacMillan created solo (without producer-partner John Weaver), utilizes the Doppelganger device, a staple of film noir.

The clip opens with a close-up of Slightly Apprehensive Pat, the prey. She’s dressed to the teeth in red sequins and acts like me when I’ve been caught downtown after sundown – a little jumpy and fleet of foot.


We then switch to Vixen in Black Pat, the stalker in tight leather pants. Drenched in confidence with attitude to spare, she is one with the city. She knows the back alleys. She’s got the cojones to loiter in dodgy subway entrances late at night, alone. She’s the other Pat’s shadow self, if you want to get Jungian.


Intent on hunting down Slightly Apprehensive Pat, Vixen in Black Pat confronts her other half on a deserted cobblestone street in the Meatpacking District and performs a few ritualistic dance moves, the subtle use of a mirror-image effect splitting her in two and then rejoining her as one.


Once the confrontation between the two Pats has taken place, the dark half fades back into the night as her twin escapes to the safety of Manhattan by early morning light… though she gives one last nervous glance over her shoulder.

I'M GONNA FOLLOW YOU not only captures some lonely back streets of New York City circa 1980, it captures Pat Benatar (a Brooklyn native) in her real-life stomping grounds, and at a moment when her career was just catching fire after the release of the multi-platinum Crimes of Passion album.

The clip also manages to convey a neo-noir vibe without using any noir clichés, and to successfully display two Pat Benatars without being even slightly reminiscent of The Patty Duke Show. Well… maybe just a little. Our Patty loves to rock and roll indeed.

ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN by Elvis Costello & the Attractions

Happy Valentine’s Day, videophiles! Some say it with chocolates, some say it with roses, some say it with those little candy hearts that taste like the clump of dried Colgate stuck to the sink. At Images of Heaven, I prefer to say it with classic music videos.

Today we take a closer look at another ahead-of-its-time video from 1979. This one’s by the British Buddy Holly, Mr. Declan McManus – Napoleon Dynamite to you and me – but frequently referred to as Elvis Costello. It’s called ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN and it is precisely three minutes of pop perfection.

The reason this video qualifies as a Valentine is because I love it. Yes, this is one of my personal favorite videos of all time, and yes I felt that way before the Museum of Modern Art selected it as one of 35 important Golden Oldies of Music Video to exhibit in 2003. A prestigious honor, to be sure… but hardly as exciting as being discussed in my blog. So let’s start breaking it down!

The animated clip was completed in May of 1979 by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton at Cucumber Studios, the folks who would go on to direct the wonderful GENIUS OF LOVE video for Tom Tom Club in 1982, and would create Max Headroom a few years later.

In ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN, Jankel and Morton turned Elvis and the Attractions into abstract cartoon characters a good six years before Steve Barron made history doing the same thing to Norwegian pretty boys a-ha. As Elvis sings about accidents, they happen over and over: sharp rocks fall, bathtubs overflow, shorts are scorched by an unattended iron, a ketchup bottle splatters madly and strips of film are exposed to full sunlight. The best accident might be when a finger pushes a button and the entire state of California snaps off, sinking into the Pacific. Oops! I only find this entertaining because I know it’s scientifically impossible. (It is, right?!)


The constant movement of the images suggests both the fluid energy of the music and the constant peril of household hazards, plus it just looks really cool. There’s a certain tragic poignancy to this particular Costello tune (well, to quite a few Costello tunes come to think of it), so the whimsical graphics add a splash of buoyancy without being inappropriately goofy (like the ridiculously misguided, Benny Hill-meets-Mary Poppins video that ruined ABC’s sleek pop masterpiece “The Look of Love” in 1982 ... but don't get me started on that).

Perhaps because of the rapid pace, ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN is able to convey levity without silliness. The images of teacups shattering and burned toast hitting the floor half-buttered flash by so quickly that the somewhat cheeky theme of minor household accidents is not immediately apparent; at first glance it’s just a feast for the eyes and ears.


The fragmented animation of the band during the song's chorus is something like the effect achieved by drawing in pencil on graph paper, coloring in with Avery hi-liters, and then shredding the pages. Vari-sized boxes of muted black and white fill the screen, accented by horizontal strips of pinks, yellows and blues. Peppered with dashed lines, squiggles and other marks to indicate action, the figures are never completely confined to the boxes; a few drops of color always manage to escape the parameters of the squares. The overall effect, like the music, is that of accessible pop art at its best.

At one point, Elvis himself is even sliced in two and skewed. As if the result of some horrible cutting-room catastrophe, his trademark knocking knees bend and flex on a separate plane from his bowtie-and-glasses-clad torso.


