We're the Kids in America How the Brits Rocked America: Go West

This programme contains some strong language

America, the land of opportunity for British music since the '60s.

And in the late '70s and '80s, we invaded again.

America is like a big treasure chest.

It's the jackpot, it's the place where starving English musicians

dream of greater glory. It's making it.

Journey or Duran Duran?

Are you going to stay with what you know and love

or are you going to go over to the dark side?

We won.

GIRLS SCREAMING

In the post-punk era, a new wave of Brits would wage war

on a country still in thrall to long-haired rock gods.

I think we went to America with the intention

of not being seduced by it.

We went there with a very kind of hardened,

English punk mentality when we first went.

In America, if you don't arrive in a limousine,

they're not going to pay to see you.

In England, if you arrive in a limousine,

they'll key the side of it. That was it for me.

The difference between America and England with the punk invasion.

# Sweet dreams are made of this... #

For the first time since 1964, British cool would eventually

capture the hearts and minds of young America

while inspiring US musicians to raise their own game.

Really, really loved it.

Loved the different localised cultures

and the friendliness of the people.

Even the unfriendliness of the people, occasionally.

AUDIENCE ROARING

'I think this is a song of hope.'

MUSIC: "Stairway To Heaven" by Led Zeppelin

In the late '70s, America was still under the spell of classic rock.

Throughout the land and across the dial,

American radio belonged to long-haired rock bands

who had been around for nearly ten years.

For a new generation of musicians

baptised in the British punk revolution and now about to go west,

this came as some surprise.

I remember the first time I went to America, there was a bit of a shock

because my musical education, or my view of the music world

was shaped by the New Musical Express

and Sounds and Melody Maker and such.

And if you had been reading them between 1976 to 1978,

you would have thought that the whole world

was aflame with punk rock.

And the shock was finally getting to America and, in fact,

radio was still playing Led Zeppelin.

# And she's bu-u-uying a stairway

# To heaven. #

You could turn on a radio

when you were driving along the freeway and switch channels and hear

different parts of Stairway To Heaven. It was played so much,

it would be on different channels. You'd get to the end on one channel

and go, "Oh, I've had enough of this."

Turn it to another channel and it would just be starting again.

On Christmas Eve 1977, a new British sound

landed on American shores.

Over the past year, the Sex Pistols had single-handedly changed

the musical guard in the UK.

Could they now do the same in the USA?

We went to America because it was, er...

The fatal attraction!

It was the...a big boil on the backside of the world, that one.

An absolute "That's a nuthouse. Gots to get there.

"Gots to see what that place is about."

MUSIC: "Roadrunner" by The Modern Lovers

The Pistols were the first British band who went to America

who didn't primarily care about making it,

so much so they didn't bother playing Los Angeles or New York

in favour of a chaotic southern itinerary.

I'd seen the John Wayne cowboy films, hadn't I?

I'd imagined cactuses and prairies and all of this.

Driving around in the tour bus, I don't think I slept at all.

Just staring out the window at the absolutely incredible

landscapes that America has.

It's an awful long time

to get from one place to another

and there is so much to see in between.

# Is this the MPLA

# Or is this the UDA

# Or is this the IRA

# I thought it was the UK... #

The south we went to, because the north was so co-opted.

It was Yankieville.

The recommendation from the record company Warners was,

"You don't want to go down there. They're all pig-ignorant."

Well, I never found that to be the case.

# Cos I-I-I

# Wanna be-e-e... #

The Sex Pistols played in Texas, in Oklahoma,

but I suspect they did it more for the provocation

than thinking they would be loved. I don't think it was about that.

# And I-I-I

# Wanna be-e-e

# Anarchy... #

They just didn't want to succeed.

By the time they got there, they were breaking up.

It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It wasn't about success.

# I want to be-e-e... #

Whilst America had loved the parochial charm of the Beatles,

the uniquely British attitude that the Pistols were exporting

was lost in translation.

Destroy!

REPORTER: 'And here they are, two of them in a hotel room in Atlanta,

'waiting for the other two to do a promised interview.

'But they're in a strange mood, flaky,

'demanding they be paid ten bucks

'before they do any bleep-bleep interview.

'Denied that, they stomp off. "Bleep!" they say.'

When the four young men left, their spit was on the carpet,

their butts on the floor, the dregs of an afternoon's beer and booze

and a couple of empty boxes of Clearasil.

The Americans themselves had got hold of a strange idea

about The Sex Pistols. They seemed to take the violence

part of it to heart, you know.

Whereas in England, I think we saw the joke in it. I don't know.

