POWER TO THE PEOPLE:
British Music Videos 1966-2016 8/10 Six discs of pop videos from the past 50 years. By John Lewis
THIS mammoth collection of pop videos is as close as we get to establishing a canon for the art form. It is split up into six themed discs – “Performance”, “Dance”, “Concept”, “Wit”, “Femininity” and “Masculinity” – but the best videos tend to blur the boundaries between these categories. This is evident even in the earliest pieces here directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, whose videos for The Beatles and the Stones pretty much invented the genre. The Who’s “Happy Jack”, from 1966 (featuring the band dressed as burglars) shows that videos could be conceptual and lateral from the word go, fusing choreography, performance acting and narrative absurdism. It wasn’t until the mid 1980s that performance videos started to expand Lindsay-Hogg’s surrealism, as with Tim Pope’s 1984 film for The Cure’s “Close To Me” – where the band are crammed into a wardrobe, with guitarist Porl Thompson miming the harpsichord riff on a plastic comb. Later performance videos in this collection explore similar territory: Blur’s “Song 2” sees the band ricocheting off flock-wallpapered walls; “Pumping On Your Stereo” sees Supergrass transformed into distended puppets.
The ’80s is often thought of as a golden age of video, but even the more interesting promos of this era on this comp – by the likes of 23 Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire, The The and Kate Bush – look like dry runs for what was to come. It’s difficult to deny that music videos have got better since the 1990s, when the medium started to be used as a testing ground for filmmakers such as Chris Cunningham, Jonathan Glazer, Sophie Muller and Dawn Shadforth. This is particularly evident with music videos that aspire to the status of short films. Compare the early attempts at this – like Julien Temple’s six-minute gangster epic which accompanies Sade’s “Smooth Operator” – with later videos, like Chris Cunningham’s stunning movie for Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker”, or Jonas Åkerlund’s video for Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up”. Meanwhile, the films for “Weekender” by Flowered Up or “Blind Faith” by Chase & Status turn the livingfor-the-weekend world of clubbing into a piece of Alan Sillitoescripted kitchen-sink realism. Cheaper technology has allowed directors to assemble visually impressive feasts for a fraction of the £1m it cost to make, say, Duran Duran’s “Wild Boys”. The disc titled “Dance” is the most instructive: it starts with Philippe Decouflé’s expensively choreographed films for New Order and Fine Young Cannibals, but the later, less expensive videos look even more visually ravishing. Check out Tom Beard’s films for FKA Twigs; the Thom Yorke/Radiohead videos directed by Garth Jennings and choreographed by Wayne McGregor; or Jeremy Cole’s film for the Young Fathers’ “Shame” – an ecstatic, thuggish ballet it’s impossible to take your eyes off.