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trailers before midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That is still the number one selling album in the history of Holland, and I never played there. It’s all because of the “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” video.
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    KEVIN GODLEY, director: Lol Creme and I made our first video in 1979 for the Godley & Creme song “An Englishman in New York.” It was post–“Bohemian Rhapsody,” which was a watermark. The record label agreed to let us make a little film on the condition that we work with a guy who had done it before. This may sound boastful, but it became obvious to us that we could do better on our own. We used video cameras and hired TV people to do the lighting. It was very low rent.
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    PERRI LISTER, choreographer: In 1978, in London, I joined a dance group called Hot Gossip. We were like a punk rock dance group. We did a TV pilot for a comedian named Kenny Everett, and when it was shown, Mary Whitehouse, who was the Tipper Gore of England, stood up in the House of Parliament and said we were lewd and should be banned immediately. Which, of course, meant instant fame. Everybody tuned in the next week. The Kenny Everett Video Show was a bit like In Living Color , and we were like the Fly Girls. We danced to Blondie, Devo, the hits of the day. David Mallet was the director, and he started directing music videos. He did a bunch of early David Bowie videos: “Ashes to Ashes,” “DJ,” “Fashion.” When he began directing music videos full-time, he often used me as his choreographer. And then I started to appear in them as well.
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    DAVID MALLET: Bowie was at the forefront of anything new and exciting. He was a fan of surrealist cinema and he wanted to mix it into rock n’ roll. The video for “Fashion” has a lot of Buñuel in it, a lot of surrealism, which David brought to the party.
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    ALAN HUNTER, MTV VJ: I’d been in New York for less than a year, attending drama school, and I was one of the six dancers in the “Fashion” video. I wore a mime striped shirt with suspenders, and I got paid $50 a day for three days.
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    DAVID MALLET: The “Boys Keep Swinging” video is an incredibly straight and normal performance by David Bowie right up to about fifty seconds, when it goes insane with him in drag. He smears lipstick across his face; that’s traditional Berlin drag-club stuff. The BBC watched the first twenty seconds and said, “Jolly good, nice to see him doing proper for once.” They put it on the air at teatime on a Saturday. And there was a hell of a row. They called it obscene and perverse.
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    BRIAN GRANT: A guy from MCA Records gave me £2,000 to make a video for M’s song “Pop Muzik.” It got shown on The Kenny Everett Video Show , which was directed by David Mallet, who later became my partner. “Pop Muzik” went to number one, and the phone didn’t stop ringing.
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    ROBIN SLOANE, record executive: In 1978, I got a job as a secretary in the publicity department at Epic Records. I was bored doing administrative work, so I said to my boss, “Can I try and do something with the promotional videos we’re getting from England?” No one paid attention to that stuff. I’d get them placed in local news programs if artists were touring, or on HBO between movies, or on late-night video shows popping up in different cities. The higher-ups left me alone.
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    WAYNE ISHAM, director: When I got out of the army after the Vietnam War, I used my GI bill to go to college, and I saw the David Bowie “Ashes to Ashes” video on a midnight show called Night Flight [USA Network, 1981–1996]. I said, “That’s exactly what I want to do.” I got a Hollywood phone book and ripped out the pages that listed production companies. I went from one to the other, saying, “I’ll do whatever it takes to get into the production