I just came up and upset the bass player

because I knew that he knew that I meant physical harm.

I was ugly about it. But he came and hit us

over the head with a bass!

I think there were audiences there for them, that's for sure.

But they were often in areas where

they had to work for it. They wouldn't be readily accepted.

REPORTER: 'The group will certainly make money.

'But they've a long way to go before they hit the really big time

'and follow in the footsteps of those other British exports

'The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.'

At that time in particular, the States was very regional musically.

You really had to cover a lot of territory to make it happen

and, you know, I don't think they were prepared for that.

I don't think they were prepared to do, you know,

a month and a half of shows.

DRUMBEAT

You'll get one number and one number only cos I'm a lazy bastard!

This Is No Fun.

Hampered by internal problems, the Pistols did not begin

to have the same impact in America as in England.

The final gig in San Francisco would be their last ever performance.

The Sex Pistols in the United Stated were kind of treated as a joke.

You know, the name was funny.

It was treated in very sensational terms,

to the degree that they got any coverage at all.

# No fun, my babe

# No fu-u-un

# You're no fun, my babe

# You're no fu-u-un... #

A lot of British punk seemed, to Americans, to be...

Well, kind of too English.

It was very difficult, I think,

for most Americans to penetrate what those issues were.

You know, there's a kind of pretence in America that there are

no class issues here.

So all of that insurgent energy that punk represented,

it was difficult for Americans often to hear it.

First of all, your country was

a lot hungrier.

Here, every kid had a TV set, if not two.

You know, Mommy's Cadillac on the weekends and probably 100 bucks,

you know, every now and again or whatever for allowance and stuff.

In your country, it was harder.

# It is no fun at all

# No fu-u-un... #

But the Pistols did have a profound impact.

They were the Trojan horse for a British new wave in America,

future seers who condescended to the corporate American music biz.

In short they were the first British band who knew better.

Oh, yes. The last Sex Pistols gig in San Francisco.

Yeah. Funny how these things just,

you know, trip off the end of your tongue.

Aha-ha(!) Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? Good night.

'I meant it.'

I meant it.

I was so fed-up with the idiocy of the management

and the dissipation of the band and them just not wanting really

to understand that, you know, I have feelings too.

Unlike most top rock groups, who prefer the opulence

of luxury hotels and chartered airplanes,

Elvis Costello And The Attractions

travel in an old chartered bus and they stay along the way

in Howard Johnson Motor lodges.

A tribute perhaps to their continuing efforts

to remain curiously working class,

in their musical image as well as their lives.

Next to wage war were Elvis and his comrades in 1978.

I never did break the mould. I just went over there and played.

I played three or four tours in America in quick succession

and then we didn't play there for a while.

I got myself in a load of trouble. Then I went back

after a couple of years and we played again

and just kept going. That's what I've done for the last 34 years.

Everybody had that sort of angry,

frustrated sort of English thing, you know,

which they don't really...

They don't do that so well in America.

MUSIC: "Crawlin' To The USA" by Elvis Costello And The Attractions

There's something about English bands.

There's that seething anger

I guess Americans find attractive, you know.

We definitely all had that.

I never did have any hit records over there.

A couple of minor hit singles,

but it was just a question of being relentless, I suppose.

So who are you?

-Who are the other guys in here?

-I beg your pardon?

-I don't know who you are?

-I'm not sure I know who I am.

-You don't know who you are?

-No.

-His name's Elvis Costello.

-He's a famous musician.

-Oh, great!

Mainstream radio's obsession with long-haired rock

and its indifference to new music

consigned Elvis to niche recognition in America.

For many, the Attractions' finest moment came

when Elvis sabotaged the TV show Saturday Night Live

with a sudden stab at the state of American radio.

The Sex Pistols were supposed to be on it

and then they blew it out for some reason.

So we got it

and then Elvis came up with this idea of not playing

what they thought we were going to play.

Stop!

I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen.

There's no reason to do this song here.

One, two, three, four.

MUSIC: "Radio Radio" by Elvis Costello And The Attractions

They all freaked out. They said

"You'll never be on television again." It was perfect.

# I was tuning in the shine on the light night dial

# Doing anything my radio advised

# With every one of those late night stations

# Playing songs bringing tears to my eyes

# I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver

# When the switch broke cos it's old

# They're saying things that I can hardly believe

# They really think we're getting out of control

# Radio is a sound salvation

# Radio is cleaning up the nation

# They say you better listen to the voice of reason

# But they don't give you any choice cos they think that it's treason. #

-Are you one of The Boomtown Rats?

-That's right.

My name is Sidney Popkin.

