#Ultravox vienna official video movie#

What’s interesting about the video is that Ant isn’t remotely unusual in doing this – quite the reverse, in fact, it’s an established part of what a pop band does in the late 70’s and early 80’s. It has some wit (Pironni’s “harp” playing) and panache, a simple storyline, an easy-to-replicate dance, and Ant looking his best as he imitates other pop-culture legends at the end of the clip (a confounding selection that consists of Alice Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Rudolph Valentino (!) and Ant’s own Dandy Highwayman). It’s an excellent promotional tool by 1981 standards. It’s a Cinderella riff, with Ant playing Cinders, the Ugly Sisters portrayed by two men in drag as per the usual panto approach, with Ant/Cinders liberated from a life of drudgery by the frankly astonishing sight of Diana Dors as the Fairy Godmother in a gravity-defying black dress leading us to a masque ball where everyone dances the “prince charming”. Take for example last entry Adam Ant, and more specifically the video for “Prince Charming”. Top Of The Pops regularly played music videos for more than half a decade before MTV arrived on the scene – this is where “Bohemian Rhapsody” comes in – and British acts were, generally speaking, much more attuned to the power of the music video than their American colleagues at the turn of the decade. Similarly, the idea that music, and specifically that music videos, could be something that people would sit down to watch rather than simply listen to, had been around in the UK mainstream for far longer than it had in the US.

#Ultravox vienna official video movie#

And certainly the song portions of Magical Mystery Tour, free of any other contextual connection to the movie they’re in, are straightforwardly music videos. The idea of “videos”, in the modern sense, had been around since at least 1966 with The Beatles recording specific promo clips for “Paperback Writer” and “Rain”, and arguably could be tied all the way back to A Hard Day’s Night. That’s not to suggest that either of those two events aren’t significant features in the development of their respective fields, but neither are the originators. In the same way that “Bohemian Rhapsody” did not invent the music video, MTV did not invent the idea of music television.