Malfunctioning props, uncooperative animals, towering egos, apocalyptic weather... pop videos can go wrong in more ways than any sane director would care to list.
The MTV era supercharged all of this: bigger budgets, stranger concepts, tighter deadlines, and a new expectation that artists should perform through whatever chaos the shoot threw at them. Across the decades, the nightmare takes many forms – from freezing beaches to collapsing warehouses, from malfunctioning rigs to monsoon‑drenched dancers – but the result is always the same: a video that looks triumphant precisely because making it was anything but.
Here are 13 pop videos that look great – but whose brilliance came at a high price.
1. Peter Gabriel – ‘Sledgehammer’ (1986)
Few videos demanded more sheer physical endurance. Gabriel spent 16 hours lying under a sheet of glass, shot frame‑by‑frame while Aardman and the Brothers Quay built a stop‑motion universe around him. Every twitch of his face required another painstaking setup; every visual gag meant another round of microscopic adjustments. The result was groundbreaking, but the process was punishing. Gabriel later joked that anyone trying to replicate it should be wished 'good luck'.
2. A‑ha – ‘Take On Me’ (1985)
Its one of the most iconic and unforgettable examples from a golden age for the pop video. But the magic of A-ha's 'Take On Me' promo came at a cost. To create the rotoscope effect – thousands of hand‑drawn frames – the band had to repeat tiny gestures under blistering lights, again and again, so animators could trace their movements. Days blurred into weeks; exhaustion set in; the shoot became a marathon of precision and discomfort. The finished clip looks effortless, but the process was anything but.
3. Tom Petty – ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ (1985)
For Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' 1985 hit, a surreal Alice in Wonderland set turned into a catalogue of mishaps. The actress playing Alice spent long stretches soaking in a giant teacup, shivering between takes, while a live piglet – meant to add whimsy – promptly escaped and took 45 minutes to recapture. The oversized props, elaborate costumes and unpredictable animals made the shoot far stranger and more stressful than its playful tone suggests.
4. Guns N’ Roses – ‘November Rain’ (1992)
The video for 'November Rain' tells a melodramatic story of love, marriage and tragedy, with Axl Rose marrying his girlfriend Stephanie Seymour before her character dies and he mourns her at her funeral. And its operatic scale mirrors the ordeal behind it.
It's Guns N' Roses, so chaos wasn’t just a by-product – it was baked into the production. Axl Rose and co. routinely arrived hours late, sometimes not until after sunset, leaving crews to wrap at 3am with almost nothing filmed. Then came the logistical sprawl: helicopters, cranes, orchestras, desert shoots, and a church hauled to New Mexico for a single shot.
5. The Beatles – ‘Penny Lane’ (1967)
A charming, whimsical clip – until the horses bolted. The video captures the Beatles strolling through and around London’s Angel Lane, with surreal imagery, playful performance shots and the band enjoying the kind of carefree, storybook atmosphere that suits the song perfectly. Then, mid-shoot, the horses tore off across the park, forcing crew and band members into an impromptu chase to retrieve them.
The contrast is wonderfully incongruous: the world’s most famous group creating a dreamy, whimsical film one moment and sprinting after runaway horses the next. Paired with the Strawberry Fields Forever shoot, it’s a reminder that even late-’60s Beatles productions could descend into cheerful chaos.
6. Elton John – ‘I’m Still Standing’ (1983)
The south of France looked idyllic on camera, but the shoot steadily unravelled. The video turns Elton John’s 'I’m Still Standing' into a gloriously colourful seaside spectacle, with Elton dancing and strutting through the streets and along the Côte d’Azur, surrounded by flamboyant dancers in bright costumes.
Behind the scenes, though, sudden downpours drenched dancers, ruined costumes and left equipment sputtering. Elton and the crew grew progressively soaked and frazzled as director Russell Mulcahy pushed to keep the energy high. The result is a wonderfully sunny video born from a distinctly soggy, scrambling production.
7. Foo Fighters – ‘Learn to Fly’ (1999)
The finished video may be breezy and comic, but the shoot was anything but. Learn to Fly is essentially a miniature airplane farce: the band playing multiple characters — pilots, passengers, flight attendants — in a spoof of disaster‑movie tropes, complete with malfunctioning controls and mid‑air panic.