I have a grocery store in Holly Ridge, North Carolina,

that I've had for 33 years.

It's called The Boomtown Grocery.

(LAUGHS) Oh, Jesus! Where'd you get that name?

We came in on the back of five hit singles and our first number one

thinking that we were clearly geniuses

and America was going to fall, you know, prostrate at our feet.

Well, America didn't give a fuck about us.

Next to vent seething punk anger on deaf ears

were these Irish ideologues, also on a mission to tear down the walls

of American radio from within in 1979.

So I pitch up in this atmosphere at a convention of DJs,

the most important convention.

And we're driven to the gig with a big hot-shot DJ.

The guy says, "I'm very important for your career." Don't say that to me.

Don't say somebody is very important for my career.

I will react entirely against that.

# It's a rat trap, Judy

# And we've been conned... #

Gig's going on fine.

I decide to make a bid for, you know,

getting down with the kids and punk's real identification.

I asked for the lights to come up and pointed out that

a quarter of this lot over here in the auditorium were the people

who determined what all the kids in the hall hear daily.

What do they think?

SHOUTING AND BOOING

They crowded around this glowing array of jocks,

going, "You suck, man! Your station sucks!"

At which point I say something scabrous

and they all get up and leave.

He just went on a rant about the idiot programme directors

and their black satin jackets,

"You're the problem! Scum of the earth!"

A few people just went, "Ha-ha! Oh, yeah!"

But a lot of them were like, "What?! How dare you!"

The rats went home, tails firmly between their legs.

We were taken off 60 of the most important stations that night.

Not a good move.

While the rats were barred from radio,

it was still long-haired rock that ruled the airwaves.

# Cold as ice

# You know that you are

# Cold as ice... #

Foreigner were an Anglo-American band

who were superstars on one side of the Atlantic.

They fitted in perfectly with American radio.

But our new generation of bands didn't want to be arena rock stars.

Instead, they were malcontents

presenting pearls before very few swine.

This is Magazine, who first toured in '79

with diary recollections from Howard Devoto.

MUSIC: "Permafrost" by Magazine

# Thunder shook loose on the outhouse again

# Today I bumped into you again

# I have no idea what you want... #

"New York.

"Two grey Lincoln Continentals to pick us up.

"I don't like this kind of gesture, but I wallow in it a bit.

"Mal, our roadie, has a tape of our last John Peel session

"which we play on the cassette recorder.

"And so, over the bridge, for the first glimpse of Manhattan

"to the strain and grind of Permafrost."

It sounds great.

# I will drug you and fuck you

# On the permafrost... #

"I'd like to sum up what I feel about this tour.

"I want it to go well.

"I want us to recoup significant amounts for Virgin.

"I want to see America.

"But I'm not interested in working like hell over here

"to make that happen."

# There's not much that I miss... #

Even if you were prepared to work, the task was daunting,

especially when what lay behind the cosy New York scene

was a vast, impenetrable hinterland.

This is Simple Minds' first American appearance in 1979 in New York City.

MUSIC: "Reel to Real" by Simple Minds

It's like walking into a cliched dream of New York.

We played that night and, in the audience,

Iggy Pop was heckling us.

Lou Reed was being moody over in the corner.

It was exciting beyond belief. It was also very intimidating.

# Real to real

# Fact to fact

# Nothing moving happening

# Artefact

# The waiting room waits. #

Then came the reality.

You drive an hour and a half to Buffalo

and there's two men and a dog. I thought we were stars last night,

I thought Lou Reed and Iggy pop were here

and Debbie Harry was there.

Why would they need us?

Why would they need some movement from the UK?

But of course, like anywhere, there were teenagers

who were hungry for something that was different and exotic.

# Come down heartbeat

# On my head. #

This rare footage of Simple Minds was filmed at Hurrah,

a new wave joint that was the point of entry

for the cool new British bands.

# Out of control. #

I remember, when we arrived in New York,

our first show was at Hurrah's

which was a very hip and happening club.

We were doing our sound check and somebody came up and said,

"Debbie Harry's over there at the bar."

I remember we had a Sounds journalist with us

trying to take pictures of us together.

I refused to stand anywhere near them.

They represented something that was too pop and too ephemeral. Little did I know.

We went to America

with the intention of not being seduced by it.

We went there with a hardened English punk mentality

when we first went.

# I would say I'm sorry

# If I thought that it would change your mind

# But I know that this time

# I have said too much

# Been too unkind

# I try to laugh about it. #

It served us well. It was the right attitude to have.

Had we gone there thinking, we can do this, boys, we can win them over,

we would've come home defeated, like many others have before and since.

