Did the Beatles invent the pop video?
There is a tendency to think of music videos as originating in the Eighties, the era of MTV and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, when every major single would be accompanied by a short film, marrying music with visuals in ways intended to enhance the song and market the artist’s image. But, in common with so many pop innovations, The Beatles got there first.
The newly released Beatles 1+ DVD features 50 promos of the Fab Four, sweeping viewers from a charmingly static black and white mop top performance of Love Me Do in 1963 to a full colour, windswept, wild and funky romp through Don’t Let Me Down on the roof of the Apple building in 1969. No other recording artists of the era accrued anything like this kind of visual record.
“It was very unusual at the time,” notes Sir Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who directed Beatle promos for Paperback Writer, Rain, Hey Jude and Revolution. “They weren’t thinking about the future, no one envisioned MTV.” Yet Lindsay-Hogg, who was 26 when he started working with the Beatles, was never in doubt of the significance of these innocent, early promos. “Society was changing and music was in the vanguard. The appearance of the musicians, their clothes, hair, their way of talking was stirring the pot of social revolution. I always thought what we were doing would be part of the history of that time.”
By: Neil McCormick
Source: The Telegraph