The most amazing thing about this video is that it was created before it was worth anyone’s while to create such a piece. Though music videos were beginning to earn a bit more respect, they were still considered disposable promotion gimmicks – not worth the extra investments of time and money it took to make anything resembling art. MTV was barely a glimmer in Mike Nesmith’s eye, and there were certainly no Moonman statuettes at stake.

I’m still not exactly sure what circumstances led to the concept and production of this video (my kingdom for more documentation on the early days of music video!), but it makes me happy that it exists. And I must disagree with artist Giovanni Garcia-Fenech, who dismissed Jankel and Morton’s use of animation as “pleasant enough though not particularly interesting” in his 2003 review of the MoMA exhibit.
Perhaps to the modern eye the clip could be mistaken for a forgettable cartoon, but in 1979 nothing else like it had ever been seen (except maybe inside some trendy Manhattan gallery). In fact, there is an argument to be made that Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton created the visual style of the eighties, and if not they inarguably aided in defining it, Max Headroom or no Max Headroom.

Every frame of ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN is chock full of a sassy, innovative use of bright pastels and deconstructed geometric shapes that would eventually penetrate the world of greeting cards, t-shirt designs and textiles well into the late 1980s – and they did this in early 1979. As a promotional clip for a song that barely cracked the Top 40. Before the term "music video" existed. Over two years before there was a channel that played music videos. Wow. That was one happy accident.

VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR by the Buggles (1979)

In the late 1970s, things were simpler. European musicians with dreams of making it big in the States often hired aspiring film directors to film or tape advertisements for their songs as a way of promoting themselves to record companies. Bands that could not afford to travel across the Atlantic and establish their presence in person could easily send videotapes overseas – and thus the modern music video was born.

Fortunately for the foreign acts, it turned out that many Americans (not just music biz execs) enjoyed watching these strange little films set to even stranger, often synthesizer-heavy, music.

But where to see them? Initially the cable channel Nickelodeon ran daily half-hour installments of videos, and by 1980 the USA network was including videos as part of their late night hodge-podge known as Night Flight. But it wasn't until midnight on August 1st, 1981 that America finally hit the jackpot: 24 hours, 7 days a week of nonstop music videos on a channel called MTV, Music Television.


As everyone (even those who weren't alive at the time) now knows, for its debut video MTV chose VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR by the English duo of Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, collectively known as the Buggles. The song has become immortal for just this reason, the answer to a simple 20th Century pop culture trivia question. It's kind of a shame, really, because VIDEO KILLED is a rare, perfectly crafted techno-pop gem that should have become a classic on its own merit.

When viewed 30 years after it was made, the video undeniably feels dated. Yet it actually holds up better than most of its contemporaries, which were often shot on tape instead of film and typically consisted of unkempt bands huddled on dull stages, miming straight performances into the camera. Status as MTV's firstborn child aside, the video's striking post-modern images have helped secure its place in history, complete with cameo (near the end) by then-unknown Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer, who worked with the Buggles on their first album.

Director Russell Mulcahy (who would go on to helm the features Highlander and The Shadow, among others) shot the entire clip for VIDEO KILLED in a single afternoon. Before bloated budgets and beautiful bodies conquered MTV – necessitating the presence of gorgeous 19-year-old models prancing behind shirtless rockers in spandex trousers – making music videos was "really good fun," according to lead singer Horn. The budget for this clip was probably miniscule and there are no scantily clad prancing girls, unless you count the clunky gyrations of one rather full-figured dancer stuffed into a sparkling leotard, undulating within the confines of a clear plastic tube.

The video opens with an exploding luminous orb that hovers above a little girl as she tunes an oversized Depression-era radio. Singer Horn's face is then superimposed in high-contrast black and white as he lipsynchs the tinny vocals into an old-fashioned microphone, Rudy Vallee-style. The innocence of radio's early days is depicted, shattered, and then lost completely as the girl transforms into a futuristic woman; the embodiment of music video itself.

The scene then switches to the "abandoned studio" mentioned in the lyrics, with the band sporting white lab coats like post-modern mad scientists. Instead of bubbling beakers, their laboratory is filled with television monitors and synthesizers – emblems of a new era in music, and appropriate set pieces for a group whose keyboardist was once entered into the Guinness Book of World Records for performing with the most keyboards onstage (28).

Two backup singers in Lost in Space-style tunics and buggy sunglasses, mechanically mouthing the song's chorus on the TV sets, provide one of the most enduring visual hooks in the video. Their day-glo orange and purple costumes evoke both the early eighties and Technicolor sci-fi of the mid-sixties, while their singing remaines pure thirties; an ode to the crass chorus girls of the distant past.

