Great moments in music video history #11: Sabotage

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

Kids today, eh? They don't like bands, or albums, they just like tracks. Example: Amusements Minor loves No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn but, despite my best efforts, steadfastly refuses to entertain anything else by The Beastie Boys. Anything! I blame Spotify. Or maybe I'm to blame, perhaps I haven't enthused enough (or too much). But I like this song... and love the video, which feels like all the best and worst aspects of every late 70s American cop show combined in three nostalgia-soaked minutes. Keep 'em peeled for a fleeting glimpse of Starsky knitwear even!

So, bottom line - I'm not picking a specific moment in this video because the whole thing is excellent. "Starring Nathan Wind as Cochese" indeed... Enjoy.

Great moments in music video history #10: Wild Boys

Duran Duran were just about the biggest band around when Wild Boys came out, a scarcely believable 39 years ago, and they had a video budget to match. They perhaps hit the peak of video excess with this four minutes of ... well, everything, frankly.

At the time, the red-tops were full of "Le Bon almosts drowns on video set" stories, as I recall. Simon has sought to distance himself from the story in recent years, calling it an urban myth. But the video's choreographer, Arlene Philips of Strictly fame no less, remembers it slightly differently. As you may recall, Le Bon was strapped to the sail of a windmill which rotated and dunked his head underwater whilst he was singing. What can I say, it was the Eighties. Urban myth the near-drowning may be, but Arlene is quoted as saying, "The windmill stopped when he was under the water and he couldn't breathe. He was stuck there and they had to send divers in to rescue him. It was awful, waiting to see if he was OK. I'll never forget it. It was an amazing video, though. Wild Boys was just the most fabulous, mad video ever."

Of course he didn't nearly drown, and I'm sure he wouldn't have downplayed it if he had. But it does give me all the excuse I need to play this gloriously OTT slice of nostalgia, and dedicate it to The Man Of Cheese, a big Duran fan back in the day - happy birthday, mate.

And P.S. - if you don't sing the intro to this but with a lyric change any time anybody ever mentions the phrase "wild boar" then I'm afraid we need to have words...

Great moments in music video history #9: Some Better Day

John Simm gets a surprise around the 1:54 mark, and we all get something in our eyes. The subject matter of Some Better Day could make for a depressing song but it becomes borderline uplifting in I Am Kloot's hands.

Great moments in music video history #8: No Distance Left To Run

In which Blur literally sleep through the whole thing.

"It's over, you don't need to tell me..."

Great moments in music video history #7: Just

I was reminded of this video recently by a post at the always-excellent No Badger Required, which described the video thus (I hope it's okay to quote verbatim):

"You of course will all recall the marvellous video to ‘Just’. A man can be seen lying on the ground in a street (actually shot behind Liverpool Street Station in London town). Slowly a bunch of people start talking to the man who lying on the pavement. Subtitles appear on the screen displaying the conversation that is taking place between the chap on the ground and the people around him. He refuses to tell them why he is lying on the ground. Meanwhile the band watch the proceedings out of a nearby window.

Eventually the man does explain, but cheekily the subtitles vanish at the same time, but what we do know is that all the other people all suddenly lie down on the ground with the original man and we never find out what was said and the band have never revealed it, in a Guardian interview about six years later, a journalist actually asked them and Thom Yorke said that if he told him “We would all have to lie down on the floor” with a smile and so the debate raged on (the real answer is of course that Piers Morgan was just around the corner, giving away free tickets for his telly programme and most people would rather be pretend to be dead that be on that)." [Source]

I can't describe it any better (or even as well) as that. What's your theory on what makes everyone lie down?

Great moments in music video history #6: Sun Hits The Sky

When this was released, keyboardist and brother-of-Gaz Rob Coombes hadn't officially joined the band, though he had been recording with them. The first half of the video for Sun Hits The Sky sees Rob travelling across a parched landscape in a Messerschmitt bubble car, hoping to arrive at the desert where the band are playing in time for his keyboard solo. Will he make it, viewers? What tension!

