If
you’ve ever enjoyed a music video on your Nokia Lumia 920, you
probably imagined them to be a relatively modern phenomenon. But
music videos didn’t start with The Beatles’ A
Hard Day’s Night,
any more than it started with MTV, VH1 or YouTube. In fact, believe
it or not, the story of the music video begins well over a century
ago.
A picture perfect beginning
It was American electrician-slash-photographer George Thomas who was the first to marry images to music. His ‘illustrated song’ – a series of still images printed onto glass slides, coloured in by hand and projected onto a screen alongside a live musical performance – made song-book publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern’s number, The Little Lost Child, a massive hit back in the music halls of 1894.
A picture perfect beginning
It was American electrician-slash-photographer George Thomas who was the first to marry images to music. His ‘illustrated song’ – a series of still images printed onto glass slides, coloured in by hand and projected onto a screen alongside a live musical performance – made song-book publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern’s number, The Little Lost Child, a massive hit back in the music halls of 1894.
Melodies are made
Skip forward almost thirty years to the era of the talkies, and musical films were taking off dramatically. Spooney Melodies was a series of five musical shorts produced by Warner Brothers between 1930 and 1931 – films that mixed art-deco animation and live-action footage and aimed to showcase the popular tunes of the day. Clocking in a six minutes (so double the typical length of the later pop video proper), only one of them, Crying’ For The Carolines, is known to have survived.
Video
boxes juke it out
In
the late 1950s, a company called Cameca in Courbevoie, France, came
up with the Scopitone, a jukebox that incorporated a 16mm film
component. Magic! Soon the Italians were following suit with the
Cinebox, which emigrated to the USA with the Scopitone in the 1960s,
where the Cinebox became the Cinejukebox and Francis Ford Coppolla
invested in the Scopitone. The craze for video jukeboxes had fizzled
out by 1967, but by then the enthusiasm for music videos was
unstoppable.
Video
kills the radio star
It
was television, of course, that truly embraced the music video. In
the mid-1970s, alongside the UK’s famous Top
of the Pops (which
had quite restrictive rules on how many non-live ‘outsourced clips’
they could use in the programme), Australian TV shows Countdown and
Sounds were busy popularising the genre. Sounds presenter and DJ
Graham Webb hired new director Russell Mulcahy to shoot videos for
songs he wanted to feature on his show but that didn’t already have
their own promo clips. Mulchay went on create the video for The
Buggles’ Video
Killed The Radio Star –
which became, in 1981, the first music video ever to be played on
MTV!
Music
TV takes off
Since
the 1980s, round-the-clock music video channels have become the norm
– starting with MTV, VH1 and Canada’s MuchMusic – and in 1984,
MTV launched their Music Awards (latterly the VMAs). Directors grew
ambitious – John Landis’ video for Michael
Jackson’s Thriller cost
a staggering half a million dollars to make and opened the way for
African-American artists in the music video scene.
Videos
go viral
Although
MTV is now more focussed on reality shows than music, the Internet
has picked up where TV has waned, and, since 2005, YouTube is now the
first port of call for anybody searching for their favourite artist’s
latest video. The video for Lady GaGa’s hit, Bad
Romance (which
owes more than a nod to Thriller)
became, in 2010, the most-viewed video not only on YouTube, but on
the entire Internet. And now, thanks to smartphones, more people than
ever check out videos anywhere, anytime.
