10 great music videos of the 1990s

“It feels like we could do fucking anything,” says a figure in overalls as he connects red Rizlas, preparing himself for a Friday night – one where he and his mates will be “buzzing off their nuts”. Ostensibly a promo for Flowered Up’s rave-crossover epic ‘Weekender’, Andrew John Whiston’s short film of the same name became a legend: a rallying cry against the rat race, an illicit VHS tape passed around all-nighters, and the “Citizen Kane of acid house”.

In 2020, after the death of iconic DJ/producer Andrew Weatherall, filmmakers and fans of Weekender (1992) gathered via Zoom for I Am Weekender, a new documentary about the classic rave short. Figures as diverse as Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder and Ratcatcher (1999) director Lynne Ramsay shared their memories of a 13-minute electronic music video: one which showed actors Anna Haigh and Lee Whitlock uniting under lasers, and taking empathy-boosting drugs that the tabloids warned were a danger to society.

The tabloids may have won: 1994’s controversial Criminal Justice and Public Order Act decapitated the rave movement, making it illegal for more than 20 individuals to gather and listen to music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. But WIZ’s video remains relevant. Weekender wasn’t afraid to question acid house, its closing shots of raver Little Joe staggering home suggesting that chemicals every Friday could soon become as tiresome as nine-to-five.

Finally available uncut on Blu-ray along with the new documentary, Weekender is one of many music videos from the decade between the wars on communism and terror that still pack a punch.

In the 1980s, it was written off as just an album track on Prince’s 1985 Family album. At the turn of the decade, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ went global when John Maybury filmed O’Connor’s haunting cover. The single camera angle may seem understated at first, given the power of the tune, but the video’s more complex than it might appear: we see long shots of O’Connor striding around Parc de Saint-Cloud in Paris, as well as close-ups of statues, treetops and falling leaves.

Her performance addresses the rush of post-breakup emotions – heartbreak, anger, pleading, resignation, like Bob Hoskins’ The Long Good Friday (1980) closing shot in a polo neck – and her tears, allegedly the result of focusing on her deceased mother, meant the video soon became a staple of music TV channels. It won trophies at the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards, as well as international spoofs by Kath & Kim (2002) star Gina Riley, and Peter Serafinowicz’s Brian Butterfield character. Its message still rings true: being dumped is rough.

Vogue was directed by a pre-Alien³ (1992) David Fincher, who shot Madonna throwing her now iconic semaphore-like shapes in black and white. There’s a hint of the director’s nihilistic tendencies, especially as the dancers’ grooves cut to a maid and butler dusting statues and gathering laundry, but the video is a safe bet when compared with the flaming crosses of Like a Prayer (1989).

Vogue, however, attracted its own kind of controversy: photographer Horst P. Horst claimed that the visuals borrowed from his portrait shots of Greta Garbo, Veronica Lake and other Hollywood icons. Regardless of ownership, the end product went stratospheric, and seems to have influenced Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000): if that movie and novel had been set in 1990 instead of 1987, you can well imagine narcissist Patrick Bateman dressed in his finest Brooks Brothers and vogueing at his reflection.

South London punks Carter USM were written out of history for inconveniently landing in the hinterland between acid house and Britpop. Accompanied by synthesizers and singing about some very radio-unfriendly subjects – wage inequality, slum landlords, racism in the army – the band repeatedly troubled the charts.

Their seventh single features a killer bass beat and lyrics recounting child abuse, and the video is just as colourful, using stop-motion animation to bring toys and sweet wrappers to life around the band, who attack their guitars in an empty playground. A warning for how quickly your childhood can be stolen from you, the video’s popularity alerted lawyers representing The Rolling Stones, who took legal action against Carter for including the line “Goodbye Ruby Tuesday” in the chorus.

The LA rockers’ sixth entry into the Billboard top 10 took the term ‘power ballad’ to new heights. The video, shot by Highlander III (1994) director Andy Morahan, wove Axl Rose’s lament to a lost love into the short story ‘Without You’ by Adalberto James, resulting in one of the most expensive rock promos ever produced.

The band are seen performing on stage in a concert call while Rose ties the knot with then-girlfriend Stephanie Seymour, only for rain to spoil the reception. As the song changes gears into a piano-led hurrah, the ceremony follows suit with Seymour’s funeral. There’s some early computer animation as the desert church evaporates, and even flashes of gore as Jesus statues weep blood. But the video’s highlight has to be Slash’s leather-trousered guitar solo, which he performs in the face of a dust storm. Rock on.

As more and more directors lent on the CGI that had made Jurassic Park (1993) and Toy Story (1995) big hits, Felix Gary Gray focused on narrative for this ninth single by the Atlanta trio TLC. We see a young woman engaging in unprotected sex; photos of her and her partner begin to flash past, then fade away. At the same time, a teenage dealer turns his back on his mother, and transforms into a ghost after being gunned down on a corner.

