Bruno My Story by Tonioli Bruno

Author:Tonioli, Bruno [Tonioli, Bruno]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780755364107
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2012-09-13T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE

I made hay during the music video explosion. It was boom time, the pop equivalent of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the cinematic era which took place between the 1920s and the late 1950s and produced such movie masterpieces as Casablanca and Citizen Kane. Instead of propelling the likes of Lana Turner and Liz Taylor into superstardom, however, the 1980s became a period of intense creativity for Madonna, Peter Gabriel, Duran Duran and countless other bands. The music channel MTV had just opened for business and artists were determined to marry their latest music to a striking, visual masterpiece in order to attract the maximum attention. Meanwhile, every video director worth his salt wanted a choreographer to concoct a complicated dance routine for his latest muse.

Talk about performing a pirouette out of the frying pan and into the fire. I was working on pop videos nearly every week. Due to my previous work in the advertising industry, I was hot property among rock’n’roll’s thrusting young creatives. Artists were getting in touch with me because they had heard that I possessed a natural feel for performance. Meanwhile my staging work with the likes of Paul Young and Hazel O’Connor caused the word to spread like wildfire.

Directors would chat and gossip at cocktail parties and fancy rock’n’roll soirées across the land. ‘Bruno can get people to make the most out of themselves,’ they would say (well, I liked to imagine). ‘Darling, we must get him to produce our next video!’

And so I would receive phone call after phone call asking me to run along to some gigantic aircraft hangar of a studio in the middle of nowhere, often to work with the latest pop sensation of the moment.

Duran Duran were one of the first, and Duran Duran were big, just about as big as anyone could be. They had scored countless number one hits across the planet. They packed arenas with screaming fans whenever they played. If they weren’t making hit albums or flying across the world for yet another sell-out tour, they could be found dating supermodels. Their music videos were just as ambitious, and Duran Duran promos were often made on 35mm film by renowned directors. The resulting mini-movies often included plenty of nudity, so naturally I thought they were fantastic even before I’d met them.

In 1985, Nick Rhodes and Simon Le Bon from the band reached out (as they say in The Sopranos) because they were working on another project, a spin-off group called Arcadia, which was an artier version of Duran Duran. They wanted someone to choreograph the videos for their latest single ‘Election Day’ and when they’d heard about some of the commercial projects I’d been working on, they were suitably impressed. In those days, the music industry was very different. It wasn’t like it is now where a million people hang around a band and spend weeks arguing over what colour the lead singer should dye their hair. Back then, when somebody had to meet with the band, they actually met with the band.

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