At the video's climax, the child climbs onto a pile of old radios, they all explode, and the broken-down studio crumbles away. The past is dead, the naïveté of simple music, with no pictures, destroyed. All that remains is a vast solid white expanse on which the band performs (in shiny silver suits) for no one but a single, unmanned camera. This is the future, as seen from the year 1979.

Of course, viewing VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR in 2010 presents an unintentional irony. Its words and images lament a loss of innocence at the hands of the music video camera, yet the 3 ½ minute film is itself a relic of a simpler era, the now innocuous early days of music video.

"Back then, it's difficult to describe how exciting it was," Trevor Horn has said."The possibilities of what one could do with pop video, you know, pictures and music together. It was a new and exciting concept."

The freshness of this new frontier is felt throughout the clip, one of director Mulcahy's very first. Though he would eventually rack up dozens of video credits for artists like Duran Duran and Elton John, VIDEO KILLED captures a moment before his work grew overly slick and flashy. As the 1980s wore on, Mulcahy's work became increasingly permeated with what critics would call "striking yet fleeting images that that captivate one’s attention and soon disappear from memory.”

Vacuous visuals are the stuff music videos are made of though, and the Buggles’ first video is no exception. Still, its pace is gentler and it feels less jaded than the zero-attention-span, made-for-MTV clips of later days.

Within a single decade, the excitement of pop videos would wear off; the novelty would tarnish. The bold new frontier of Music Television would succumb to beach parties and game shows, and kids would choose the complex drama of reality programs over the simplicity of pop music.

Nowadays, musicians still make music videos … but the pictures have gotten smaller. The video, in the face of the almighty digital age, has followed the path of radio. Inevitably we come full circle as we face the death of the video star. Now all we need is for the Buggles to reunite and write a song about it. Then shoot a video, of course.


Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star
Uploaded by valentin73. - Watch more music videos, in HD!

Hello!

"I heard you on the wireless back in '52..."

The first line of the first video to appear on MTV was a lyric about forgotten old radio stars. Nearly thirty years later, the clip itself has become a hazy artifact; the antics of forgotten old video stars from the early moments in a now all-but-defunct medium.

Like the crude nickelodeon fodder shot in the first decade after Edison perfected his moving picture camera, most promotional music clips produced in the 1970s and '80s are today considered laughable YouTube fluff at best, obsolete and disposable relics at worst.


But is there more to classic music videos than meets the eye at first glance? Sure, we in our late 20s to late 40s remember them fondly -- after all, Music Television was the milk that nursed most of us. But if you surf '80s pop on YouTube, you'll notice even the kids of the kids of the original MTV generation (back when they played music) are eating up these clips, sometimes just to laugh at the moussed hair and cheesy special effects, sometimes to make genuinely impassioned pleas to "bring back videos like this", or lamenting that "music today sucks!"

Either way, the appeal of music videos as entertainment cannot be denied. Some hold up better than others, but for every boring .38 Special performance clip or zany Toto Coelo promo, there are a thousand neglected nuggets out there; wildly original mini-films with rockin' soundtracks, striking visuals and maybe even a little something to say.

At this point I should introduce myself. I am Girl on Film (no relation to the X-rated chicks in the Duran vid), I am completely obsessed with classic music videos and films, and I am starting IMAGES OF HEAVEN to explore these videos not with the cold scrutiny of a music video scholar or cultural analyst (fat books on the subject have been written by those far more informed than I), but with the subjective eye only a child of the '80s could have.

I remember when the cable guy first installed that big brown box, and my sister requested he switch the box to MTV. He handed us the remote and left the children in the care of Ben Orr and Ric Ocasek, who greeted us like old friends: "Hello again," they sang as the weird-looking old man behind the bar served them drinks.

Little did I know back then that the old guy was Andy Warhol and that I would be writing about the video 25 years later! I just knew I was having fun. That was the point of the music video, right? To make the song more fun, more glamorous, more entertaining, leading to more sales. And it worked like crazy... until it was discovered that reality TV hooked people more than music videos, generating more repeat viewers and bigger bucks.

The video lost its channel, but has it lost its audience? Judging by the huge amount of fans, young and old, trolling the net for obscure '80s music, I say music video still has the power to capture the imagination, and I hope those classic clips continue to thrive online -- they're too enjoyable (and culturally significant as time capsules) to vanish from the radar into oblivion.

So please join me as I dig waaaaay deep, exploring some of my favorite obscure, forgotten, or never-fully-appreciated music videos from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Have something to say about all this 1980s nonsense? I'd love to hear it. Got your own fave music videos to suggest or discuss? Bring 'em on. I'm going to attempt to review one video per week, so we'll see how that goes. In tribute to the pioneer spirit of early MTV, the Buggles will be my first victim.