Michael Penn, his song “long way down” has one of the most amazing videos ever and the studio was pissed that he wasnt in it so his only appearance was at the very end as a still photo of him sticking his tongue out…probably the final straw between him and the studio.
Well, shoot. Now I really want to find a Radiohead-less Radiohead video.
Don’t think they’re in the vid for Pyramid Song, which has a beautiful ending.
Actually, at some point in that video you can see the John’s heads. I’m not sure where I heard it, maybe in the commentary for the video on “Direct from Brooklyn” that in order for a video to be played on MTV at the time, you had to have the band in it at some point. So they pasted their faces into the stop-motion animation.
Didn’t the video for C+C Music Factory’s song Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) have Zelma Davis lip-syncing Martha Wash because Martha was “too fat” to be in a video?
But that video featured Freedom Williams as well as Clivillés and Cole… so only one artist wasn’t featured.
Quite a few wrestling promotions produced music videos back in the day. Likely violated the hell out of copyright in so doing, but they’d take a popular song and dub it over footage of featured wrestlers. Ones I can remember off the top of my head include Here I go Again featuring Kerry Von Erich, Sharp Dressed Man featuring a tag team called The Fantastics, and The Boys are Back in Town featuring a six-man team called the Freebirds.
Back when I watched it a lot, they (WWE, which was the WWF at the time) did something like that for the song “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” by Wang Chung. Damn it was lame.
Title of the thread says singer, not the whole group. Plus they replaced the original with a more attractive version, so it probably deserves a mention.
The title is “Music videos where the band/singer doesn’t appear” so it seems it can be either/or.
Not strictly in the “they don’t appear” sense, but Depeche Mode appears only briefly in the awesome video for Wrong. Pretty much, as the car drives down the street, it drives by them and they stare at it in slow motion for a few seconds.