AC/DC

AC/DC existed before the music video did, and the earliest clips here show it: 1975 and 1976 footage of a band playing straight to a camera, because that was the only way to reach the next city.

Then the form caught up with them, and one man handled it for fifteen years. David Mallet shot six of the videos here, from "Highway to Hell" to "Hard as a Rock" in 1995, and his instinct ran against what MTV rewarded at the time: barely any narrative, no actors, no concept. He filmed AC/DC as an arena. "Thunderstruck" is the band and a crowd, lit like a storm; "Moneytalks" buries the stage in falling banknotes and stops there.

The exception proves how deliberate the rest was. "Big Gun" came from the Last Action Hero soundtrack, so Mallet let Arnold Schwarzenegger kick in the door as Jack Slater, catch a lit stick of dynamite and light his cigar off the fuse. Angus Young flicks his school cap at him, Schwarzenegger's clothes morph into the uniform and a Gibson SG, and by the end Angus is riding on his shoulders, still playing. Mallet spent the shoot behind the set trying to teach Schwarzenegger the duckwalk.

That range is the point, because Mallet was also the director who staged David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes" and put Iron Maiden on film for "Run to the Hills". He could do surrealism and he could do spectacle. For AC/DC he mostly decided the song needed a stage and nothing else.

Andy Morahan took both 2000 singles, arriving from the other end of hard rock: he had made Guns N' Roses' "November Rain" and "Don't Cry", videos with orchestras, weddings and helicopters. For "Safe in New York City" he ringed the band with armed police in a tunnel — and for "Stiff Upper Lip" he did what Mallet had done, pointed the camera at them and let them play.

The catalogue runs from 1975 to 2008 without the formula changing once: the same schoolboy uniform, the same two chords holding up the roof. Most bands who last that long survive by reinventing themselves. AC/DC survived by refusing to.