Tears For Fears - Everybody Wants To Rule The World

What this video is

Released on 22 March 1985 as the third single from 'Songs from the Big Chair,' the video arrived at the height of the Second British Invasion, when MTV's heavy rotation of UK acts reshaped American pop. The video's sun-drenched Californian road-trip aesthetic was a deliberate visual pitch at American audiences, and it worked: the song reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 on 8 June 1985. The open desert…

Why it matters

A canonical artifact of mid-1980s new wave and synth-pop, the video codified the era's aesthetic formula: British band + American landscape + MTV rotation = transatlantic stardom. Its understated, road-movie realism stood in contrast to the high-concept performance videos of contemporaries,…

The director

Nigel Dick (born 21 March 1953, Catterick, North Yorkshire) is a British-American music video director and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. He trained as an architect at the University of Bath before entering the record business at Stiff Records. He…