It is often assumed that the music video business was kick-started by the launch of MTV on 1 August 1981, but in Britain the initial production of pop videos for use on television was actually the effect of changing sales conditions in Europe.  As Emily Caston explains in her excellent notes on this 6 DVD release of ‘over 15 hours of iconic British music videos’:

When MTV became available to cable subscribers in the USA it could, then, draw on a UK video production industry already in place, while US record company marketing teams could refer to ‘a recognised stable of [UK] video genres’:  the majority of videos broadcast on MTV in its early years were British made.

The irony of this story is that, while MTV had as significant an impact on TV viewing in continental Europe as in the USA, the service never really took off in Britain itself.  The increasing use of video promotion here reflected more parochial changes in television regulation.  The Broadcasting Act of 1980 allowed for a fourth television service and Channel 4 was duly launched on 2 November 1982. This immediately increased the number of music programmes on terrestrial TV.  The Tube, for example, had its first broadcast three days later, and while it was organised around live studio performances, videos were a key part of its programming. The Broadcasting Act was also designed to pave the way for the cable TV in the UK, and prospective cable companies were keen to emulate the US success of MTV by providing all-day music video services (and record companies were quick to buy stakes in prospective cable companies).  In 1983 Melody Maker reported that ‘apart from channels concentrating on films, 24-hour news and sport, the vast majority of potential cable companies are including all-day rock video channels’.  Richard Littleton from EMI's cable division told the paper ‘piped TV could be rock music's biggest single advance in promotion and exposure’ (Melody Maker, 9 September 1983, p. 3).

In the event, though, it was not cable that revolutionised British broadcasting but satellite, following the launch of Sky in 1989.  Sky, like the cable companies, also offered sport, films and 24-hour news but, unlike them, had little interest in music programming.  The rise of video promotion in the UK owed more to policy changes made by public service broadcasters.

In 1983 the Musicians’ Union and the BPI signed new agreements with the BBC which brought to an end the long-standing requirement that bands appearing on Top of the Pops and other music programmes re-record their tracks for the broadcast, using the same musicians who played on the original recording.  The new agreements allowed the use of music videos, compilation videotapes and video jukeboxes on television; videoed musical performances no longer had to be re-recorded or re-filmed for a BBC broadcast.  As Melody Maker explained, ‘in effect, as far as the public is concerned, what the new agreements will mean will be far more videos on TV’ (Melody Maker, 2 July 1983, p. 3).

In contemporary accounts of the 1980s ‘video boom’, popular music journalists and academics traced various consequences: the impact on record companies’ artist promotion strategies – music video budgets were seen to be good value for money in marketing terms, certainly when compared with the costs of live touring; and the rise of new kinds of star with new kinds of career – from paying one's dues on the road to being signed up and video packaged for instant stardom.  The music press assumption was that video selling placed greater emphasis on an act's visual aesthetic than on its musical or live performing skills.  A host of British artists from the post-punk fashion scenes flourished, with bands like Duran Duran and Culture Club achieving unexpected success in the USA.

Music videos, however, didn't have the revolutionary industrial or aesthetic effects for music making that were predicted.  Much of what was written on the subject by popular music academics in the 1980s – I include my own work here – now seems quaintly wrong-headed.  Certainly the most interesting music video analyses since then have been rooted in film rather than popular music studies (Carol Vernallis’ work, for example).Footnote ¹

This is reflected in Power to the People.  It is a most entertaining and instructive anthology.  It makes excellent use of Arts and Humanities Research Council funds to celebrate transient popular art works; it is a collection that should be in every university library.  For most readers of Popular Music, though, it is not, I think, what one would expect from a box set of ‘iconic’ videos and its title, Power to the People, is decidedly misleading – ‘power to the advertising industry’ would be a more appropriate strap line.  Who would have expected that the bands with the most tracks here would be Chemical Brothers, Coldplay and Radiohead (with five videos each), followed by Basement Jaxx, FKA Twigs, Massive Attack, Oasis, Prodigy and Robbie Williams (with four videos each)?  Or that the distribution of selected videos over the decades would be 1960s (2), 1970s (5), 1980s (33), 1990s (64), 2000s (48), 2010s (48)?Footnote ²  The point here is that this collection was not put together by some music critical consensus but

The six discs are organised accordingly: performance videos (‘the core deceit of the performance video is that the band perform the track live for filming but mimic performance by singing and operating their instruments in synch to an audio playback’); concept videos (music videos ‘inspired by a concept that informs art direction, costume design and choice of location’); dance videos (featuring the work of choreographers); story videos (‘short film narratives’ – plotted by the directors not the lyricists); witty videos (comedy and/or political commentary resting on various kinds of formal self-referentiality); and portrait videos (representations of femininity and masculinity).

The video material here, in short, is not organised by musical genre or musical influence or record sales patterns but by innovations and impacts in the video production process itself. While this is a refreshing way of looking at the history of British music video, it does raise questions that the sleeve notes are too brief to answer.

First, while this project succeeds as a celebration of key video makers and commissioners, it offers little in the way of video analysis.  It doesn't provide a video-by-video account of why each one was chosen or what, in production terms, made it innovative or iconic or influential.

Second, although the notes open by reference to the initial music industry conditions of video production, there is no discussion of the ways in which these conditions have changed (if at all) over the following 40 years.  One conclusion I would draw, for example, is that the ‘decline’ of the record industry in general and the major labels in particular has been vastly exaggerated, but more information about the ways in which the later videos here were funded and used for marketing and promotion would be needed to confirm or refute this.

Third, one way of making sense of this collection is as a kind of historical version of an advertising awards ceremony.  Emily Caston became Professor of Screen History (at the University of West of London) following a distinguished career as producer in the film, video and advertising industries and is unsurprisingly comfortable to present adverts as an art form.  As an old rock fan I'm still a video sceptic.  I don't doubt the aesthetic appeal or imaginative energy of some advertising but I am uneasy with the romanticisation of advertising agencies’ ‘creativity’. How does a video director's artistic freedom relate to a video's purpose to sell a record and/or construct an artist's brand image?  What role do the performers play in determining how they and their songs are represented?  (On this collection very few musicians – FKA Twigs and M.I.A. most notably – are credited as directors of their own videos.)  The advertising industry has long been a training ground, a lab and a financially rewarding site on which young film makers can start their own (non-advertising) careers, and watching the most interesting videos here I found it hard not to conclude that they were more about establishing their makers’ imaginative skills than those of the musicians they were promoting.

The unanswered question here, then, concerns the relationship between video makers and musicians.  On this anthology the latter seem somehow excluded from the process that, at the end of the day, they are paying for.  What is needed here is the kind of ethnographic work on video shoots that has become familiar in studies of what goes on in the recording studio.  I certainly hope to learn a lot more from Emily Caston's forthcoming book, British Music Video, to be published by Edinburgh University Press in Reference Caston2019.  I guess this collection is best thought of as an intriguing trailer.