1981

On 1 August 1981, just after midnight, a new American cable channel went on air with a countdown, a rocket launch and a man saying that from that moment you would never look at music the same way again. The first thing MTV played was "Video Killed The Radio Star".

It is difficult now to convey how strange this was. A channel that played nothing but promotional films for records, around the clock. There was no obvious reason it should work, and at the beginning it very nearly did not. MTV launched in a small number of American cable markets, so few that most of the people who worked on it could not watch it at home. The famous "I want my MTV" campaign existed because the channel had to persuade viewers to go and badger their own cable companies into carrying it.

The supply problem

MTV had a more immediate difficulty: there were not enough videos. A channel broadcasting continuously needs an enormous amount of material, and in 1981 the total worldwide stock of music videos was a few hundred at best.

This produced two consequences that shaped everything afterwards. First, MTV played what it had, over and over, so a small number of videos became extraordinarily familiar. Second, and more importantly, it played a lot of British acts. British record labels had been making promotional films for years because of Top of the Pops, so when an American channel suddenly needed video, the British had a stockpile and the Americans did not.

That is the mechanical reason for what got called the Second British Invasion. Duran Duran, Culture Club, the Human League and a long list of others reached American audiences on the strength of having film ready to send. Bands who understood video early got a run at America that they might never otherwise have had.

What it means for the puzzle

1981 is a transitional year and it looks like one. Some videos are still the flat, static, television-studio approach of 1980. Others have started to reach for something more: an idea, a location, a costume, a bit of narrative. The New Romantic acts in particular arrived with a fully developed visual sense, because for them how they looked was never a secondary consideration.

If the picture coming through the static has bold colour and deliberate styling, you are probably looking at one of the newer wave. If it is greyer and flatter, you are probably looking at a holdover from the year before.

The 1981 videos in WTV

These 15 videos from 1981 appear in the game.

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