This was chosen as the first ever music video to be played on MTV when it launched in 1982.
Why do you think this was the video / song that was selected to launch the channel?
Why do you think this was the video / song that was selected to launch the channel?
Top Of The Pops was the most popular music television programme for over 4 decades. It launched in 1964 and went off air in 2006.
The show was broadcast on BBC1 in a prime time slot on a Thursday evening with up to 20 million viewers tuning in to watch their favourite acts and to see the countdown of the latest Top 40 chart.
The show was important for artists as it enabled them to be seen by a wide audience and was god for their promotional work.
The clip below shows the band Lynx performing on a TOTP from 1981 - the band are clearly lip-syncing which was a common feature of the majority of performances.
If an artist's song was selected to be played on TOTP but the artist was not able to be there in the studio, it was a regular occurrence to have an all-female dance group (such as Pan's People below) put together their own choreography to go with the song.
This was not always to the artist's advantage as some of the dance routines were strange to say the least and would not always communicate the correct image for the artist.
The power of the music video was increasingly realised by a growing number of artists from the mid 1970s onwards.
In the video below for Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen's image as a band is carefully mediated through the music videos editing and mise-en-scene.
Artists, and their promoters, quickly came to realise that having a music video to accompany a song was a real advantage - it also meant that this could be shown on show's like TOTP without the artist actually being present.
In the 1980s music videos reached the status of 'art' and bands such as Duran Duran spent millions of pounds producing videos for songs such as 'Rio'.
A new Duran Duran music video was eagerly awaited by fans and the music video became almost as, if not more, important than the song itself in securing success in the charts.
