Just months after the first space shuttle flight, and when Princess Diana was still a blushing bride, there came a revolution that changed the music industry – and the revolution was televised.
Because on August 1, 1981, came the launch of Music Television, which soon came to be known as MTV.
A voice boomed: “Ladies and gentlemen…rock and roll” and the first video played – a bit obviously, it was Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles.
The idea behind the station was very simple. Youngsters in the US aged 12 to 30 had been giving up on TV while remaining loyal to the radio stations that played the music they loved.
So the idea was to bring the music to the TV – and those young viewers with it.
John Lack was the Warner executive who helped persuade the entertainment giant to launch the station – and his was the gravelly voice that launched the channel on that first day.
He says: “Apart from sports and sex there is nothing that drives us together like music.
“We felt that if we could put music on television all the time for these kids we had a chance [of making it work].”
Within four years MTV would revolutionise the music business and youth culture, lending its name to an entire generation that grew up watching videos whenever they wanted, instead of waiting for a weekly showing on Top of the Pops or similar.
It became the natural showcase for the flamboyant stars of the 80s such as Duran Duran, Madonna and Prince.
But in the station’s earliest days there was a problem: when it launched, there were only about 150 videos in existence.
Even Video Killed the Radio Star was two years old by then, and had previously only reached number 40 in the US charts.
In fact, the term “music video” did not even exist in 1981.
Record companies in the US almost resented having to make “promos”, as they called them. They tended to consist of concert footage packaged together to promote a new release in far-flung places, in lieu of flying the band out.
They thought so little of video content that MTV was initially given what existed for next to nothing, or even free. Gale Sparrow, head of talent relations at the channel, says: “We’d play anything that came through the door in the first six months… it had to be pretty bad for us not to play it.”
Fortunately, a new wave of British acts such as The Human League, Soft Cell, Ultravox and Culture Club were making creative and innovative videos for shows such as Top of The Pops.
Ground-breaking videos such as Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer were much loved.
Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, talking of singer Annie Lennox’s appearance in the video for Sweet Dreams, told a documentary about the station: “The idea of Annie’s face staring out of a full-screen TV in a kid’s living room in Cleveland, Ohio, must have been like ‘Whoa’.”
