When you think about the most iconic music videos of all time, what comes to mind? There have been some great videos in the last couple of decades, but invariably the ones that are most often referenced are from the first decade of MTV. There was a freshness to music videos of that period, often wildly experimental and with a lighter touch than the average over-produced Lady Gaga video. And they were everywhere, swirling 24/7 on MTV and finding their way into network programs, shopping malls, and Saturday morning cartoons. There's a reason those videos stick with us after so many years, despite how crude many seem in comparison to what you see today, and it's largely because of the brilliance of some wickedly talented directors who were defining the genre on the fly.What not everyone knows, though, is how much of that iconic list was the inspiration of one man. His name is Steve Barron, and he was the creative force behind some of the most memorable videos of all time. A director could have made his name off any one of these videos—"Don't You Want Me?" "Billie Jean," "Summer of '69," "Money for Nothing," "Rough Boy," "Take On Me"—but Steve Barron did all of them, and many more. His artistic vision practically defined the visual template of my youth, as it did for so many other people of our generation. And on the 30th anniversary of MTV, he was gracious enough to sit down with us at Culture Brats and tell us about his experience, his art, and his role in the birth of a genre.
Thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to speak with me and all of us at Culture Brats.
No problem
You directed some of the most famous music videos of the early years of MTV. How did you get into that, especially at a time when directing music videos wasn't an obvious career path?
Yeah, it wasn't a clearly defined route, and it wasn't really a premeditated thing either. It just sort of happened by my start as a camera assistant and technician in films in London. I was actually very young getting into the business. By the time I was 20 or 21, I was doing some pretty big movies as the camera assistant, and when I was working on movies in the UK like Superman. I was living the 21-year old social life in London. I was meeting bands and people who were in the music business—as you do, out and about—and the more I met, the more I chatted with them. I was always a big fan of music; I just kind of got pulled into that world.
It was at a phase [when] they weren't called videos. This was like 1976, really, and they were promotional films. They seemed to be being done sporadically by the record companies who were frustrated by not having any outlet for them. But they were still making them just the same. I jumped onto that really by ignorance as much as anything, because the music world didn't understand what the film world did, and the film world didn't really understand what the music world did. The fact that I was a clapper loader and I was on this massive movie...at the time they weren't really distinguishing between the clapper loader and the director. The fact that I was working on the film gave me a certain amount of credibility. I was able to put together, through my knowledge of cameras primarily, little shoots for bands. The first one I really did was for The Jam. That's how it all sort of began: by chance, wanting to work with music but without a clear path.
