I Want My MTV (19 page)

 

ADAM ANT:
My strategy for making videos was sex, subversion, style, and humor. I was the first person to put a star in a video—I cast Diana Dors, who was the British Marilyn Monroe, in “Prince Charming.” The castle in “Goody Two Shoes” is a mental institution which housed Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, a crazy, awful place. That's quite iconic, because it has Graham Stark, who was in the
Pink Panther
movies, and Caroline Munro, who was in the Hammer horror films. The bit where I'm sliding down the pole is an homage to Elvis in
Jailhouse Rock
. And “Strip” has an homage to the shower scene in
Psycho
. But things do burn out. You can't have a firecracker going off forever.

 

ROBIN SLOANE:
Adam & the Ants went gold, largely because of MTV. So we threw a dinner party at Windows on the World for the MTV crew—Les Garland, Gale, Freston, Buzz Brindle, those people. I never told my boss about it until the day of the party. And I got fired. The next day, I got a job at Elektra as the head of video promotion. Elektra had a German synth-pop artist named Peter Schilling. I got “Major Tom” on MTV. Mike Bone, who was our head of promotion, said, “Hey, Sloane. You got Schilling into heavy rotation? Let's go.” And he walked me down 52nd Street to a lingerie shop. He said, “Buy whatever you want.” And I ended up with $500 of lingerie. That was the record biz.

 

THOMAS DOLBY:
Because of the excitement around MTV, I wrote a storyboard for “She Blinded Me with Science” before I wrote the song. I also persuaded the label to let me direct it. I fancied myself a filmmaker; I specialized in splicing together discontinuous bits of film.

I was never going to be Simon Le Bon or Adam Ant. I needed a persona, and it wasn't a stretch to portray a young scientist. I was involved in synths and technology. My underdog persona was like the slight guy from silent films who wins the girl. I wanted a Japanese girl in the video, so I came up with the “good heavens, Miss Sakamoto” lyric. I was boldly ahead of the times in fetishizing Asian women.

My dad, a professor of classical archaeology at Oxford University, was one of the scientists in the video. And we had Dr. Magnus Pyke, a famous British TV personality and a bona fide scientist. When I saw him a few years later, he cursed me, because in America, people would walk up behind him in the street and shout, “Science!” He was a man of accomplishment, and he was annoyed by that.

 

DAVE STEWART:
When we made “Love Is a Stranger,” we hardly had any money. We had enough to hire a very plush car, and I was Annie's chauffeur. The apartment in the video is actually my mother's. Annie played a call girl calling on a client, but there was something very dark and sinister underneath. At the end she ripped off her wig and she had greased back hair. She looked like Mick Jagger in
Performance
.

 

JON ROSEMAN:
In America, there was a huge furor. Everyone thought Annie was a transvestite.

 

BOY GEORGE:
I can't imagine what people must have thought when they first saw me in America; it must have been mind-blowing. When we first went to the MTV offices, the VJs had really long hair, and not like how I had long hair. More like “rock n' roll” hair. Lots of perms. And they wore wide-collar jackets. Americans seemed quite '70s to me. One thing that really alarmed people about me was that they realized it wasn't a costume. It might have been for other artists, but that was how I lived 24/7. In fact, the look I had in Culture Club was toned down from what I normally wore.

Our early videos certainly didn't relate to the tunes, which tended to be love songs. Julien Temple was quite a well-known director, and we let him take control. The concept for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” if there was one, revolved around me as an outcast, being ejected from various, incongruous places throughout the twentieth century: the Gargoyle Club in the '30s, a swimming pool in the '50s. It played on the idea of me as an outsider, someone who wasn't part of normal society. There's a chorus of jurors in a jury box, and we had them done up in blackface. In the UK at that time, blackface was completely acceptable. Al Jolson–style entertainers like that were part of our “music hall” tradition. But in America, people got really upset. We didn't know it was a faux pas.