To pull it off, the Foo Fighters spent hours in heavy prosthetics and wigs, sweating under lights on a set that was cramped, overheated and constantly breaking down. Every time a door jammed or a mechanism failed, the entire sequence had to be reset from scratch. Cast members fainted between takes; the band were wedged into tiny spaces while the set’s hydraulics misbehaved; and the comic timing demanded endless repetition.
What looks like carefree slapstick on screen was, behind the camera, sweaty, claustrophobic chaos — a perfect example of how a seemingly simple concept can become a production ordeal.
8. Bon Jovi – Bed of Roses (1992)
This one has a genuinely scary production anecdote. Richie Sambora was taken to a mountaintop to film a guitar sequence; when the helicopter came to collect him, high winds meant it couldn't land. Staying overnight could have been life-threateningly cold, so Sambora and the stunt coordinator had to jump into the helicopter before it had fully landed.
9. The Police – ‘Synchronicity II’ (1983)
What looks like a stark, apocalyptic performance piece was really just the band trying to survive the elements. The video places them on a bleak Scottish shoreline — chosen to mirror the song’s tension and its sense of domestic pressure erupting into something monstrous — but the location turned out to be a torment.
Hurricane‑force winds, freezing rain and sand blasting across the beach made every take a battle. Equipment toppled or shorted out; the band were soaked, shivering and visibly fed up. The video’s raw, elemental mood wasn’t crafted — it was the weather beating them into submission.
10. Kate Bush – ‘The Red Shoes’ (1994)
The video for Kate Bush's 1994 single depicts Bush as a dancer trapped in a dark, fairy-tale world, performing elaborate choreography as she struggles to escape the spell of the cursed red shoes. And the video proved to be a very real-world struggle of its own.
Bush insisted on doing her own choreography and wire work, pushing for emotional authenticity even as repeated takes left her bruised and exhausted. Technical failures stalled the shoot; last-minute rewrites meant entire sequences had to be re-blocked on the fly. What looks fluid and dreamlike on screen was built from physical strain and relentless troubleshooting behind the scenes.
11. R.E.M. – ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)’ (1987)
The song itself sounds nonchalant and carefree — a shrug in the face of apocalypse — but the video was made in conditions that were anything but. Set in a derelict warehouse, the clip follows a lone child rummaging through debris as the band appear in fleeting, chaotic fragments.
The location was a genuine health hazard: dust clouds everywhere, collapsing props, unstable flooring and constant safety scares. The child actor was miserable; the band hated the environment; the crew spent the day firefighting problems. Its anarchic, disordered mood isn’t an artistic flourish — it’s the shoot, barely held together.
12. Duran Duran – ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ (1982)
Sri Lanka seemed perfect for Duran Duran’s cinematic ambitions: the band wanted jungles and exotic locations, while director Russell Mulcahy had recently visited the island and suggested it. The video plays like a glossy Indiana Jones fantasy, with Simon Le Bon pursuing a mysterious, tiger-like woman through markets, streets and jungle, while the other band members search for him.
Behind the scenes, however, the shoot was far less glamorous. Monsoon rain drenched the crew, leeches clung to ankles, transport broke down and stomach bugs laid people low, with Andy Taylor hospitalised after drinking contaminated water. The exotic adventure became an exhausting logistical ordeal – although the resulting video helped make Duran Duran MTV stars.
13. Michael Jackson – ‘Black or White’ (1991)
A technical nightmare disguised as a blockbuster. The video’s famous morphing sequence shows a succession of faces changing seamlessly into one another – people of different races, ages and genders dissolving into the next person. It was a visual expression of the song’s message that racial differences should not divide us: as Jackson sings, the faces literally become interchangeable.
Achieving the effect, however, was extraordinarily demanding for its time. Dozens of cameras had to be perfectly synchronised while performers hit exact marks, with computers crashing, rigs jamming and choreography repeated endlessly because the technology kept misbehaving. The machinery was the real star – and it was nowhere near ready for prime time.
Screengrabs: YouTube / Vevo
