The video was one of their first to see heavy rotation on MTV. It was filmed in Sälen, Sweden in December 1982 and directed by Meiert Avis. The band only appeared in the performance scenes of the video as it was filmed in the dead of the Swedish winter. U2 guitarist Edge revealed in the official U2 biography that the four people riding on horseback in the video that appeared to be the four U2 members were in fact four Swedish teenage girls disguised as the members of U2 riding on horseback with masks over their faces. This was done as the band were frozen from shooting the video in sub-freezing temperatures the day before. Their biography states that Bono refused to wear any headgear despite the cold weather and had a lot of trouble mouthing the lyrics. The video also features footage of Soviet troops advancing in winter during World War II.
The video made its debut UK television broadcast on Friday 31 December 1982, on the Channel 4 music programme, 'The Tube'.
U2 allowed free-of-charge use of this song in a spot prepared by the European Commission. This clip published on YouTube shows a transformation of Poland in last 20 years mixed with short scenes from today’s Warsaw seen from a perspective of a 20-year-old woman.
The music video featured Bush and dancer Michael Hervieu in a performance choreographed by Diane Grey. The pair are wearing grey Japanese hakamas.
Bush wanted the dancing in "Running Up that Hill" to be more of a classical performance. She stated that dance in music videos was "being used quite trivially, it was being exploited: haphazard images, busy, lots of dances, without really the serious expression, and wonderful expression, that dance can give. So we felt how interesting it would be to make a very simple routine between two people, almost classic, and very simply filmed. So that's what we tried, really, to do a serious piece of dance.
The choreography draws upon contemporary dance with a repeated gesture suggestive of drawing a bow and arrow (the gesture was made literal on the image for the single in which Bush poses with a real bow and arrow), intercut with surreal sequences of Bush and Hervieu searching through crowds of masked strangers.
At the climax of the song, Bush's partner withdraws from her and the two are then swept away from each other and down a long hall in opposite directions by an endless stream of anonymous figures wearing masks made from pictures of Bush and Hervieu's faces. MTV chose not to show this video (at the time of its original release) and instead used a live performance of the song recorded at a promotional appearance on the BBC TV show Wogan. According to Paddy Bush, "MTV weren't particularly interested in broadcasting videos that didn't have synchronized lip movements in them. They liked the idea of people singing songs."
The video for "Golden Brown", directed by Lindsey Clennell, depicts the band members both as explorers in an Arabian country (sequences include images of the Pyramids as well as the explorers studying a map of Egypt) in the 1920s and performers for a fictional "Radio Cairo". In addition to the Pyramids, the video is intercut with stock footage of a madrassa in Uzbekistan, the Shah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran and Great Sphinx, Feluccas sailing, Bedouins riding and camel racing in the United Arab Emirates. The performance scenes were filmed in the Leighton House Museum in Holland Park, London.
Tina Turner - What's Love Got To Do With It (1984)
The video features Turner walking down the street engaging with the public, intercut with scenes where she's singing directly to the viewers. The video was shot in New York City during the summer of 1984. The music video also features Sleepaway Camp 2's Pamela Springsteen as a street dancer.
The music video for the song claimed a prize at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1985 for "Best Female Video".
The music video, featuring Idol attending a gothic wedding, is one of his best-known videos. The bride in the music video is played by Perri Lister, Idol's real-life girlfriend at the time. She is also one of the three dancers clad in black leather, who slap their buttocks in time with the clap track in the song as they shimmy downwards near the end. "That's the kind of thing they love in England", says Idol.
In a memorable scene from the video, Idol forces the barbed-wire wedding ring onto the bride's finger and cuts her knuckle. Lister insisted that her knuckle actually had to be cut in order for the scene to appear more realistic.
MTV initially removed this scene from the video.
Also controversial were the apparent Nazi salutes made by the crowd towards the couple. Director David Mallet says he was merely "playing with the power of crowd imagery" when he had the extras reach toward the bride and did not realize how it looked until later.
The video was filmed in a real church outside of London. The MTV-edited version of the video is included on the DVD portion of The Very Best of Billy Idol: Idolize Yourself CD/DVD package.
