How Queen heralded the age of MTV way back in 1975
When MTV was launched in 1981, suddenly everything changed. It wasn’t just that music now had a new media form to be getting on with, or that the music industry had just kicked up a gear. But in an instant, artists themselves had a new form of control over how they presented themselves.
It’s easy to underestimate the music video, especially in today’s modern landscape, when tight budgets and artists working on a shoestring often mean that they’re the first thing to go. But when you see a good one, it can be life-changing, or at least career-changing.
When Wolf Alice returned with ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’, the question was whether the opening of their new era would have been quite as impactful without the hyper-glossy new visual identity the music video launched. Or in the world of pop, would Charli XCX’s Brat phenomenon have been quite as overwhelming if she hadn’t set the scene with the ‘365’ music video, roping in all the internet’s most popular ‘It Girls’ to christen the moment in time with their status and approval?
Throughout music history, the path is paved by now iconic videos, like Duran Duran’s super expensive visuals for ‘The Wild Boys’, or Michael Jackson’s horror movie in a song-sized package for ‘Thriller’.
However, in the 1970s, when Queen were at their peak, MTV wasn’t there yet. Without the dedicated channel showing these clips, music videos didn’t really exist, only semi-live performances on music TV shows like Top of the Pops.
However, that was a weird way of working. As we all know by now, these TV shows rarely let artists actually sing, leading to protests like Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas eating a banana while seemingly singing her harmonies. At the same time, the lip syncing and glossy sets were essentially intended to make a music video right there and then.
In between those two factors, though, and with the fact that a show like Top of the Pops had its own ideas and identity, it meant that artists were more cast into their videos, rather than having any kind of control over them. By 1975, when Queen were releasing their opus, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, they didn’t want any ounce of artistic control to slip from their hands.
So they made their own video. On a budget of £4,500, the band created their promo clip for the song. It’s rare for the time, bands simply were making videos for the sake of it then, but this one for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ exists as the band were determined to present themselves, and the song, in exactly the way they wanted to.
It makes perfect sense. The band had battled their label to have the song released, so why would they stop there and settle for a half-arsed lip-synced performance of the track being the only visual shared around? Instead, they made their own ‘pop promo’ and sent it out to TV channels and beyond, leading to the track landing at number one and staying there for nine weeks, and also leading to music videos soon becoming a necessary part of any song release.