As an aside, I've been re-evaluating my thoughts on Supergrass lately. Back in the day, they didn't quite hit the mark for me... but I'm starting to think I gave them short shrift.

Anyway, here's the video.

Great moments in music video history #5: Come Into My World

This is from 2002, around the time I used to refer to Kylie as "the future wife". As well as delusional, this didn't go down too well with my partner at the time, now ex. Anyway, here are multiple Kylies - just what we need in these unbearably hot and indescribably grim days.

It's not just Kylie that multiplies, of course. Half the fun of this video is seeing everything in the background replicate too. As such it bears repeat viewing - that's what I told the ex anyway...

Great moments in music video history #4: Free Yourself

It's not their finest moment musically, but this promo video for the Chemical Brothers' 2018 release Free Yourself is quite astonishing really, and the fact that it might not astonish you or other viewers is really just a sign of how blasé the world has become about CGI and computer animation. I've no idea what this film cost to make - and really that's what it is, a short film rather than a music video - but the fact that it's in budget at all is, when you think about it, astounding.

So, here's Free Yourself - think I, Robot but with a big beat instead of Will Smith. And don't forget to sit through the credits, for a little coda.

Great moments in music video history #3a and #3b - Love's Great Adventure and Closer

Personally, I quite like it when a music video steps outside of itself. The first example I can really remember was a past-their-best Ultravox offering up this breather a mere 30 seconds into the video for Love's Great Adventure:

And then there's Closer, from Travis, which I've featured here before. Check this out from around 2:45, with peak outside-ness from 3:06. No points for ID'ing Ben Stiller.

Can you think of any other videos with a pause in the proceedings?

Great moments in music video history #2 - Smack My Bitch Up (NSFW)

The second in a very occasional series, and my first post in 13+ years of blogging to require a NSFW warning (hence posting it at the weekend when, presumably, most of you aren't at work).

Today's great moment in music video history is the obvious one, coming, as it does, from the promo to accompany The Prodigy's 1997 single Smack My Bitch Up. It got to number eight in the UK chart and, aside from Firestarter, was their only single to crack the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. So it must have been doing something right. For me, it's not their finest hour but the video... well, even 21 years down the line, it's a powerful four and a half minutes of anyone's time. Sex, drugs, violence and a terribly messed-up protagonist, this has all of that. And it's still sufficiently shocking, a generation later, to be hard to find on YouTube. No doubt it violates their terms of service, or some such. Thank goodness for Vimeo, then.

In the very unlikely event that there is someone out there reading this who doesn't know the big reveal, I won't spoil it by saying what happens at 4m20s, other than that the video rewards a second watch, to spot all the clues. But I repeat, NSFW. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Great moments in music video history #1 - Living On The Edge

The first in what may become a very occasional series. With the emphasis on may and very occasional...

Today's great moment in music video history comes from the promo to accompany Aerosmith's 1993 single Living On The Edge. I'm not an Aerosmith fan, but this track is okay, I think, for what it is. The video got an awful lot of airplay on MTV at the time, and since I was working in a TV and hi-fi shop (low paid but a lot of fun, lots of tech to play with, and a great friend made) where MTV was our default satellite demo channel, I got to watch this video a lot.

According to Wikipedia, this video is "notable for a number of things, including depicting vandalism, theft, joyriding, airbag crashing, unprotected sex, violence among school-aged youth, cross-dressing teachers, a naked Steven Tyler holding a zipper by his crotch ... and lead guitarist Joe Perry playing a lead guitar solo in front of an oncoming train." It also features Edward Furlong - you known, John Connor in Terminator 2.

Memorable though the "lead guitar solo in front of an oncoming train" is, the great moment in this video comes in early, just 40 seconds in. I won't spoil it for you, but you'll know it when you see it. Here you go.