The first video MTV played
MTV went on air in the United States just after midnight on 1 August 1981. It opened with film of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, with the channel's own flag planted on the Moon, and the first music video it played was 'Video Killed the Radio Star' by the Buggles. The title was half right. A channel showing videos all day meant that how a song looked mattered almost as much as how it sounded, and the stars who understood that — Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince — became the biggest in the world. RADIO survived, though, and so did the Buggles' song.
That flag-waving astronaut became MTV's mascot, and a small statue of him is still the trophy handed out at the channel's Video Music Awards.
Music you could carry
The Sony WALKMAN went on sale in Japan in 1979 and became the gadget of the 1980s. The story goes that Sony's co-founder Masaru Ibuka wanted a way to listen to opera on long flights without lugging a heavy tape recorder around. For the first time, you could walk down the street with your own soundtrack playing in your ears, and nobody else could hear it.
It played the CASSETTE, and by 1983 more cassettes than VINYL albums were being sold in the United States. Cassettes made the MIXTAPE possible: your own choice of songs, recorded from a friend's records or off the RADIO, usually while trying to hit stop before the DJ started talking. Britain's music industry was so worried about home taping that it ran a campaign with a skull-and-crossbones cassette logo and the slogan 'Home Taping Is Killing Music'. It did not stop anyone.
One keyboard behind a thousand ballads
Cheaper digital keyboards gave the decade its sound. The Yamaha DX7, launched in 1983, became one of the best-selling SYNTH keyboards ever made, and one of its built-in sounds, a shimmering electric piano, turns up on slow song after slow song from the 1980s — play almost any power BALLAD from the decade and there is a good chance you will hear it. Some bands built whole songs from machines: the Human League's 'Don't You Want Me', made with synthesisers and a drum machine, was Britain's Christmas number one in 1981 and topped the American chart the following summer. For players who wanted to strut around the stage like guitarists, there was the KEYTAR: a keyboard with a neck and a strap, worn over the shoulder.
Two concerts, one drummer and a Concorde
On 13 July 1985, Live Aid raised money for famine relief in Ethiopia with two giant concerts on the same day, one at Wembley Stadium in London and one in Philadelphia, shown on television to an estimated audience of around 1.9 billion people. It was organised by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, who had written the charity single 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' the winter before. Phil Collins played at both. He finished his set at Wembley, flew across the Atlantic on the supersonic jet Concorde, and was on stage in Philadelphia the same evening.