 

JULIEN TEMPLE:
The popularity and hypocrisy of blackface had always fascinated me. During the early '60s, British TV programmers would air minstrel shows as primetime family entertainment while professing to be winning the battle against racism. “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” was about being gay and being victimized for your sexuality, which George was kind of emblematic of. It seemed appropriate to me that in the video he would be judged by jurors inin blackface, to send up bigotry and point out the hypocrisy of the many gay judges and politicians in the UK who'd enacted anti-gay legislation.

 

HARVEY LEEDS, record executive:
When I played the “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” video for people, they'd say, “Man, she's really ugly.”

 

HUEY LEWIS:
I went to Les Garland's office and he played me “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” Everyone thought it was a chick. He said, “You believe this shit? It's gonna be huge.”

 

BOY GEORGE:
“Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” was prophetic; one of the first images people saw of me was that video, where I'm dragged away from a courtroom. I started my career in court, and also ended my career in court.

 

SIOBHAN BARRON:
Boy George rang up and wanted my brother Steve or Julien Temple to do the video for “I'll Tumble 4 Ya.” I told him that neither was available. And George called me a cunt. I'm still friends with him. He and [Culture Club drummer] Jon Moss, though, they'd fight all the time. They never came out of their dressing room until evening time. On one video shoot George stuck a hat pin through Jon's hand.

 

LOL CREME:
Sting was a cocky bugger. On the very first video, he said, “Just keep the camera on the money,” and pointed to himself. And we did. We're no fools.

 

ANDY SUMMERS, the Police:
We made “Synchronicity II” on the outskirts of London. We had to wake up very early to get there, and we wore these kind of
Blade Runner
outfits. Godley and Creme had built a huge set with three scaffolding towers and gangplanks between them. The towers were way up in the air, probably twenty-five to thirty feet up, and we had to climb up with our instruments. Below, they'd created a sort of wasteland of debris, like cardboard boxes and stuff you'd find at a dump. And of course they had giant fans blowing dry ice everywhere. Well, after several takes, the air in the room became extremely dry, and this fake wasteland spontaneously combusted and set Stewart's tower on fire.

 

LOL CREME:
The fire alarm went off and the people on the stage started saying, “Clear everybody off the set.” We said to the DP, “Keep rolling,
keep rolling
.”

 

STEWART COPELAND:
There was a moment where I felt like King Kong, I was banging away on my thirty-foot-high pile of drums. I thought,
I'm stealing the video here
. You live and learn. The song isn't about King Kong climbing around a drum set. It's about a dragon and Loch Ness and Karl Jung.

 

LOL CREME:
Sting was hanging from a rope, swinging like Tarzan, and he fell off.
Whoops, where's the star?

 

STEWART COPELAND:
My particular role was undignified. What's the drummer going to do? You jig along in time to the music, or else you try to look snarly and handsome. When the chorus comes along, you pretend to sing along even though you don't actually sing the chorus on the record. I felt like a dick.

 

LOL CREME:
The first time I met Sting at his house, to discuss the video, he answered the door dressed up as Hamlet or something, and he'd been practicing in front of a mirror. We knew he'd be up for performing.

 

ANDY SUMMERS:
Godley and Creme rocked. Those guys had an amazing partnership. They both could draw incredibly well. They were both major dope smokers, too. They smoked a lot of fucking reefer.

 

KEVIN GODLEY:
Most of the time, Lol Creme and I were stoned out of our minds. The first thing we'd do when we arrived on set was roll a reefer.

 

ANDY SUMMERS:
“Every Breath You Take” is a complete rip of a much better 1944 film of jazz musicians made by a great Albanian photographer named Gjon Mili. Jeff Ayeroff showed us this film, and Godley and Creme basically copied it. But it certainly wasn't as good as the Gijon Mili one, which was much more artistic and a lot hipper. It's all these jazz giants—Lester Young, Jo Jones, Illinois Jacquet—playing in a nightclub with swirls of cigarette smoke, and it's a beautiful little five-minute film. Ours was a slightly watered down version, but of course very few people saw the original. A lot of people think ours is fantastic, but to me it's just okay.

