ANYONE else remember video jukeboxes? Back in the early 1980s, in the days when I still went to pubs, there were a couple of hostelries in Stirling that had one. You’d stick your money in the machine and a pop video of the time would flicker and strobe across the screen. Adam Ant. The Human League. This Mortal Coil for the indie kids.
Virgin Records in Glasgow had one too, I think. Upstairs as I recall. At least I remember watching a lot of men standing around with their tongues hanging out watching the risque video for Duran Duran’s Girls on Film there.
It’s what we had instead of MTV, currently celebrating its 40th anniversary, but which didn’t start airing in the UK until 1987. And yet over in the States most of what was getting shown on the new channel, as Adam Buxton reminded us in MTV – A British Invention (Radio 4, Saturday) originated in the UK, with British bands and British-based directors.
Buxton’s show saw him talk to directors like Russell Mulcahy (who was responsible for many of Duran Duran’s most epic videos, though not Girls on Film), Tim Pope, who worked with The Cure and Soft Cell (his video for Sex Dwarf was banned) and Steve Barron, whose video for Billie Jean helped break the colour bar on MTV, about the mixture of innovation, creativity and silliness that marked the first wave of the video age.
It is worth remembering how important the pop video was at the time. It was a new form that could make or break a record. A-ha’s Take on Me didn’t trouble the charts until Barron was given carte blanche to shoot a second video for the single. It was the comic-strip flavoured video that made the song.
For a while the pop video was everything. Within a few years, Buxton pointed out, “MTV’s style of fast-cutting and poppy montages started appearing in movies like Flashdance and Top Gun. Music video directors were hot property.”
Well, for a short while. “For 10 minutes we became more important than the band,” Tim Pope suggested. “And I thought that was just bonkers.”
Eventually the form settled down, found itself some reliable cliches and became a vehicle for hair metal bands.
“We got corporate, I hate to say,” MTV’s Gail Sparrow admitted. “All of a sudden I could have been working for an insurance company.”
Still, it was nice to be reminded of a time when it was safe to mingle freely. In Ellie Taylor’s Safe Space (Radio 4, yesterday) the comedian wondered if we’ll ever shake hands again. “Touching strangers seems so retro now,” she pointed out. “Like ASBOs or ordering a panini.”
Handshakes in one form or another have been around for some seven million years, according to Ella Al-Shamahi, paleoanthropologist, evolutionary biologist and author of "The Handshake: A Gripping History
And some of those forms are very strange. Like the penis handshake. “I did a few of those in the back seat of a Vue cinema in the late 2000s,” Taylor admitted.
But that was only the second weirdest greeting Al-Shamahi says she encountered while researching her book. In one village in New Guinea, she said, it is considered customary to “take a quick suck on the chief’s wife’s teat.”
Can you imagine? Then again, given that she then told us that “globally, only 19 per cent wash their hands after a number two,” perhaps we should all be giving it serious thought.
Listen Out For: Romesh Ranganathan: For the Love of Hip Hop. Radio 2, tonight, 9pm. That’s Radio 2, note. Ultimately, all rebellions get co-opted by the state.
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