Translator — Un-Alone

JUL 01 1983 · 12:00

Translator — Un-Alone (1983) Era: Early MTV Era (1983) - The nascent period of music video as promotional art form, coinciding with MTV's explosive early growth and the college-radio new wave boom on the US West Coast. A rare surviving promotional clip for a critically appreciated but commercially underexposed college-radio single of 1983, 'Un-Alone' offers archival value as a representative example of Bay Area independent-label video production at the dawn of the MTV era. Its location photography in eastern Alameda County and performance-among-statues aesthetic provide documentable geographic and stylistic specificity. No director credit survives in any indexed database, making this a priority candidate for provenance research and credit attribution. Context: Released in 1983 as a single from the album No Time Like Now (415 Records/Columbia), 'Un-Alone' emerged during the critical early years of MTV when the network was actively platforming college-radio and new wave acts that commercial radio largely ignored. Translator occupied a distinctive niche in the San Francisco Bay Area scene, signed to Howie Klein's independent 415 Records imprint with Columbia distribution — a structure that gave them national reach while preserving an underground identity. The video's location shooting in eastern Alameda County, CA, and its low-budget narrative construct (parallel driving sequences, performance among outdoor statues) is typical of the cost-effective but visually ambitious clip-making of the period, where story-driven conceits were used to distinguish tracks in an increasingly crowded MTV rotation. Director notes: IMVDb lists the video as released in 1983 but carries no director or crew credits. No director attribution was found across IMVDb, Wikipedia, Discogs, or any other indexed source. The video depicts a dual-protagonist road narrative set in eastern Alameda County, CA, intercut with outdoor band performance footage staged among statues, consistent with low-budget Bay Area production practices of the early 1980s.