1980

1980 is the year before everything changed. There is no MTV yet, no video channel of any kind, and no reason for anybody to spend real money on a promotional film.

What a video was for in 1980 was television bookings. If a band could not get to a studio to perform live on Top of the Pops in Britain or Countdown in Australia, they sent a film instead. That was the entire commercial logic, and it shows in what got made. The typical 1980 video is the band, in a room, playing the song, shot in a single day on a budget that would not cover catering on a video five years later.

That sounds like a criticism and it partly is, but there is something appealing about the honesty of it. Nobody is pretending. The band are there to play the song and the camera is there to point at them, and when it works it works because the band themselves are interesting to look at.

What it means for the puzzle

1980 videos are among the harder ones in WTV, for a specific reason. Through heavy static, what you are reading is colour, movement and composition, and a static wide shot of four people on a stage does not give you much of any of those. There is no striking single image to grab onto. You will often find yourself relying almost entirely on the audio in the first few rounds, and only confirming from the picture later.

The compensation is that the visual style of the period is very distinctive once you tune into it. Videos from 1980 tend to look like television rather than film: flatter lighting, video rather than film stock, muted and slightly washed colours, and a static camera. If the picture emerging from the static looks like it was shot for a TV studio rather than for a cinema, you are probably early in the decade.

The one that started it

The Buggles' "Video Killed The Radio Star" sits at the front of the game's catalogue, and rightly. It came out in 1979, before any of this, and it turned out to be the most accidentally prophetic record in pop history. When MTV launched two years later it was the first thing they played, which is the sort of coincidence that looks like planning.

The 1980 videos in WTV

These 20 videos from 1980 appear in the game.

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