My favorite videos aired on the first day of MTV

On the day MTV went live I was really just a kid, I was actually very poor but I was fortunate enough to be living in the basement of a house that was wired for cable and I was glued to the set. The music was necessarily eclectic as the idea of making videos was still new. What I saw changed my musical tastes forever and broadened my horizons in a way that I don't think is possible now, I mean you HAD to sit through the April Wine video to see Elvis Costello and along the way you got a dose of Kate Bush, Iron Maiden and The Specials! Oh how the times have changed...


August 1, 1981:

"Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles
"You Better You Bet" by The Whol
"Brass in Pocket" by The Pretenders
"Time Heals" by Todd Rundgren
"Message of Love" by The Pretenders
"Double Life" by The Cars
"In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins
"Looking For Clues" by Robert Palmer
"Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" by Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
"One Step Ahead" by Split Enz
"I Wanna Be a Lifeguard" by Blotto (So bad its good?)
"Oliver's Army" by Elvis Costello
"Is it You?" by Lee Ritenour
"Tusk" by Fleetwood Mac
"Rapture" by Blondie
"Don't Let Go the Coat" by The Who
"Talk of the Town" by The Pretenders
"Can't Happen Here" by Rainbow
"The Man with the Child in His Eyes" by Kate Bush
"Ashes to Ashes" by David Bowie
"Rat Race" by The Specials
"Once in a Lifetime" by Talking Heads

I am still looking for a list of everything that was played the first year or two... MTV was struggling to fill up the playlist and it forced some odd and wonderful choices. Once more and more commercial music started to "clue in" and infiltrate the programing, it started to loose its luster for me... hard to think of the Talking Heads as being "unknown" but if other bands that where popular on the radio at the time had also produced visual content so early, then I doubt most people would have never heard of them as they would have just never made it on the air. Those first 12-24 months of MTV was a rare moment in the history of popular music.

Note: The dates of the music releases can be a little confusing as a lot of these where shot as promos for the band and the videos got shown before the record was released.