There are two versions of the video. The first version (the 1982 version) starts off with a girl walking into a record store. She picks up a Billy Idol record and the song starts to play. The video features scenes from New York City, interspersed with stock footage of nuclear bomb tests. The second version (the 1987 version) was banned by MTV because it showed Idol's girlfriend Perri Lister nailed to a cross toward the end of the video. The later version was included on the DVD edition of The Very Best of Billy Idol: Idolize Yourself.
The song's music video mixes elements of Mozart's time with modern times. Falco is shown in a modern dinner jacket, walking past people in eighteenth-century formal wear. Later, he is shown dressed as Mozart, with wild colored hair, being held on the shoulders of men dressed in modern motorcycle-riding attire. At the end, the two crowds mix.
In the "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video, directed by Simon West, produced by Andy Picheta and edited by Robert Bannochie, a smiling Astley sings and dances to the song in various outfits and venues in west London, sometimes accompanied by backup dancers.
A bartender played by Clive Clarke (who appeared prolifically in 1980s music videos, and was a member of Top of the Pops dance troupe Zoo) gradually shifts from casually noticing Astley's singing to being fully engrossed in the song with energetic acrobatic moves. The athletic exertion of many of the other dancers also becomes more intense over the course of Astley's performance.
"Never Gonna Give You Up" is the subject of a popular Internet prank known as "rickrolling" involving misleading links redirecting to the song's music video.
By May 2007, the practice had achieved notoriety on the Internet, and it increased in popularity after its use as a 2008 April Fool's Day joke by various media companies and websites, including YouTube rickrolling all of its featured videos on that day and a website allowing people to Rickroll their friends' phones.
In 'a couple of weeks', about 13 million people had been 'rickrolled' into watching Astley's video, the BBC reported on 1 April 2008. "I think it's just one of those odd things where something gets picked up and people run with it," Astley told the Los Angeles Times in late March 2008, adding: "That's what's brilliant about the Internet."
Rick Astley also appeared in the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade interrupting a song performed by those on a float promoting the Cartoon Network program Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends with a lipsynched performance of "Never Gonna Give You Up".
In several of its protests against Scientology, Anonymous has employed The Rickroll.
The music video for "(Keep Feeling) Fascination" was filmed in a semi-derelict area of Newham, London which was due for demolition and redevelopment as part of the widescale redevelopment of Docklands and East London which took place in the early 1980s. The central theme of the video was based on a red dot on a map, which in turn is a real red dot on the ground. The red dot highlights a single house on the apex of a street where the band is playing the song in the front room, which is painted entirely grey.
Filmed before the widespread use of CGI for the video, the house (which was 1 First Avenue, London E13 8AP) and surrounding area (Junction of 1st Avenue and 3rd Avenue) encompassed by the red dot were completely painted red, including a nearby car. The opening scenes establish the landscape from a map before zooming through the front window of the "red" house, as the band starts the song. The video was conceived and directed by Steve Barron, who directed most of the Human League's early 1980s music videos. The band's scenes were all filmed in a studio; Susan Ann Sulley says that the house was still occupied by a family during the painting and filming of the external scenes. The house remained red for a couple of weeks before finally being demolished in mid 1983.
The music video was shot in New York City and features a take on the American TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, with a bumbling cop duo who chase the girls as they make their escape in a truck (at one point, Bananarama members throw bananas at a trailing police cruiser).
"[It] was just an excuse to get us to the fabled city of New York for the first time," says Siobhan Fahey. She recalls the shoot as a difficult experience. "It was August, over one hundred degrees. Our HQ was a tavern under the Brooklyn Bridge, which had a ladies' room with a chipped mirror where we had to do our makeup."
After an exhausting morning, the band returned to the tavern for lunch. They made the acquaintance of some of the local dockworkers, who upon learning of their situation shared vials of cocaine with them. "That was our lunch" said Fahey, who had never tried the drug before. "When you watch that video, we look really tired and miserable in the scenes we shot before lunch, and then the after-lunch shots are all euphoric and manic."
