How did MTV help create a second British invasion?

Posted On January 1, 2025January 1, 2025

When it comes to movements in music, people tend to romanticise a little. The likes of punk, rave and hip-hop aren’t thought of as styles of music that caught people’s attention; they’re underclasses hitting back against mainstream banality. Even today, people see K-pop booming in Western markets as striking a blow for the global majority in the face of cultural colonialism. To be clear, they’re not incorrect. However, it is also intensely powerful corporations turning a fine-tuned and deeply effective marketing scheme on the rest of the world via technology, which, arguably, MTV did first.

The channel became responsible for one of the most compelling moments in the history of pop. A brief period of time when a bunch of artsy European weirdos were catapulted to fame that came entirely from technology and availability. I’m referring, of course, to the British invasion. No, not that one. By this time, The Beatles had been split up for ten years. The Stones were a stadium-filling nostalgia act, and neither Herman nor his Hermits had been seen or heard from in decades.

Today, we’re talking about the second British invasion of the early 1980s instead. For all the praise the 1970s get for giving the world some of the best music ever, by the end of the decade, the American charts were an absolute barren wasteland. Seriously, if you think that what we have now is bad, give ‘Kiss You All Over’ by Exile a spin and be thankful for what you’ve got. After a shower, naturally.

The intense, bigoted backlash to disco had all but sent the genre back underground, and punk was never going to go mainstream in the States the way it did in the UK. Record labels and radio executives were sent scrambling to find something, anything that could appeal to a younger audience, and instead, they found something else that the UK had been quietly pioneering for years. You see, the states didn’t have music TV shows the way that the UK did.

Sure, there was American Bandstand and Soul Train, but they were more about bringing acts in to perform on the show, whereas every single week, the entire UK top 40 was covered on the likes of Top of the Pops. The longer a band was on the charts, the more they’d have to show the song, and there were only so many repeats of their original performance you could get before viewers got sick of it (or performances from Pan’s People, for that matter). So, British bands and artists started making music videos before everyone else.

Back in the late 1970s, these label and radio executives saw the success of the music video across the pond and decided to give it a go themselves. The Warner-American Express Satellite Entertainment Company founded the cable channel MTV, which premiered on August 1st, 1981. There was just one small problem, though. There were barely any music videos from American artists to play. In desperation, they took a chance on a British New Wave whose big hit had stalled in the American charts two years earlier. Thus, the answer to the pub quiz question to end all pub quiz questions. What was the first song played on MTV? The Buggles, with ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’.

One video doth not a music channel make though. Since the Buggles track had gone down a treat, sending it back into the Billboard Hot 100, they decided to pack the channel out with other British New Wave acts with music videos they could show immediately. Bands like The Police, Soft Cell, The Human League and especially Duran Duran became worldwide sensations off the back of hits on MTV.

While American bands were getting on board (the second video shown on MTV was by Pat Benatar, after all), these British acts skyrocketed in popularity, with The aforementioned Police becoming arguably the biggest band in the world at their peak. Them, alongside Wham!, Eurythmics, Culture Club and Spandau Ballet, led to cultural critics calling this period “the second British invasion”, and they have the humble music video to thank for it.

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