The Moody Blues – Knights in White Satin – 1967
The combination of music and images has, since the introduction of opera, been one of the most powerful media in human experience.
Up until now, it was so complicated and expensive to mount a production that it was left to the very rich or the highly motivated to create music videos.
Today, of course, it’s relatively easy to do – but it is still an immature medium with enormous as yet untapped potential.
Last time, we looked at the very earliest days of music video and its progenitors.
Today, we’re going to look at 3 examples of the beginnings of the breakout of music video as a medium in its own right.
The inherent limitations here are cost of production and platform.
By the 1960s, television began to give music videos a platform that they had never had before – a place where people could see the music as well as listen to it.
The first music videos, as such, were in fact more promotional tools for the recording industry than an art form on their own, but they were very much a beginning.
They were, of course still shot in film and required enormous amounts of work in the editing rooms to get them in shape. None of this came cheap.
Knights in White Satin, (above) by The Moody Blues was produced and released in 1967, the ‘summer of love’. It was written by Justin Heyward and appeared on the Days of Future Past album. The film was shot as a promo for the album.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb3iPP-tHdA[/youtube]A Whiter Shade of Pale – Procul Harum – 1967
Released in May 1967, A Whiter Shade of Pale immediate shot to the #1 slot in the UK and #5 in the US and stayed there for 6 weeks. The song has been covered many times since.  The promotional film was shot in Witley Court in Worcester, England and released the same year. What makes the film interesting (besides the great music), is the break-away from the band performing to the shots of Picadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square in London. Instead of simply recording a performance video, the film begins to create a kind of mixed media/mixed message. OK, the camera work is dodgy and the shots of the miniskirts while now historical footage don’t add a great deal to the narrative – never the less, it is an interesting departure. A second version was made a year later, this time with footage from the war in Vietnam in the place where the band members run to the camera.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgD-D_z0Cs8[/youtube]Sympathy for the Devil – The Rolling Stones – 1968
Now, here is where we begin to get something really interesting.
In this video, The Stones collaborated with French film director Jean Luc-Godard to create a real break- out music video. Instead of shooting one performance piece or laying out a complete music track with lip synched video (I used film and video pretty interchangeably here but it was all film), Godard shot rehearsal tracks over and over at the Olympic Studios in London. Then he covered a great deal of the film with his own political footage. Today, in light of Final Cut Pro the ‘special effects’ are nothing astonishing, but on its release in 1968, it was pretty mind blowing. (Particularly if you indulged in some illegal chemical substances prior to viewing).
The film was so powerful that it convinced The Stones to collaborate with Michael Lindsay-Hogg to produce a full-length feature film entitled The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, which featured not only The Stones but also John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton and the then-new UK band, Jethro Tull.
Remarkably the film was not released until 1996, an you can’t find a copy of it on Youtube (or anywhere else, so far… but if you do, please send it to me!)
3 Comments
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Malcolm James Thomson February 17, 2011
I find it almost lèse majesté to presume to correct you, but only the Witley Court is an example of what we called ‘promos’ back in the day. There were not many outlets for these productions which were usually financed by the artist’s manager or record label. The television channels, all three of them (!) preferred to get the acts into their own studios, surround the performers with dancers (“Ready, Steady, Go!”) or have them introduced on a trendy magazine show by David Frost (looking so very, very young!).
Some promos did wind up on Scopitone video jukeboxes but many promo productions languished without any proper means of exposure to an audience. This, of course, had the advantage of allowing those of us making such filmlets had a chance to hone ouur skills so that by the time ‘video killed the radio star’ there were some very porficient directors at work.
To embarrass me my daughter tends to send me the clip I made in ’69, “Space Oddity”, to remind me of how awful some of our efforts were!
Michael Rosenblum February 17, 2011
Thanks Malcolm
As you were there it’ always best to get first hand information. It’s amazing how much innovative stuff came out of the UK