# Boys don't cry

# I would break down at your feet

# And beg forgiveness

# Plead with you

# But I know that it's too late

# And now there's nothing I can do. #

We were fighting a different battle.

We weren't trying to crack a mike, we were trying to...

I don't know, I suppose be cool.

But we... It was a self-conscious kind of cool.

# I'll practise my fall for practice makes perfect

# Chained to the wall for maximum hold. #

We didn't want to be seen when we went back to Liverpool,

to have kind of, in any way, sold out.

# You knew about this

# With your head in your hands

# All along

# I was the puppet I was the puppet. #

I remember some record company following Chicago.

It was an after show after some big gig we'd done.

He said, "You've got to see this fellow from WXYZ radio station."

I remember saying, "I'm trying to get a tequila and orange here,

"and if you don't piss off, I'll headbutt you."

It's probably not the greatest thing to do to a record company bloke.

# All along

# I was the puppet I was the puppet. #

Of all these pioneers, only a handful would enjoy later success.

But at the turn of the decade,

it was clear that if you actually wanted to break America,

you had to play the game.

Since the sex pistols went there and failed to ignite,

it didn't work for them in America

the way that they captured the nation in England.

It just didn't strike a fire there,

but the hunger for something was very much there.

So, The Police, the Mercenaries, went over there

and we went from city to city

fulfilling that need for this revolutionary thing.

We weren't revolutionary at all.

We were capitalism slick, but we had the right hairdo.

OK, and some pretty good songs written by himself.

I'd never been to America.

I flew to America on Freddie Laker, 60 quid.

I landed in New York.

We played Seabee Jeebies, played three sets that night.

Brought the house down, found myself in a hotel on 44th Street.

Pretty flea-bitten hotel, but very happy to be in America

and the land of dreams, land of fantasy.

We started touring there and eventually we made it there.

Unlike other bands, The Police were overt in their ambition.

They wanted to make it and were happy to get embedded

in the unglamorous underbelly of America.

The secret of The Police was

that it was affordable. With only three guys and a roadie,

we could say, you know what, we don't need the radio,

we don't need that big support system,

we don't need the tour support of the record company

and all that stuff.

We don't need the touring bus.

We can get in a station wagon

and we can go play a 300-seat club and with two hotel rooms,

because we'd have one roadie and the guys would double up,

we'd get a rollaway bed and actually go out on the market.

We could get back to the people.

In the end, it's the fans that make an act happen or not.

We did plan Poughkeepsie on that tour and it has become legendary.

We had this place called The Last Chance Saloon, aptly named.

There were only four people there and it was like,

it isn't worth bothering about.

We had the spirit at the time and thought,

we have paying customers, all four of them.

We did the show and everybody absolutely loved it,

all four of them. They all came back to the dressing room.

Unlike many of their peers,

The Police were happy to schmooze American radio.

All right, we're out in the woods here in Virginia,

down in the great dismal swamp and The Police are raiding the station.

We've been invaded by The Police, and Sting, Andy and...

In my day, we'd show up in Boston and the long-hairs would say,

"Who are these punks with their short hair?

"Who do they think they are pissing on legends of long-hair music?"

It was our job to get on the radio station.

The Grateful Dead suck! Ohh!

# I want my MTV. #

The Police became the first new wave act to break through in America.

The tide was beginning to turn in our favour

and what happened next would open the flood gates.

To this day, when I meet people in the right demographic,

who might have been somewhere between 12 and 25 back in 1981,

I say to them, "I bet you remember exactly what you were doing

"the first time you ever saw MTV."

Unlike the regional nature of radio,

MTV was America's first truly nationwide music network.

Its reach promised to be massive,

but in 1981, there was one problem.

Nobody was making videos,

apart from the Brits.

Take you back in time and the early days of MTV in the early '80s,

we'd probably get no more than three to five videos a week.

That was it, that was the maximum output of music companies combined.

There really weren't that many videos being made.

MTV is not financially successful at this point,

but, you have to understand,

it cost millions and millions of dollars to launch this channel

back in August 1981.

The financial outlay, day one, was over 20 million.

Imagine, we're sitting in a music meeting one day,

we're playing and checking out all this new music,

and one of the music people says,

"We have this video by this band called the Flock Of Seagulls."

"The what?"

You put it in and that riff hits and it's really hard

and here comes this guy with the craziest haircut you've ever seen.

We're like, "Yeah, yeah!"

In the UK, Flock Of Seagulls were one of many foppish bands

with outlandish hairstyles.

But mainstream America, still in thrall to long-hair bands,

just hadn't seen the like.

