The Cure: "A Forest" (1980)

Like most genres, music videos took a while to become their own thing, with early pioneers taking their cues from cinema, concert footage, promotional shorts and behind-the-scenes documentaries, among other influences. At the same time, there were music videos that somehow arrived fully-formed, helmed by artists who just seemed to get, intuitively, the inherent possibilities of this new medium. Released as the first single off their sophomore effort Seventeen Seconds, The Cure's "A Forest" is one of those videos - a spine-tingling fever dream that immediately and intuitively grasps that sparseness and spareness would be one of the key ways to access the ghostly space where music and image collide. Drenched in blue-green light, it intercuts footage of the band playing the song with images of forests, although they perhaps deserve to be call after-images rather than images, drawing on the inchoate and inverted visual configurations that remain imprinted on the eyelid after you’ve closed your eyes, or after you’ve just heard a piece of music – barely-formulated, half-unconscious fragements of visualese you’re hardly aware of processing or possessing at the time. At moments, it’s a bit like out-takes from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari were left to rot and decay on a long-forgotten shelf until they were luridly and exotically restored with an 80s sheen, in what often looks like a forerunner of The Blair Witch Project as much as a seminal slice of post-punk minimalism. In that sense, it plays as a kind of sequel to Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” which discovered the genesis of Goth rock in silent cinema, except that here it feels as if the Cure are literally scoring a silent film, putting silence squarely at the centre of it all – not an inappropriate sensation for a single, and album, which so often seems to will itself into silence, “running towards nothing” with that peculiar isolation, lonelieness and uncanniness that only early cinema can bring. Perhaps that’s why the music video never really presents the band as a band so much as a sequence of atomised soloists, leaching away any sense of an audience in turn, until it provides you with something like the claustrophobic immediacy of a live performance but without any of the accompanying relief of community or collectivity. To watch it, then, is in some sense to be instantly drafted into the band, which turns out to be the most isolating experience imaginable, so miserable that Robert Smith doesn’t even need to wear makeup yet. Natural, naked and younger than you ever would have thought it could be, his face leaves no illusion that it’s addressing a camera rather than a live audience, which, strangely enough, turns out to be one of the simplest yet uncanniest ways to embrace music video, still unsettling some thirty odd years down the track.

John Lennon: "(Just Like) Starting Over" (1980)

Making a posthumous music video is a delicate task, let alone for a single that reflects as painfully and poignantly upon its creator’s death as “(Just Like) Starting Over.” Yet in some ways, “(Just Like) Starting Over” isn’t really a music video so much as a short film that happens to be scored by Lennon’s late masterpiece – a tribute to his life with Yoko Ono that ends at what would shortly become Strawberry Fields, with a slow pan up to the Dakota. That perhaps makes the film sound more chilling than it is, though, since it opens on quite a different note – an excerpt from a 1970 interview in which Lennon imagined himself and Ono at sixty-four, living in a small cottage off the coast of Ireland, “looking at our scrapbook of madness.” Proceeding to a series of gorgeous, photographic shots of the Irish coast, most of the film takes place within that “scrapbook of madness,” as we’re introduced,  slowly, to the cottage that Lennon and Ono might have called their own – first, through a series of establishing shots, followed by a series of still interiors, evocative objects, photographs tracking Lennon and Ono’s lives together and, finally, a more mobile segment in which all the photographs and objects spin outside and coaelsce into a short animated vision of the couple. At times, the effect is partly of a memento mori, while the destruction of Lennon’s glasses along the way – still exactly the same style at the age of sixty-four – often makes it feel like an attempt to repair and heal his and Ono’s apartment at the Dakota from the last day that they left it. At the same time, though, there is a sense that this cottage is gradually coming to life, rather than closing down, loosening Lennon’s spirit a bit from the shackles of tragedy and allowing it to breathe as effortlessly as it does across the whole of Double Fantasy. At one level, that’s because the song itself shifts periodically from quite melancholy, minor-key segments to jauntier, janglier McCartneyisms, but it’s also because the cottage itself – quite improbably – feels like a forerunner of the spaces that would come to characterise MTV and music video. Quaint it certainly is, but there’s also a porosity, a gradual yet irreversible ballooning of interfaces and points of access to Lennon, that actually has the effect of making it feel as if he is still in some sense alive, which is perhaps why it feels so right when he and Ono emerge animated, computer-generated, out of this supposedly naturalistic, nostalgic fantasy. One of the key motifs of early music videos was musicians witnessing their proliferation across different media platforms – or realising that their living, breathing selves were just another platform, no different from the rest – and by the end of “(Just Like) Starting Over” you can’t help but feel Lennon is watching over these versions of himself as well, more present because he is even more displaced, transformed and transfigured rather than completely removed.

Village People: "5 O'Clock In The Morning" (1980)

“5 O’Clock in the Morning” was the Village People’s first music video as a new wave band, rather than a disco band, and the transition is somewhat startling. Gone are the flamboyant, extroverted dance moves – there is almost no dancing at all, unthinkable for a Village People music video from even a year before – and gone, too, is the collective sense of curiosity that made it feel as the band were cruising any and every space they encountered. Instead, New York comes off as a cold, synthetic vortex, funelling the band into movements more than moves, and streamlining them into a sleek, slinking singularity that makes them feel more like a perfectly polished unit than the catch-all community of their disco days. No longer really differentiated by their costumes, their uniformity seems to intensify as the clip goes on, as if enforced by the empty streets and smoky vents that smother and spit them out as new wave automata, androgynous androids in the vein of David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s personae of the late 1970s. Yet, unlike Bowie and Pop, there’s no real conviction here, no sense that the Village People have embraced their role as a new development or mutation. Instead, it feels like a diminution, a sustained retreat that often conceals itself quite well as a frontal attack, but is finally debilitated beneath the cavernous, panoptic crane shots that anchor us. Released the same year as William Friedkin’s Cruising, it seems to offer another version of the 70s giving way to the 80s, as the flexible, provisional, cruisey rhythms that made the Village People such a quintessential mouthpiece for post-Stonewall New York start to tighten into something more rigid, paranoid, panic-stricken – the apprehension that some apocalypse is imminent, something that will render even the most flamboyant bodies and outfits as uniformly sallow, sickly and haunted as these once-familiar faces. It’s not that hard to see, then, why the album – and single – was so despised, since it’s a singularly downbeat and depressing vision of the next decade, let alone from a group that was once so pleasure-oriented – a dystopian nightscape in which it’s too late for nightlife, too late for cruising, too late even for wandering without being picked up by the same arbiters of good taste that coerced disco artists away from disco in the first place. And in that sense there’s something ever so reproachful about it, a nagging sense that the people who most violently hated it were also the people who secretly wanted to see the Village People reduced to this anti-anthemic vision of a world without YMCAs.