 

RICHARD MARX:
The first video I watched over and over was “Every Breath You Take.” It was like seeing a Bergman film. Directors usually spelled out every word of the lyric in a video, but this was the first video I knew that didn't do that. It was abstract.

 

TIM NEWMAN:
I admired Godley and Creme the most. I was a huge fan. Their ideas were amazingly original.

 

ANDY SUMMERS:
I never much liked the idea for “Wrapped Around Your Finger.” No, I was kind of pissed off about that one. I've never been much of a fan of that song, actually. Sting got to shoot his part last in that video and made a meal of knocking all the candles out. Fuck him.

 

WAYNE ISAAK, record executive:
Sting was nervous for his closeup. He felt like he needed a couple of vodkas before his last take. I was in the greenroom, he did some shots and then did that scene where he runs through the candles.

 

DANIEL PEARL:
The producer had rounded up thousands of candles and was nervous about how to set them up. She called Godley and Creme, who were still in England, and said, “You have to send me a diagram.” So they faxed over a diagram, and—this was Godley and Creme's sense of humor—it was simply a drawing of one candle.

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
When Godley and Creme made the Police's “Wrapped Around Your Finger” on the A&M lot, I was the electrician. This guy named Ron Volz, in the art department, he ran around with a torch and lit all those candles. And when they got knocked down, we set 'em back up. I was the guy who ended up scraping all the wax off the floor the next day. That was
my
gig.

 

DANIEL PEARL:
After that video came out, I saw Sting in Los Angeles and he thanked me for how fantastic he looked.

 

KEVIN GODLEY:
As they say, the camera loved him. Sting was very filmable, at any angle; slightly sinister, heavy on the cheekbones.

WAYNE ISAAK:
Sting wouldn't be where he is, or where he was back then, without ambition. The Police were even competitive among themselves. Stewart and Sting fought like brothers on half of those videos.

 

ANDY SUMMERS:
We dominated MTV that year. On the one hand you think,
This is pretty cool
, and the other you think,
This is bullshit
. Our music had sort of erroneously become extremely commercial. We looked right, we had the right songs—MTV was a perfect hookup for us. The band was a huge success. Everybody won. Everyone was making money.

 

JEFF AYEROFF:
“Every Breath You Take” probably cost $75,000 to $100,000, and we sold over 5 million albums. With a good video, the return on your investment was phenomenal.

 

STEWART COPELAND:
We joyfully exploited each other all the way to the bank.

 

ANDY SUMMERS:
I don't like any of our videos. We were always made to look bright and inoffensive and appealing. As videos progressed, they started to move away from that: they got hipper, people started using Super 8 and handheld techniques, and everything got darker and more interesting. As a total film buff, I regret that we weren't around ten years later to make those kind of videos.

 

BOY GEORGE:
I never liked any of our videos. They weren't glamorous or outrageous enough. Directors, management, and record labels wanted to make me look as normal as possible, whereas I would have preferred to have gone much, much further. When we did the “Karma Chameleon” video, out on a riverboat, I had the most amazing makeup and they made me look like I had none on. The lighting was really shit, and it was a miserable, gray English day. I thought,
I spent all morning getting ready and I look like this? What a waste of time
.

 

HOWARD JONES:
Rock n' roll was a macho affair in the '70s. And us lot came along with brightly colored clothes and the haircuts. It was a real affront to the establishment. It rubbed so many people the wrong way. That whole explosion of MTV was quite significant in the sense that it gave the finger to rock n' roll.

 

MARTIN FRY:
In the early '80s, a bunch of people imagined a world they wanted to live in. It was a more multiracial world, a less homophobic world. And it was a much more interesting world than the suburb where you lived. All those video clips were aspirational, you know. They're people's dreams. In a way, those dreams did come true, years later.