Music videos after midnight

 

It's always fun to bore the living shit out of my workmates who are more than half my age, going on about how entertainment options were so much more limited when I was a kid. They never get sick of it. I can tell by their bored expressions and glazed eyes how much they love it.

They just love hearing how if you missed that one episode of Doctor Who that was playing on one of the two TV channels available, well, tough shit, you're never going to see it again. Or the wonderful limits of the walkman, or the beauty of the Friday night mission to the video rental store, or the naked emotions of the mixtape.

And I never, ever get sick of telling them about how important music videos were to me, and how hard it was to find the good ones.

There is a time in your life, usually starting in your very early teens and lasting far into adulthood, when music is everything. It's saying things you can't say, making you feel a whole new way, getting you thinking about the world and your place in it.

It's a fucking magnificent time, and the moment you realise you've grown out of it is the moment you're truly becoming an old fart. Enjoy it while it lasts, kids! 

Music videos were a huge part of my musical upbringing, and they weren't available on YouTube with seconds of searching. We didn't have any dedicated music video channels - I wanted my MTV, but could never have it - we just had Ready to Roll on a Saturday night, where you would get five videos, and sometimes there was a TV show called Radio With Pictures, with an hour of weird music that I didn't understand and made me feel strange and wrong.

But also, for a while there when I'd just moved out of home, there were two channels that would play music videos after midnight, and I could stay up till dawn with some of my best mates, flicking between the two channels until the sun rose, because that's the sort of thing you can do when you're a young adult out on your own for the first time. 

I would watch an hour or two when I came home from the pub or a party, coming down in three minutes chunks of tune. I still have deep emotional connections to Bic Runga's Drive, or Faith No More's Evidence, and fell hard for Britpop the instant I first saw Design For Life and Disco 2000 on the same night. 

This kind of indulgance also cemented certain prejudices against some songs - Live's Lightning Crashes was on such high rotation that I still can't bear to listen to it (although I have got over some old hatreds - I heard Whitney's I Will Always Love You the other day and that song drove me crazy with its ubiquity in 1992, and now sounds slicker and more powerful than any other pop ballad I've heard in the past 30 years.) 

For the early nights in bed before midnight, there was always video tape, and I spent several years taping three random hours of music videos at night, and then copying the odd gem onto a master tape of great songs, and I was still doing them several years into the new century, before Spotify and Youtube and all the rest. 

I've still got those tapes now, and the quality ain't exactly hi-fi, but as a glimpse into the sort of thing that was rocking my world when that really meant something, they can't be beat.