First Ever Pop Video

Posted by: throbnorth on 25 March 2003

Does anyone know what this might actually be? Bohemian Rhapsody is usually trotted out, but I remember videos [or more properly promotional films] for Penny Lane & Strawberry Fields. Anything earlier come to mind?

throb
Posted on: 25 March 2003 by Not For Me
I have seen performance videos of Doo Wop groups from the 50's, but these hardly qualify as 'music videos'.

BR is usually the culpirt named as the first concept video.

DS
Posted on: 25 March 2003 by garyi
I always thought to myself that See Emily Play (or whatever the floyd song with them on a beach with a manakin) must have come way before the Queen number
Posted on: 25 March 2003 by AL4N
As David says there may of been bands playing music on our screens, but that doesn't make them video's.Bo Rhap is as likely as any
Posted on: 25 March 2003 by JohanR
Ah! A favorite topic of mine. I'm an old Queen fan, but the idea that moving pictures to popular music as a promotional tool was invented out of nowhere with BR is of course completely preposterous!
Several examples to the contrary has already been stated in this thread.
I was a kid in the 1960-s and watched pop programs on the telly, and the "running around and being silly" style was popular with many bands.

JohanR
Posted on: 26 March 2003 by seagull
Some early British ones...

Help!
Summer Holiday
Yellow Submarine - first animated one
Posted on: 26 March 2003 by throbnorth
I'm sure the answer must be the Dylan, which had completely sliped my mind [and if it is, what a distinguished effort to start the genre - still endlessly quoted, and a sort of perfection].

BR is definitely NOT the first [unless possibly for the fact that it was shot on video rather than film, but that wasn't what I meant]. Heaps & heaps before that.

I don't think Summer Holiday or Help can count, because they were clips from films. If we're going doen that road, then when 'We're In The Money' from Gold Diggers of 1933 was bizarrely a hit in 197?, they used a clip of that as well [magnificent album on UA issued at the time, BTW - not only did it have a pop-up wedding cake like gatefold sleeve, but all the fantastic percussive tapdance bits were panned across your living room in simulated stereo]. Why isn't it on CD? Anyway, I don't think film clips count.

As I said before, The Beatles made films for Penny Lane [bus ride round Liverpool, but no sign of the Fab Four] and Strawberry Fields [definitely in the 'being silly' category, - a piano with lots of string, solarisation and the lads in a tree] and surprisingly never seemed to get to grips with the idea. No so the Stones - is anyone old enough to remember the film for 'Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby' [1966] which had the group in drag dressed as wartime WAAF's staring at the camera for the full 2.30 mins? Bill Wyman was in a wheelchair, with his legs deliberately twisted to suggest polio, and Mick was a Harlowesque blonde with a fag. No miming, no nothing, just dour stares for the length of the track. High Concept or what? And in 1966.....! In our house, watching TOTP at that time was a family event, partly enjoyable for the spectacle of watching my father, ensconced in his armchair, Jim Royle stylee, but sans remote, gradually purpling and threatening to explode every few minutes, although he strangely grew very quite for Pan's People for some reason. His reaction to this little outing kept the rest of us going for months, and I can't imagine why I've forgotten it until now.

throb