I was more excited about The Human League,” laughs Steve Barron, as he tells me about the time he was asked to direct the video for Michael Jackson’s hit single, Billie Jean. “I was more disappointed about not doing The Jam’s Down in the Tube Station at Midnight.” This was 1982.
A decade later, the Billie Jean video was inducted into the Music Video Producers Hall of Fame and now, some 32 years after the video was released, Barron has written a book, titled Egg ‘n’ Chips and Billie Jean: a Trip Through the Eighties. The music video that least excited Barron has, in many ways, come to define him.
The 58-year-old Dubliner has since directed a number of successful feature length films including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Rat (2000) and the hugely popular Mike Bassett: England Manager (2001), a sequel to which is due to be released next year. He has also been nominated for 27 Emmy Awards and five Golden Globes.
However, it is Barron’s creative output during the Eighties, when he was working with and producing music videos for artists such as Fleetwood Mac, Madonna, Dolly Parton, A-ha (Magne Furuholmen from the band designed the artwork for the memoir), Paul McCartney and David Bowie, that forms the basis of this fascinating memoir, released earlier this month.
On first meeting Madonna, for example, Barron writes: “Lying on the floor. Naked apart from her little white knickers, one worked-out leg folded over the other in mid dance-step or mid pose or stretch or whatever else she was in the mid of. She turns to look up at me in the doorway.”
On a late-night telephone call from Bowie: “[He’s] not sure whether he’s talking to me or to my [answer] machine. He’s calling from Gstaad, just seen the finished video. It’s probably late there. He’s had a few and he’s gushing. And slurring a bit.” It’s all deliciously indiscreet.
Barron now spends much of his time in LA but was in London recently to speak at the inaugural Music VidFest at the Southbank Centre. I took this opportunity to visit Barron in his West London home to ask him about the art of producing music videos in the YouTube age and to discover exactly how he went from making the tea on various film sets to hanging out with The Jam and The Only Ones and directing some of the most influential music videos of all time.
An exclusive extract from Egg ‘n’ Chips and Billie Jean: a Trip Through the Eighties has been reproduced below this interview.
Was writing the book a cathartic experience?
SB: It was quite a cathartic experience. I wrote it in two chunks; I just went away for some of it and did nothing else for 14 hours a day, which is the best way of doing it.
I imagine all sorts of memories came flooding back…
SB: Memories kept popping out of the woodwork. I’d be writing about a specific day in the Eighties, and suddenly I would be back near the street where I once was with Michael Jackson – La Brea [in Los Angeles]. It’s a very particular street between Highland and Santa Monica that I drove up and down many times. It is almost the route to everywhere: not far from the Chateau Marmont where you’d hang out, [near the] Sunset Marquee, so it seemed to be at the centre of everything. I did once add up that I’d spent a total of four years at the Sunset Marquee during the Eighties.
When I went to write about all of that, I kept driving again and smelling La Brea, which has a very specific, dry smell. It has a smell that is very hard to describe: it’s LA, but it’s dry, dust meets petrol. It was very different to London, which has always got this very familiar, but sort of dank feel.
It was obviously a special time…
SB: Things came together at a certain time; in a certain atmosphere; when, culturally, things were at a certain place. Culture was in a pretty bad way. When you look at movies in the Eighties, we weren’t in great shape, creatively.
And so there was a massive opportunity for something to come along and change, in particular, the rhythms. And we realised that we didn’t have to just do what we’d seen before. We could be open to something completely original or extraordinary. There was a bunch of us who felt that way at the same time, and we began kicking open the door and the door kept opening, so we just piled in and had a great experience creating some absolute rubbish – and some stuff that has stayed around. I am really, really happy that I was there to experience, and lucky enough to experience, that journey through the Eighties.
And how do you feel about the state that culture is in today?
SB: My heart bleeds for music video directors who are trying to get through now on formats such as YouTube. There isn’t an industry, it’s falling away. Whereas we had a massive opportunity, there was a gaping hole to be filled. Right now, such a thing does not exist, there’s just a mass of everything with no holes to fill. You just have to shout louder. And there are some great videos being done that would have won MTV Video of the Year 10 times over back in the day. It is much harder to get appreciated because there is so much noise around. But there is some really great stuff out there.
Let’s go back to how it all started. How did you arrive at a stage when Michael Jackson’s agent is calling you to ask you to direct the video for Billie Jean?
SB: I left school early and became a camera assistant; a tea boy, really. I leaned to make a great cup of tea and got very involved with a lot of good film crews, who were doing a lot of good films. At the time I was really good at the tea and I think I was quite efficient at being perceptive of what might be needed.
Source: telegraph / Rupert Hawksley / MJ-Upbeat.com
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