The most played music video in MTV history
The advent of MTV changed music forever. When the station arrived in 1981, its cultural transformation was overnight. Everyone wanted airtime on it. Even the avant-garde madman Don Van Vliet of Captain Beefheart kicked up a feud with the producers when they said his video for ‘Ice Cream For Crow’ was “too weird” to be played. In short, suddenly, a song without a video was like a film without any moving images.
Strangely, very few artists fought against this commercial move. This is possibly because music itself was desperately incorporating technological advancements in search of a new sound when MTV dawned. As such, music videos didn’t seem like incumbent commercials and were seen more like a chance to finalise the creative reach of the project, almost as though the song was cooking, and the video was the presentation.
With that in mind, Peter Gabriel decided to throw the kitchen sink at something the world had never seen before with ‘Sledgehammer’. For the 1986 video, he combined Claymation, pixilation and stop-motion animation, the holy trinity of actions, to create the most played (and potentially most viewed) video in MTV’s long-chartered history. The station confirmed that people simply went cock-a-hoop for the innovative video, and in the classic supply and demand stylings of modern pop culture, they just kept broadcasting it.
The director, Stephen R. Johnson, had already had a stop-motion hit with the video for the Talking Heads classic, ‘Road to Nowhere’. Despite the brilliance of Talking Heads, they had always struggled commercially. The fun work of Johnson helped to bolster their appeal on this front. While Gabriel has always had a strong following, Tessa Watts at Virgin Records figured that he was an alternative star in the age of pop who could also do with a boost, so Johnson was asked to reboot his animation works on a larger scale this time.
A gargantuan effort was in store. Thankfully, the former Genesis musician at the centre of the whole thing was happy to go along with it. The poor bloke had to lie under a sheet of glass for 16 hours as the whole thing was painstakingly filmed one shot at a time. It says a lot about the importance of music videos that Gabriel’s comments at the time had an air of competitiveness about them. “It took a lot of hard work,” he said. “I was thinking at the time, ‘If anyone wants to try and copy this video, good luck to them.'”
But it was worth it because it transformed music videos and the public’s perception of Gabriel as an artist. He told Rolling Stone: “I think it had a sense of both humour and fun, neither of which were particularly associated with me. I mean—wrongly in my way of looking at it—I think I was seen as a fairly intense, eccentric Englishman.”
It has very little to do with the innuendo-filled song that it accompanies, and the video itself has very little meaning, but it looks cool, and there is some definite social commentary in that.
You can watch the ground-breaking feat below.
