This is the last of these occasional posts on music videos - it comes a few days before I'm off to New York for a bit of a break, so it's quite nice timing. Completely unplanned, but it's nice that International Boomtown Rats Day on the 28th will fall when I'm there!!!
Watch out for my advantures on Here's a Postcard.
As we saw in part 4 of these posts, in the late 1970s, the Boomtown Rats set the agenda with the video for I Don’t Like Mondays and the other promos off The Fine Art of Surfacing. By this time, the music video had become a staple for the music industry as a whole. And boy, did the competition heat up…
In 1980 – the year The Rats released Banana Republic –
David Bowie released what by that time was the most expensive music video ever produced – Ashes to Ashes. Like the video for Mondays, Bowie’s budget bustin’ promo is seen as a significant milestone.
Perhaps the biggest step in the evolution of the music video occurred in 1981 – the year The Rats released Elephants’ Graveyard. This was the year that MTV launched in the US and the first video screened was The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star
There was now a 24 hour-a-day market for music video and everyone was fighting for air-time. There are countless great videos I could mention, and I’ve picked out links to a few of my all-time faves:
Kate Bush – Cloudbusting
Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer
Dire Straits – Money for Nothing
But there are many more – please share links to your standout videos.
Amongst the chart-topping musicians of the later 1980s, it’s sad that The Boomtown Rats began to struggle – it’s not that they didn’t continue to write and perform great songs….tracks like Never in a Million Years
and Dave
are widely regarded as some of the band’s best – but for whatever fickle reasons, The Rats’ faded from popular view. A huge shame and something us fans of the band will never get our heads around.
It seems fitting to close this series of articles on music videos with The Rats last video from 1985 – A Hold of Me
or maybe we shouldn’t be too negative ….. let’s end instead with a link to their latest promo film, 2022’s uplifting Here’s a Postcard
Roll on next summer …..