The video for I Ran made them the first living room stars of MTV.

# I walk along the avenue

# I never thought I'd meet a girl like you

# Meet a girl like you. #

I remember the record company saying to us,

"you're going to make a promo clip, a video for this new company

"and they're going to play it every couple of hours."

I think it was probably 99.99% important for us

as a breaking band at the time.

I think we got one of the first four or five videos to be on there.

# I ran all night and day

# I couldn't get away. #

You know, bands in those days, especially bands like us,

were so image laden

because we'd listened to David Bowie and stuff like that.

We wanted an image that was as big as that.

Our heroes were big images, so we wanted to have big images.

It doesn't show on radio, but on TV, it's right in your face.

You are about to participate in a cable adventure,

which reaches from the outer limits to your inner sanctum.

A lot of British bands got tremendous exposure on MTV.

Music television.

"Video killed the radio star."

There was a sense in which MTV really broke the monopoly

of what radio was.

It made it possible for bands

that might not have gotten on the radio in the US,

because of the way they looked, the way they acted or sounded.

It gave them a route in.

There were many of them, but probably Duran Duran is most synonymous

with MTV in its early days.

# In touch with the ground

# I'm on the hunt, I'm after you

# A scent and a sound

# I'm lost and I'm found

# And I'm hungry like the wolf

# Strut on a line

# It's discord and rhyme

# I howl and I whine I'm after you... #

With scenes reminiscent of the Beatles' arrival in New York in '64,

Duran Duran led a second British Invasion in 1982.

Once again, the British had the look and America was agog.

Unlike their punk predecessors,

Duran Duran were naked in their ambition.

16 magazine, which was like this really popular teen magazine,

they ran this story saying, "Journey, or Duran Duran."

Are you going to stay with Neil and the boys,

who we've loved for so long?

Or there's these new weird-looking Brits.

Who are you going to go with?

Are you going to stay with what you know and love

or are you going to go over to the dark side?

We won.

Duran Duran was one of the first guest VJs ever on MTV.

They came into the studio that day and I'm floored

because Nick has full-on make-up, like ladies kind of make-up.

I was like, whoa! OK, he's going on like this.

And he did!

I'm Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran

and you're watching and listening in stereo to MTV music television.

You'll never look at...

Some people think we're reading this from cue cards.

Let me tell you something...

We happened round about the same time as MTV was happening.

I remember very early days being asked to do one of those,

I want my MTV commercials.

Little did we know what a monster it would become.

-24 hours a day on cable TV.

-I want my MTV, MTV, MTV!

Too much is never enough.

# Don't put your head on my shoulder

# Sink me in a river of tears

# This could be the best place yet

# But you must overcome your fears. #

In the UK, Boy George meant pantomime.

In Reagan's puritanical America,

his X factor not only outraged the right,

but also helped make Culture Club the best charting singles band

since the Beatles.

What video did was it sent a colourful postcard

to every corner of the world, particularly in America.

And from a social point of view,

if you were some gay kid in Arkansas or middle America,

or in Texas,

it was a very powerful medium because it was like...

it was like, "I'm not alone."

Culture club?

If you would've told me two years ago that I would dig Boy George

and I'd really want to come and see the show,

I would've said, "Shove it!" you know?

But, hey, I'm really up for it.

I had death threats, I went on stage in a bullet-proof vest one Halloween

because people had called to say they were going to shoot me.

We used to have all the Christians with the, "Boy George is the devil."

And "If sex is a sin, what's Boy George?"

British rock star, Boy George,

is on a US tour and he's already wowed them in Dallas.

But in Baton Rouge at Louisiana State University,

150 protesters, led by the Reverend David Diamond, showed up.

The reverend says Boy George is perverse

and said as much to the member of one of the singer's entourage.

I used to deliberately open the top of the limo roof

and wave at them. Hi!

But the concert went on, Bill.

# Hey, little sister Who's the only one. #

It was a Goddamn British freak show.

But unlike their punk forebears,

these new pop stars wanted to make it.

Even former punk, Billy Idol.

# It's a nice day to start again. #

We made a video for White Wedding

which, I don't know,

it had me smashing through a stained-glass window of Jesus on a motorcycle.

# Nice day to start again. #

I think when you do things like that, people sit up and notice.

We had a lot of fun making this sick Gothic video.

We never thought anybody was really going to see it.

Billy was good because he was smart. He said, "Fuck this."

Went to America and there he was.

He just banged away and he got the cover of Rolling Stone.

He looked that up. I didn't.

I was supposed to get the cover of Rolling Stone

but someone decided I was a Nazi.

