Supertramp — It's Raining Again

JUL 01 1982 · 12:00

Supertramp — It's Raining Again (1982) Director: Russell Mulcahy Era: Early MTV Era (1982) - Peak of the music video art form's commercial and creative ascendancy, coinciding with MTV's first full year of broadcast and the dominance of cinematic narrative-driven clips over performance footage. High curatorial value as a confirmed Russell Mulcahy production from his most prolific and influential period, representing a fully realized cinematic narrative in short form. The video's nested drive-in structure, color-coded symbolism, and Hollywood location production distinguish it aesthetically from contemporaneous performance-only clips. As one of Supertramp's final charting works with Hodgson, it also holds biographical and historical significance for the band's legacy. Context: Released in October 1982, 'It's Raining Again' arrived at the precise moment the music video was cementing itself as a primary promotional and artistic medium via MTV. Directed by Russell Mulcahy — the director of MTV's very first broadcast video — the clip exemplifies the early-MTV philosophy of treating the pop song as a vehicle for cinematic short filmmaking. The song itself, a Roger Hodgson composition dressed in a deceptively bright pop arrangement, embeds themes of loss and romantic redemption beneath a bouncy piano-driven surface — a bittersweet duality Supertramp had long cultivated. The Hollywood Boulevard setting grounds the clip in American mythology while maintaining the band's British art-rock identity, bridging transatlantic audiences at a time when British acts were dominating U.S. charts during the so-called Second British Invasion. Director notes: Confirmed via IMDB title record (imdb.com/title/tt12064122/). The video is a fully realized short film set on Hollywood Boulevard, deploying Mulcahy's signature fast-cut editing, location-based practical lighting, and mini-drama narrative ambition. The production employs a sophisticated nested structure: a couple watching a drive-in movie that mirrors the story of a hitchhiker's misadventures, culminating in a romantic reunion in the rain. Color-coded umbrella symbolism (black crowd vs. orange gift vs. yellow love interest) functions as a visual motif. All five members of Supertramp appear in the video. The drive-in framing device bookends the clip, and the final shot pulls back to reveal the couple now with two children, synchronized to the nursery rhyme fade-out. The production is consistent with Mulcahy's peak 1982 output, the same year he directed Fleetwood Mac's 'Gypsy' and was deeply embedded in the early MTV ecosystem.