It may have been a gamble for band members Chilli, T-Boz and Lisa Left-Eye to let their tune be attached to such harrowing visuals – Larry Clark’s feature film Kids (1995) would receive similar criticism that same year for its tale of teens caught in the AIDS epidemic – but ‘Waterfalls’ proved a hit, winning the band and Gray trophies for best R&B video, best group video, video of the year and viewer’s choice at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards.

Tilda Swinton has enjoyed a staggering assortment of roles – the White Witch in the Chronicles of Narnia (2005), Lena in Caravaggio (1986), a futuristic Thatcherite in Snowpiercer (2013) – but she’s entrancing as a mute alien in this spine-tingling techno offering from the Hartnoll brothers.

Swinton plays a ‘traveller’ from a slow-spinning gas giant planet who wades around our breakneck world, alarmed at what she sees. Intentionally dressed like David Bowie in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), she explores the East End, vans blurring past her as she catches her breath on a traffic island. Plastic rises out of the Thames, and people rush through tube barriers like twigs trapped in a weir. After crawling across a floodlit driving range where the golf balls are peppering the grass as fast as hail, the traveller becomes overwhelmed, and promptly legs it back to Neptune. 

Danny Boyle reportedly once claimed that Trainspotting (1996) couldn’t exist without Weekender (1992). It’s equally hard to imagine his film’s legacy if it hadn’t closed on this anthemic dance track from Romford producers Rick Smith and Karl Hyde. Originally a B-side until the tune’s popularity earned it breakfast radio airtime, the accompanying video was shot by long-term Underworld collaborators Tomato.

Vocalist Hyde crouches in the toilets of their D’Arblay Street offices, mouthing “I love you,” and headbanging while hooked up to a Walkman. Bandmates Smith and Darren Emerson, meanwhile, flicker in time to the relentless trance beat. The stream-of-consciousness approach Hyde uses in his lyrics means there’s no chorus, but for the song’s central refrain of “shouting lager, lager, lager”, the fast-cut visuals settle on a flashing pint. It sealed the song’s reputation as a binge-drinking anthem – ironic given Hyde is a tee-total recovering alcoholic, his lager chant the result of him forgetting the next line but not wanting to spoil the take.

Before he directed Sexy Beast (2000), Under the Skin (2013) and the famous Guinness surfer commercial (1999), director Jonathan Glazer had a nightmare in which he was trapped in a car that was pursuing someone. That became the concept behind this video for ‘Karma Police’, the second single from five-times platinum-selling album O.K. Computer (1997).

Shot POV-style, the video puts you in the mind of vocalist Thom Yorke’s chauffeur as he tries to run down an enemy on a moonlit country road. It’s a morbid but mesmerising setup, leaving you almost relieved when the victim pulls a switcheroo on us for the song’s gurgled conclusion. A warning for everyone who’s tensing their knuckles and committed to exacting revenge: before you set off, dig two graves (and always check your fuel filter).

The video that launched the fisheye lens habit for a ton of future hip-hop promos, Melissa Misdemeanor Elliott’s first solo single remains timeless on the four key axes of music television: fashion, choreography, production, gags. Elliott’s outfits – which range from gold bicycle helmets to inflated trash bags – are as playful and eye-catching as anything modelled by peak Lady Gaga, and it’s refreshing to see the rapper/producer who’s wearing them isn’t afraid to let her backup dancers take the limelight, particularly while she’s inviting the listener to “Play with her yo-yo”, or sitting on a sunny hilltop in a green tracksuit (a shot that seems to have anticipated Windows XP Bliss background).

It’s the first of Elliott’s videos to be shot by Hype Williams, and it’s testament to her impact as a songwriter that a host of hip-hop titans from Diddy to Lil’ Kim to co-producer Timbaland flock around their friend to make non-vocal cameos. 

Two years after its appearance on her 1997 Homogenic LP, Björk’s trip-hop anthem received a major upgrade care of dystopian director Chris Cunningham. Perhaps best known for his nightmarish, nan-terrorising 1997 promo for Aphex Twin’s ‘Come to Daddy’, Cunningham’s take on Björk’s romantic declaration was to shoot her as an Asimo-like android being pieced together in a factory, the singer’s face rendered in freshly moulded white plastic.

The digital animation as Björk’s skull hatch is welded shut and her arms are fitted with chassis housing is flawless – as impressive as any of the liquid metal effects from Terminator 2 (1991) – and as an identical cyborg confronts and then snogs her, the Icelandic singer and the Reading-born director produce an antidote to modern AI scaremongering. Maybe it’s possible for the robots to do what Iain M. Banks promised they would, and what the ravers almost achieved: embrace empathy.