However, while MTV proclaimed a second British invasion,

the real musical revolution would not be televised.

Emerging from the underground was the nascent sound of hip-hop.

One of its founding fathers was the Bronx's Afrika Bambaataa.

And in the true spirit of trans-Atlantic exchange,

British music would play a crucial role at the heart of hip-hop.

One minute you'd hear rock music at my party, you'd hear funk,

you could hear soul, disco.

You might hear some salsa or Latin type music.

I could take you into some of the early techno pop records

of Yellow Magic Orchestra, of Gary Numan.

People thought I was crazy playing Gary Numan at a hip-hop party.

I got to New York City and I wanted to see some art so I went to MoMA.

Outside there were these black kids breakdancing on a board,

spinning on their head and they were dancing to Gary Numan.

I think people should remember that.

Gary Numan was a pioneer and they loved it.

They did beat box with Gary Numan

and that pretty much, I think, speaks for itself.

They had no idea what Gary Numan looked like.

When all that was going on, I had no idea that it was going on.

I'd have been really proud of that if I'd known.

I didn't find out until relatively recently

when Bambaataa explained it all to me

and described certain scenes that he remembered

in these derelict building sites.

You'd work your way through and eventually you'd find a little area,

where thousands were dancing to white electronic music

and people rapping over the top of it.

I'd have loved to have been there and seen some of that.

It must have been great.

In 1982, Bambaataa released Planet Rock,

one of the first hip-hop records to chart.

It caught the imagination of another British new wave act,

who promptly set out to collaborate with him.

But there was one problem.

We just got a record and it had Afrika Bambaataa on it.

It's a bit of a made-up name.

Obviously nobody's really called Afrika Bambaataa.

It's is a bit of a jokey name.

The only name that made any sense on the record was Arthur Baker.

Arthur Baker, was Bambaataa's producer,

so New Order went to New York.

He thought we'd have ideas and we thought he'd have ideas.

None of us did, so we went into the studio

and went through the presets on a synthesiser

for three or four days and recorded them all.

He turned up and said,

"No, let's just go in the studio and do something."

We still hadn't got any ideas

and by the time we got into the studio, Confusion came out of it.

# Confusion, confusion... #

We went in with Arthur, and he just went,

"Right, let's get something together!" We were like,

"Oh my God! What the hell?"

We just didn't know what was happening - even though

we loved the music, we had no idea how he created it.

# Why can't you see?

# Why can't you see?

# What you mean to me? #

To my mind, it perfectly melded white indie

with what was considered to be black hip-hop.

By 1984, staunchly hetero American rock

was also taking its cue from the British New Wave.

Here was Bruce Springsteen with a music video and a synthesizer.

# I get up in the evening

# And I ain't got nothin' to say... #

America was, up to that point,

very slow to change its ideas on rock'n'roll.

# Feelin' the same way

# I ain't nothin' but tired... #

MTV, and bands like us,

and bands that weren't afraid to sound different,

to lead instead of follow,

I think that made them change their minds, and it influenced them.

# You can't start a fire

# You can't start a fire without a spark

# This gun's for hire

# Even if we're just dancing in the dark. #

A lot of American groups

learnt from what the British groups were doing with video,

and the way they presented themselves.

And so you have, after Duran Duran and Eurythmics and groups like that,

you get a wave of American groups who have taken it on,

so you have ZZ Top, with these very funny, stylish videos.

# She's got legs

# She knows how to use them... #

I guess ZZ Top were the main of that - they were from Texas,

multimillionaires or whatever, huge band,

and never broke out for 25 years until they put a sequencer in one of their songs.

# All of the time... #

And there was one American artist who would use video and synths to devastating effect.

I will never, ever,

and don't want to ever forget

when I saw Billie Jean the first time.

The music video came over to the office, I rallied everybody,

I said "Here we go." We hit the start button, and it was Billie Jean.

# She told my baby we'd danced till 3 and she looked at me

# Then showed a photo of a baby crying

# His eyes looked like mine... #

That was the one that set the standard at that time.

# People always told me

# Be careful what you do

# Don't go around breaking young girls' hearts

# But she came and stood right by me

# Just the smell of sweet perfume... #

Billie Jean owed more than a debt of influence to the synth and videos

of the New Wave, whilst simultaneously knocking the Brits into a cocked hat.

And MJ wasn't finished there.

Perhaps he'd seen a Billy Idol video from 1981.

We dressed up these breakdancers as zombies.

And they were supposedly coming up this tower

to kind of attack me,

and then with some wild force, I was able to expel them.

