I Want My MTV Read Online Free PDF

business,” and eventually I got a job as stage manager at the A&M soundstage. I’d literally clean the stage by hand. I didn’t know how to plug in a light. But that was the best education I could’ve had. When Russell Mulcahy showed up, I was the only guy who knew who he was, because I’d seen his video for XTC’s “Making Plans for Nigel” on Night Flight . All these crazy English directors filmed there—Russell, Godley & Creme, Steve Barron.
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    STEVE BARRON, director: My mother, Zelda, was a continuity girl in film—they call it “script supervisor” in America—and my father was a sound mixer. They worked on films like Blow-Up and Performance. I was never much good at school and I left when I was fifteen. This was 1976, and music in London was getting really interesting. I worked as a camera assistant on movies, and eventually that led to the first video I directed, the Jam’s “Strange Town.”
    SIMON FIELDS, producer: Steve Barron and I had our first meeting at Warren Beatty’s house; Steve’s mother, who worked for Beatty, had just finished work on Reds , and she was staying at his place. I had more meetings with Steve and his sister, Siobhan, who was very smart, very wild. She ended up as my fiancée later on. She and Steve started a production company in London called Limelight, and we decided to join forces.
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    SIOBHAN BARRON, producer: When we started Limelight, we were working out of Steve’s house. We were living on Scotch eggs to try and make ends meet. When the phone rang, which was once in a blue moon, Steve would always make me type on the typewriter, so we sounded busy.
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    BETH BRODAY, producer: I was a producer on a syndicated video-clip show in LA called Deja View . Ricci Martin, Dean Martin’s son, was the on-camera talent. Response to the rudimentary clips we played was unbelievable. Station managers would get calls from viewers saying, “This is fantastic. We’ve never seen anything like this.” This was before MTV, but I knew it was going to explode.
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    MARK MOTHERSBAUGH, Devo: Groups made videos in the 1940s. The Beatles made “Hello Goodbye” after they weren’t willing to tour anymore, and the Monkees movie Head was like a music video. Music videos weren’t invented in the early 1980s.
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    STEWART COPELAND, the Police: The first videos were for bands like the Monkees, where somebody with a video camera shot them walking through a park, doing stupid shit. “Hey, one of you guys climb a tree.” The band jerks around and someone hoses them down with a camera and cuts it in time with the music.
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    MICHAEL NESMITH, the Monkees: I recorded a song called “Rio” in 1977, and Chris Blackwell, the head of Island Records, asked me to make a promo for the song—I think he called it a “clip.” I wrote a series of cinematic shots: me on a horse in a suit of light, me in a tux in front of a 1920s microphone, me in a Palm Beach suit dancing with a woman in a red dress, women with fruit on their head flying through the air with me. As we edited these images, an unusual thing started to emerge: The grammar of film, where images drove the narrative, shifted over to where the song drove the narrative, and it didn’t make any difference that the images were discontinuous. It was hyper-real. Even people who didn’t understand film, including me, could see this was a profound conceptual shift.
    That wasn’t what Island Records had in mind, at all. They wanted me to stand in front of a microphone and sing. These lavish images were more than the medium could really stand. But “Rio” became a mild hit in Europe. I decided to try three or four more of these. And I started to see other music videos popping up.
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    MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: By the time MTV showed up, it was something Devo had been anticipating for half a decade. In 1974, Jerry Casale,