[tweetmeme]For this week’s installment of “120 Minutes” Rewind, we look back at the time The The mastermind Matt Johnson hosted the show in 1986 while promoting that year’s Infected — and earned an on-screen disclaimer because of his stridently political remarks between music videos.
As you can see in the clips below, Johnson used his late-night cable platform to decry the “Reagan/Thatcher romance,” and, in particular, the U.S. bombing of Libya and the U.K.’s role in that attack. (As he put it, “the use of Britain as a mere aircraft carrier to hit Libya with.”)
During the episode, the following message scrolled across the bottom of the screen: “The content of this segment does not necessarily reflect the position of MTV Networks.”
Johnson, who returns with the first new The The single in a decade later this month, also was less than charitable to the bands whose videos he was introducing, admitting he’d never heard Easterhouse before, calling The Stranglers “perpetually middle-aged” and saying, “I must admit, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark aren’t a band that I like or dislike, they’re just kind of there.”
Check out four clips from the Johnson-hosted episode below via uploader MrPhilrand.