Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls" was directed by Andy Morahan and Eric Watson, and consists of shots of the duo around London.
At the beginning of the video, noises from the city can be heard, a camera passes Lowe on the street, and focus on two vintage dolls in a shop window. Then appears a sequence of quick cuts with shots of the city's different sub-cultures, the video freezes and cuts to Tennant and Lowe, who walk through an empty Wentworth Street in Petticoat Lane Market. They stand in front of a red garage door, Tennant is in front dressed with a long coat, white shirt and dark necktie addressing directly to the camera, with Lowe standing behind him with a blank expression.
Then the video shows shots of people walking into the London Underground metro system, and as the chorus starts the duo appears on the boarding platform. In slow motion, the camera passes through a shopping mall in central London, followed by the duo walking along the concourse at Waterloo Station. It cuts to a brief shot of a red double-decker bus, and black and white shots of the Tower Bridge, Westminster and the Big Ben from the sky.
The duo poses on the South Bank of the River Thames in a pastiche of a postcard image, with the Houses of Parliament as a background.
The camera shows shots of young women, and passes through arcades and cinemas in Leicester Square. The camera now passes the South Africa House, showing protestors in an anti-apartheid vigil.
The video cuts to a closeup of Tennant singing the chorus, with a purple neon sign passing across his face. At the end the camera passes again through Leicester Square, where people queue to see Fletch and Desperately Seeking Susan.
The video was nominated for Best New Artist in a Video at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, but lost to a-ha's "Take on Me".
The music video features a bespectacled David Byrne dancing much like a marionette. Byrne is shown making sudden flings of his arm, tapping his head, and getting on his hands and knees to pat the floor, much like simple tricks which can be done with actual marionettes. In the background, clones of Byrne dance in perfect synchronization; in the foreground, a larger Byrne is getting further and further out of synchrony.
The video is exhibited in the New York Museum of Modern Art. Some of Byrne's mannerisms (such as physical spasms, unfocussed eye movements, and sharp intakes of breath) were inspired by his choreographer, Toni Basil, showing him footage of epilepsy sufferers.
A music video for a shortened version of the original song was created in 1983, featuring military clips with false colour, simple computer-generated graphics such as colour blocks and geometric lines, digitised video of band members at very low resolution and framerate, and a short appearance of the game Zaxxon (reportedly the Apple II port). The colour blocks were created using Peter Saville's colour coded alphabet.
The music video begins by showing sped-up footage of clouds passing through the sky. After the opening riff, which is shown as just the keyboardist's hands playing it whilst being animated using digital rotoscoping, it shows a transparent video image of McCluskey vocalising and playing a bass guitar. The still photo from the album cover is taken from the video.
The video clip was shot in the Whisky-A-Go-Go during the Mötley Crüe's warm up show before embarking on the Dr. Feelgood Tour. Sam Kinison is featured at the start of the video in a short cameo as the band's driver. For the Carnival of Sins 2005 tour, "Kickstart My Heart" was used as the band's closing song for the tour because of its fast pace and epic feel. This was again proven when the band used it as an intro for Crüe Fest. The song is again being used as their closer on the 2011 Tour with Poison.
Rock as it should always sound.
LA rock, one of my favorite.
The Clash made low-budget music videos for several of their songs, and the one for "Rock the Casbah" may be their most memorable. Filmed in Austin, Texas, it depicts an Arab, played by Austin actor Titos Menchaca, and a Hasidic Jew, played by local stage director Dennis Razze, befriending each other on the road and skanking together through the streets to a Clash concert at Austin Coliseum, often followed by an armadillo, interspersed with the band performing in front of an oil well.
The U.S. Air Force became an unwitting participant in the video. Two RF-4C aircraft landing at Bergstrom Air Force Base (near Austin) from the east are featured in the portion of the video with the lyrics "the King called out his jetfighters..."
Whitney Houston "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" (1987)
The video for "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" (directed by Brian Grant) is one of Houston's best recognized music videos. In the intro of this video, Houston just finishes a performance onstage. She walks backstage, and the scene is intercut with more vivid, colorful images of her. The song then explodes into its beginning, with myriad locations and various outfits by Houston, as dancers trying to impress her as she dances around, just having a good time. The music video was in heavy rotation on music channels MTV, VH1, and BET during the song's run.
"I Love Rock 'n Roll"'s gritty, black-and-white music video received heavy play from the then-young MTV network. In it, Jett and the Blackhearts travel to a small, dingy bar and proceed to excite the drunken crowd by performing the song and yelling out its famous chorus. A snippet of Jett's 1981 hit, "Bad Reputation," is featured at the beginning of the video. Jett followed "I Love Rock 'n Roll" up with another cover — her version of Tommy James and the Shondells' "Crimson and Clover" was a top-ten U.S. hit. The video was originally in color, but it was converted to black and white due to the way Joan Jett felt her red leather jacket looked in color.
The music video features a bespectacled David Byrne dancing much like a marionette. Byrne is shown making sudden flings of his arm, tapping his head, and getting on his hands and knees to pat the floor, much like simple tricks which can be done with actual marionettes. In the background, clones of Byrne dance in perfect synchronization; in the foreground, a larger Byrne is getting further and further out of synchrony.
The video is exhibited in the New York Museum of Modern Art. Some of Byrne's mannerisms (such as physical spasms, unfocussed eye movements, and sharp intakes of breath) were inspired by his choreographer, Toni Basil, showing him footage of epilepsy sufferers.
A still from this video was my avi for the longest time!!
Van Halen - Hot For Teacher (1984)
The music video (directed by Pete Angelus and David Lee Roth) (produced by Jerry Kramer and Glenn Goodwin), and (concept/treatment by Anthony Nasch) was filmed at John Marshall High School, with Phil Hartman performing the voice of Waldo, the video's hero.
Along with Waldo, the "kid versions" of Van Halen face the trials and tribulations of (shown in black-and-white) grade school.
Once the schoolteacher arrives, she steps onto the desks, arrayed like a runway. She then tears off her dress, revealing a bikini bottom, cropped top and a sash that reads "Phys Ed", all to the cheers of the students, male and female. In the end, the kids grow up to become, variously, a gynecologist (Alex), sumo wrestler (Mike), psychiatric hospital patient (Eddie), pimp (Waldo) and game show host (Dave). Urban myth is alive and well in regards to the multitude of music insiders who claim creative credit for HFT.
The original director, Rick Friedberg was hired for his knack to to tell funny stories ("Pray TV"). Unfortunately, Friedberg's old-school film making approach did not mesh with the free wheeling high-wire ways of VH. At the end of the day Angelus and Roth made the final editing decisions. On the set Angelus contributed to a few shot selections, combined with 'directing by committee', incredibly in spite of the footloose production history will bestow "Hot For Teacher" as one of the most influential MTV videos that helped catapult the network to legendary success.
The video of the song was set at Tintern Abbey and Chislehurst Caves, and features Graham Chapman; this would be one of his last appearances on television before his death in October 1989 of cancer. In the video, Chapman plays an irritable art instructor who criticizes a young student for drawing Iron Maiden mascot Eddie rather than sketching the abbey ruins. The teacher discovers an underground lab and finally encounters an animated version of Eddie, who leers and reaches out to him from inside a refrigerator. The band appears on a TV screen showing live footage of a concert. Adrian Smith is shown playing left-handed, suggesting a reversed image.