But they were almost zomboid...breakdancing zombies,

and I really thought, well, a couple of years later,

Michael Jackson really ripped off the idea for Thriller.

The pinnacle of it all at that time was Thriller.

I can tell you, there probably is not a bigger artist

in the history of MTV than Michael Jackson.

We ended up with Thriller, which was a 10-minute short film, really.

Some people might call it a music video, we looked at it more like a short film.

This was destination television.

Michael Jackson exposed us for the amateur interlopers that we really were,

but whilst the King of Pop would reign from now on,

there would still be plenty of room in his court.

1983 would see the Police at the height of their game with a gig that resonated down the ages.

# Every game you play

# Every night you stay

# I'll be watching you... #

The pinnacle of it all, and towards the end of the band's career

was of course when we played at Shea Stadium.

I think historically, we were the first band back in there after the Beatles.

# How my poor heart aches

# With every step you take... #

Because the Beatles had played there, of course,

it was a legendary venue.

# Every vow you break

# Every smile you fake

# Every claim you stake

# I'll be watching you... #

We had the number one single, Every Breath You Take,

and we also had the number one album,

which was number one for four months. Actually kept Michael Jackson out of the number one slot!

# I look around but it's you I can't replace

# I feel so cold and I long for your embrace... #

About six months after that, it was the end of the band.

So we got off at an extremely high point!

By 1984, any remaining post-punk ideology

seemed to have been sublimated to naked pop ambition.

The biggest British New Wave act in America were Duran Duran,

who embarked on their first stadium tour.

The '84 American tour was really the end of the cycle

that I always think started at Brighton in the summer of '81,

and it was just the whole teen chapter of the band,

it just reached its apotheosis.

Apotheosis?

We opened in Seattle,

and we'd been pretty used to some of the crazy hysteria in the UK,

and Australia, and some other places we'd been to.

But when we got on stage in Seattle, and there was 20,000 people,

it was a whole new scale.

We literally couldn't hear anything.

We were all looking at each other laughing for the first few minutes,

thinking, "They're going to stop, though, right?"

It didn't stop.

It went through the entire show, and then it happened on the second show and the third show,

and we thought, "I guess this is our world for a while."

# Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand

# Just like that river twisting through the dusty land... #

There was an awful lot of other bands that were doing very well

that we despised. They were the enemy. Duran Duran.

It was just that one video they did, on a boat, with lots of women in bikinis.

That was our touchstone of all that's wrong with modern music

for about four or five years in the '80s.

That was the image we had of what we had to defeat.

That's who we were at war with.

One post-punk band still carried on the war.

In the mid-'80s The Cure would cheer up to enjoy a Beatle-esque glut of singles success

that remained subversive.

# We move like cagey tigers

# Oh, we couldn't get closer than this... #

It was a kind of difficult transition for me,

because I really had enjoyed - not playing the outsider - but we actually were.

And what I didn't realise at the time, with hindsight,

was that we remained outside of that cultural mainstream to a degree,

even though we ended up playing huge places and selling a lot of records.

You couldn't really take us home.

# I'll show you in spring It's a treacherous thing

# We missed you hissed

# The lovecats

# We missed, you hissed

# The lovecats... #

When we made that transition, people were saying, you're selling out.

I was thinking, "We're not, what we're doing is reaching more people." And there's a difference.

It sounds disingenuous, but there is a difference. If you continue to make the music you like,

but you're reaching more people, primarily because of the media,

and suddenly people are saying, "They're a bit weird, but it's OK to like them,"

suddenly your audience starts to get bigger and bigger.

# It's the perfect dream... #

The Cure would become prime exporters of a British melancholia to a massive US market.

They enjoy a privileged position in America

which continues to this day,

perhaps rivalled only by Depeche Mode.

There were a lot of similarities in our career,

particularly in America - I don't so much anywhere else, probably only in America,

because we were perceived as English bands, and so the distinction's kind of blurred.

For the mainstream American media, there are no distinctions.

You know, we're just two lots of weirdos!

# Sweet little girl

# I prefer

# You behind the wheel

# And me the passenger

# Drive... #

Of all the British bands loosely associated with post-punk music in America,

none would enjoy the enduring success of the Cure and Depeche Mode.

But if the scope is extended

to include the British Isles as a whole,

there was one band who would trump them all.

# I have held the hand of the devil

# It was warm in the night

# I was cold as a stone... #

Key to U2's meteoric rise was a different special relationship -

the Irish love of America and the American love of the Irish.

