Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) - 1983
The music video for "Sweet Dreams" was directed by Chris Ashbrook and filmed in January 1983, shortly before the single and the album were released. The video received heavy airplay on the then-fledgling MTV channel and is widely considered a classic clip from the early-MTV era.
Lennox's striking androgynous visual image, with close-cropped, orange-colored hair, and attired in a man's suit brandishing a cane, immediately made her a household name. Her gender-bending image would be further explored in other Eurythmics videos such as "Love Is a Stranger" and "Who's That Girl?"
Ultravox's Vienna music video, directed by Russell Mulcahy, is particularly evocative of The Third Man. It was Ultravox's second video, after "Passing Strangers" (also with Mulcahy), and cost £6000–£7000, footed by the band after Chrysalis refused to fund it.
Ultravox - Vienna (1981)
"It may come as a surprise to know that approximately half of it was shot on locations in central London, mainly at Covent Garden and also in the old Kilburn Gaumont Theatre in North London (now a Bingo hall). The embassy party scene was in some house we’d rented in town. Can’t remember where, but I do remember that it took the crew a long time to set up the lights to prepare for filming. So long that we all got impatient with waiting and dipped into the many cases of wine we’d laid on for refreshment after the shoot. By the time the crew was ready to film, we were all well partying for real."
"The other half was in Vienna. We did it on the cheap. There was just us and Nick, our trusty camera man. We took an early morning flight to Vienna, ran round like loonies in and out of taxis as we filmed, and soon discovered that, due to it being the winter off-season, many of the splendid places we’d been counting upon filming were either shut for redecorating or covered with webs of scaffolding. “What do you mean it’s ‘closed for repairs’?!” We finished up in the cemetery for the shots with the statue which had been used for the single’s cover (a gentleman who made pianos for the rich and famous of his time, I believe), did the sunset shot, and then dashed back to London to start editing."
—Warren Cann, Explaining the location details to Jonas Wårstad
The gravestone that is shown in the video and on the single cover is part of the grave of Carl Schweighofer and is located on the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna. Schweighofer was a famous Austrian piano manufacturer.
The music video for this song was directed by Russell Mulcahy, director of Highlander. Notable is that guitarist Brian May did not use his famous Red Special guitar in the music video, instead he used a 1984 copy.
Mercury is dressed as a magician type of figure. He enters an abandoned theatre (The Playhouse Theatre in London) where Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon (all dressed as stereotypical tramps) are asleep until awakened by Mercury's entrance. Mercury, dressed as a magician, transforms the hobos into the Queen members dressed regularly with their instruments, and back to hobos again as he leaves.
Throughout the video, cartoon images dance to the beat of the song.
The gay controversy: Oliva Newton John "Physical"
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The music video was directed by Brian Grant.
It features a lusty Olivia, dressed in a tight leotard, as a gym teacher trying to make several overweight men healthy.
She repeatedly tries to make the men lose weight, but her plans fail and she leaves the room to take a shower. Suddenly, the men work out on their own, and they transform into muscular attractive men. In one part, one muscular man glances at his overweight self. Olivia is shocked when she sees this, and starts to flirt with them.
At the end, two of the men secretly go out, holding hands, inferring they are gay. Olivia is surprised to see this, and so she and one of the overweight men play tennis. The gym setting may have been partly an attempt to divert attention from the overt sexual connotations of the term "physical".
This was further emphasised by the twist comedy ending of the video, when the transformed men who are now oblivious to Newton-John's advances are ultimately revealed to be gay (this was also a source of controversy; MTV frequently cut the ending when it aired the video, and the sometimes sensuous nature of the video also led to it being banned outright by some broadcasters in Canada and the United Kingdom).
The Olivia Physical video (where "Physical" music video was included) won a Grammy Award for Video of the Year in 1983.
Rod Stewart's "Young Turks" was filmed in the central downtown area of Los Angeles in the summer of 1981. The runaway couple mentioned in the song is juxtaposed by a group of dancers who seemingly intermix with them throughout the video.
At the start of the video, Billy emerges from one floor above Licha's Santa Fe Grill, in reality at the northwest corner of 7th and Santa Fe Streets in Los Angeles, California. A little more than one-third of the way through the song, Billy and Patti are shoved toward the entrance of the Hotel Hayward, in reality at the west corner of 6th and Spring Streets, again in Los Angeles, between a mile and a half and two miles to the northwest. The dancers eventually end up in a railway yard just to the east of the grill, to where the couple has returned and Rod Stewart is singing the last half of the song.
The video for "Young Turks" is the first MTV music video to feature the dance Popping performed by Paul "Cool Pockets" Guzman-Sanchez from the San Fernando Valley dance group Chain Reaction. Choreographed by Kenny Ortega and directed by Russel Mulcahy, the video came out two years before break dancing was widely known.
The music video for "Walk Like an Egyptian" was nominated for Best Group Video in the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards.
It features people dancing in a pose similar to the pose depicted in the Ancient Egyptian reliefs that inspired songwriter Liam Sternberg; while most of them are ordinary people, some famous figures were depicted dancing in that same pose through the use of simple special effects, like Lady Diana and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
In a popular scene from the video, Hoffs was filmed in a close-up where her eyes moved from side to side, looking left and right. When asked about the scene in an interview with online magazine PlanetOut.com, Hoffs explained that she was actually looking at individual audience members during the video shoot, which took place with a live audience. Looking directly at individual audience members was a technique she used to overcome stage fright, and she was unaware that the camera had a close-up on her while she was employing this technique, switching between one audience member on her left and one on her right.
The music video for the song received extensive play on MTV and video channels across the world, and presented Bananarama in various costumes, including a she-devil, a French temptress, a vampiress, and several Grecian goddesses. In one sequence of the video,
The Birth of Venus, the painting by Sandro Botticelli, was reenacted.
The video marked a pivotal shift towards a more glamorous and sexual image for the girls that contrasted with the tomboyish style in their earlier work. Choreography by Bruno Tonioli.
Music video directed by Peter Care.
Prior to the film The Wall, the first video for the track, directed by album/concert/film art designer Gerald Scarfe, depicted students running in a playground and the teacher puppet from The Wall concerts was used. The video also mixed in some animated scenes later used in "The Trial" and "Waiting for the Worms". The children who sang on "Another Brick in the Wall (Pt. II)" were not allowed to appear in the video as they didn't hold Equity Cards.
Once the film was completed, the actual scenes of "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" and "Another Brick in the Wall, Part II" were combined into a new video, which now represents the music video for "Another Brick in the Wall".
The first version of the music video for Khan's song featured her working in a club with female dancers.
As rap music and break dancing were becoming well known in mainstream pop culture at the time the song was released and started gaining popularity, the more well known video was created featuring Khan with a Disc jockey and break dancers in an inner-city courtyard setting.
A remixed version of the video was created to match the 12" vinyl version of the single.