The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones were already a decade into their career when the music video arrived as a format — and they had been making films for it before it existed.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg is the thread. He shot the Beatles' promotional films for Paperback Writer, Rain and Hey Jude, directed the Rock and Roll Circus over two days in December 1968, and went on to make four Stones videos across the seventies and into the eighties: Angie, Miss You, Waiting on a Friend and Start Me Up — the last of them shot in a single day on a small New York stage, against a black backdrop, with no time to bring in a set designer. Before there was a word for it, he was working out what the thing was.

The band kept hiring forward rather than backward. David Fincher sent giants wading through New York in Love Is Strong (1994). Samuel Bayer, who had shot Smells Like Teen Spirit for Nirvana, made Anybody Seen My Baby. Michel Gondry built a video for Gimme Shelter in 1998 — twenty-nine years after the song was released.

That gap is the whole story. The clips here run from mid-sixties television slots to a Gondry film in 1998, and it is the same band the entire way. Very few catalogues cover that distance, because very few bands were there at both ends of it.