Introduction

The dedicated scholarship on music video has been dominated by US perspectives, just as popular perceptions of the medium have been shaped by MTV. Yet the British story followed its own arc: its talent educated at art schools, its industry differently organised and its shop windows – until the arrival of MTV Europe in 1987 – represented primarily by Top of the Pops (BBC, 1964–2006) and The Chart Show (Channel 4 & ITV, 1986–1998). This special issue features new research which explores aspects of music video culture in the UK for the first time, and adopts fresh approaches to its analysis. The contributors are members of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded ‘Fifty Years of British Music Video’ project team, and their partners at the British Film Institute (BFI) who will curate a ‘British Landmark Video’ collection as one of the project’s key archival outputs.

The project was designed as a collaboration between a number of public and private stakeholders including the British Library, the BFI, Warp Records (a major UK independent record label), Thunderbird Releasing (a film distributor), and Video Performance Ltd (the licensing agency for the British recording industry). It was conceived from the outset as a collaboration with the British music video industry as a joint intellectual effort. This industry focus is a distinctive aspect of the project’s intellectual work, and is demonstrated in the articles gathered in this special issue.

Music video is one of a number of ‘hidden’ screen industries that had been neglected in government-funded creative industries research (e.g. Hutton et al., 2007) and, apart from Emily Caston’s own research nothing has been published on the industry or its contribution to the British creative economy (Caston et al., 2000). The whereabouts of most video masters was unknown, and the collections of significant recording artists, video directors, and production companies had never been curated in any publicly accessible form, let alone put into a systemic catalogue that would enable academic analysis in pursuit of rigorous questions about aesthetics, production, distribution, or audiences. The Head of Research and Scholarship at the BFI, and the Lead Curator for Moving Image and Curator for Popular Music at the British Library agreed that this situation needed to be addressed.

Academic interest in analysis of these hidden industries was emerging (e.g. Grainge and Johnson, 2015), but published documentation was still limited, with the exception of Fletcher’s rich account of British advertising (2008). Non-academic research focused on distribution (Banks, 1996; Denisoff, 1987), the USA (Austerlitz, 2008; Schwartz, 2007), or directors and textual analyses rather than industry studies (Aust & Kothenschulte, 2011). Significant research by Donnelly (2007), Railton & Watson (2011), and Vernallis (2001, 2002, 2004, 2007, 2008, 2013a, 2013b), demonstrated the urgent need for evidenced-based understanding of the production of music videos. The intention of our research project was to redress that using Keith Negus’s pioneering work on the music industry as a culture of production (1992, 1997, 1999) and his later work on creativity (Negus & Pickering, 2004). Drawing additionally on Caldwell’s work on production cultures (2008, 2014) and his concept of ‘industry intellectuals’ (2009), we were keen to employ sociological and ethnographic approaches to the study of art and culture (Bechky, 2006; Born, 2004, 2010; Hesmondhalgh, 2007; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011). We intended to identify the distinctive and unusual characteristics of music video as a hybrid production culture emergent from the fusion of graphic design (album cover design), portrait photography, television live concert performance, and fine art that emerged in the highly vibrant art school culture of the late 1960s which has had a profound, widespread, but as yet undocumented impact on the wider arts economy and culture of Britain.

In 2013, Carol Vernallis called for a canon of music video (2013a). This special issue reflects research that has been undertaken by our partners in a larger research process centred on understanding how to tell a coherent story about an industry that has produced a huge number of music videos, the very definition of a ‘music video’, how to curate ‘music video’ for the general public, and how to advise the...