# I wanna feel

# Sunlight on my face

# I see the dust cloud disappear

# Without a trace... #

Americans like to be liked, so Bono coming over here

and being everybody's great Irish buddy - people responded to it.

There was a sense in which, "He's not sneering at us, he's not condescending to us,

"and he doesn't think we're philistines,"

or any of the other stuff that a variety of other British bands

made no bones about communicating here.

U2 was not about that.

There was something about America that they loved.

# And when I go there

# I go there with you

# It's all I can do... #

Here was a band that truly embraced America and created a new stadium sound.

The post-punk argument with the USA was running out of steam,

and now the Americans themselves were about to recapture the zeitgeist.

There was a time when we English bands

were constantly touring in America, and it seemed really...

like a war, really.

# Follow me, don't follow me

# I've got my spine I've got my orange crush... #

But there did come a time when suddenly there was a whole gang of American artists

who started to come up, like REM,

who supported us on a few of our shows.

# We are agents of the free

# I've had my fun and now it's time... #

And then it seemed like, "We don't really need you guys,

"we've got our own music to listen to now."

And there seemed to be an uprising of young American artists

and bands that seem to come along

and quell the fire that was coming from the UK.

Since the '60s, Britain had grown fat by exporting black American music back to white Americans,

but from 1989 onwards, that was no longer necessary.

The age of empire ended when hip-hop went overground,

driving the colonists out.

# 1989

-# The number, another summer

-Get down!

# Sound of the funky drummer

# Music hittin' ya hard cos I know you got soul

# Brothers and sisters... #

A couple of things happened in the '90s to really marginalise

British music in the United States.

The first one is hip-hop.

That becomes really the dominant form of popular music.

And...you know, it seemed very American

and very home-grown.

Obviously, you want it to be from some ghetto, you know,

in New York or Los Angeles.

# Straight outta Compton is a crazy brother named Ice Cube

# From the stupid dope gang with a attitude

# When I'm called off I got a sawed-off

# Kick knowledge and bodies are hauled off

# You too, boy, if you get with me

# The police are gonna have to come and get me... #

And so that somehow, coming from anywhere else, I think,

didn't seem meaningful.

I think the other element was grunge,

which also had a very American feel to it.

# Yeah, yeah

# Yeah, yeah

# Yeah... #

Even as British punk, I think, was one of the big influences

on Kurt Cobain and on Eddie Vedder,

you know, the flannel shirts and the dressing down and the North West,

and all this other business,

you had a very American feel.

# I like it, I'm not gonna crack

# I miss you I'm not gonna crack... #

Grunge was one facet of a burgeoning alternative rock scene

that also included the likes of the Pixies and Smashing Pumpkins.

American music now had market saturation,

making it difficult for new British bands to make meaningful impact in the '90s.

It's an interesting question,

when you look at the tail end of the bands that came through in the '80s,

right up until the early '90s,

Outside of the Cure and Depeche Mode,

who are still doing really well...

I guess the sort of so-called Britpop bands -

Blur couldn't travel outside of the UK, I don't think.

And Oasis had a good stab at it.

The record companies were determined that someone was going to break America,

so they were just hurling Britpop bands at America,

and America didn't really want to know, because it had its own culture, it had grown up, in a way.

A lot of the bands that had come out of the grunge period

had filled up all those gaps, there was no space for anyone else to go over there.

The main reason why we did well in America was the songs.

That's what people who have tried to conquer America,

sort of forget that bit. That's the key part!

Without the songs, none of it's going to work anyway.

In the 21st century,

America no longer asks the same questions about British music.

That's not to say we're no longer successful.

Coldplay and Adele are our current ambassadors.

But the world is a smaller place.

Thanks to the internet, we're all so much more connected.

A band emerges, and within moments everybody knows about them -

on both sides of the pond.

Today, the very idea of a British invasion of America seems old-fashioned.

For nearly 50 years, there has been an ongoing musical dialogue between Britain and America.

We have gone west in search of the land of our dreams,

to find out who we are, and if we're any good.

And America has looked to us as a place of radical chic.

We have enchanted them, shocked them and shown them the future.

It's been a very special relationship.

I love its vastness, I love its history,

I love its musical history.

I love the people.

There's a lot of really cool, good people, who are quite positive,

and quite free, quite liberal thinking, and I like that.

Having said that, I like our kind of awkwardness,

the British, you know...

That's OK, too, because we're not just won over by any little thing.

We kind of question everything - it's not a bad thing.

And the great thing is, for our kind of music, they love it.

And they love it just like we loved Elvis.

We loved Elvis because he was American.

They love us cos we're British. There's a bit of that going on.

Special relationship.

Special relationship.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd