Emu's World

 

 

 Having paid my respects to the category-defying works of Fred Spencer, I feel I should probably also share some weird, personal, self-produced music videos that are actually ept. Jazz Emu's visual album Ego Death (below) came to my attention last year when the video for Fun Kitai Furai Dei (above) appeared on a bill of comedy shorts at the Ritzy to a hot crowd of universally dropped jaws. When real-name Archie Hendersen's full album showed up on youtube in March, its brilliance lifted me out of a particularly lightless attenion-deficit - I had just moved to a spacious flat near Arsenal and decided to keep the walls bare, a stowaway in my new captital P place, my brain two-thirds phone. That threat of playing statues hasn't entirely vanished, the feeling of wanting to tell myself to just go on ahead and I'll catch me later. But Ego Death still gets me moving.

 

Sometimes this blog will just be "Venice In Peril"

 Another canal. Maybe you can imagine how much Angus McKie's artwork for Rondò Veniziano's 1983 album "Venice In Peril" blew the mind of a young boy rifling through records in WHSmith, although I didn't know it was called that back then, and having my mind blown by album art was literally the only reason I rifled through records in WHSmith in the eighties. Click to enlage if you like, but don't blame me if you never come back, and here's another.

 

 I've just started watching Dennis Potter's Casanova: its scenes of an imprisoned writer suffering pornographic flashbacks and raging against his cellmates are very reminiscent of The Singing Detective, but its sumptious and creepy Venetian exteriors are giving me welcome flashbacks of my own, specifically to how powerful a role some idea of this city played in my childhood imagination. The mad cover art on a Rondò Veniziano record is probably what started it.

 A decade after "Venice In Peril" was released I would have my first ever pizza (I was scared of cheese) and, as I've written before, I chose a Veniziana because for every one ordered Pizza Express would pay "a discretionary 25p" to the "Venice In Peril fund" and I still hadn't been. In the end Venice did not disappoint, but that discretionary 25p would never change in value over the next three decades of my ordering Venizianas. Then, last weekend, I went to the Pizza Express in Paddington basin and found out it was no longer on the menu. I asked why. Apparently Pizza Express no longer has the necesary sultanas. I blame Brexit. How are we going to pay for that spaceship now?

My Gruelling Journey To Find A Good George Harrison Music Video

  Here's what happened: My brain had gone from thinking about The Lady From Shanghai to remembering the existence of Shanghai Surprise – that Madonna and Sean Penn film nobody saw – so I decided to look up a trailer for it, and found out that George Harrison the Beatle had written the film's score and that there was a music video for it, so I decided to start watching that, and I say start watching because it was... well, it was subtitled for a start, so I can give you a taste:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 It was here, just as Harrison sang "hot for me like tofu" that I paused the video to check how much more was left. Guess...

 

 

 Three minutes. 

 I'd already watched two. 

 This was a five minute long song. My sweet lord. Isn't it a pity? I'm not going to post the whole thing but if you want you can find it here. (There is one good bit where Vicki Brown sings "You must be crazy. And you got no money. And you're a liar." I like that lyric.) Anyway, next to that video was a thumbnail for something called Crackerbox Palace courtesy of George Harrison's own youtube channel...

 

(Does anyone know who owns Dummy Princess Margaret these days – not that I fancy her?) 

 

 I'd never heard of Crackerbox Palace, and it turns out I don't really know Harrison's solo stuff as well as I thought, so I decided to check the channel out, beginning with this sketchy, star-studded (not filled, just studded) phantasmagoria... 

 

 

 

 I'd assumed any video would come as a relief after Shanghai Surprise, but uninterrupted peace did not descend upon me as I watched this. I definitely wanted to share it though: It's shorter than Magical Mystery Tour, and grittier than Zardoz. And doesn't George smile like David Byrne? But now I wanted to find a video I could genuinely love, I wanted that peace. (Why not just listen to the songs, Simon? Shush.) 

 So, next up I watched the video to This Song which had a similarly Carollian and unironed look, but was set in a courtroom, here, and I began to be reminded of early Madness videos, which made me realise what I'd been missing: fun. I wasn't sharing the fun. 

 Next up... Of course! I'd completely forgotten about the seven-minute long video put out to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of My Sweet Lord!

 

 

 

 Rewatching it I remembered why. Yes, it has Fred Armisen in it. And John Hamm! And Nate's Natalie Palamides! (Oh man, I keep meaning to post about Nate.) But all these celebrities and clowns, they don't... they're just in it... they don't... It was like Crackerbox Palace all over again, except the video had nothing to with the song. Was this for charity? 

 It really looked like George Harrison's music videos and I were just never going to be friends. There is a happy ending however. A video had also been put out to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Isn't It A Pity? and that's what I watched next, and last. I love cartoons. Peace descended. Journey's end. Hot tofu forgot. This is really lovely. Thank you, George.

 

NEW, PARTIALLY BLOCKED SHOWREEL!

 

 Now with added EastEnders, which means that even though I used a clip from EastEnders' youtube channel the video is still "partially blocked", so that only certain countries can see it. I don't know which countries. Has it been blocked inside Britain? Outside Britain? Are you in one of those countries? That's a shame. Let me know.*

 For those of you who can't enjoy it, off the back of Orson Welles' Haitian Macbeth here's more scrupulously researched Vodou. As a kid I rarely experienced a fear of missing out, but I remember never being taken to a massive out-of-town Toys R Us, and never being given Atmosfear or Nightmare or whatever these board games were called. Whoever came up with SNL's David S. Pumpkins sketch clearly had though, so enjoy, and happy season of the skeleton!**

 

 

 

 *UPDATE: Okay. Blocked in the UK. If you still want to see it I think THIS is the link to the Spotlight upload. 

 ** And if you simply want more of Baron Samedi and a man rocking around in a stationary ghost train, THIS is the link to the full music video.

The "The Call to Adventure" Round

 

 

 In the end I decided this round could be a straight steal from Martin White and the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra's typically brilliant, self-directed music video for The Call To Adventure. It's the big opening number to their album "The Hero's Journey" on which I briefly appear as Richard Nixon, reading the speech written for if the moon landing had gone wrong. Identify then the following films from the title screens below – we always give the years now in the quiz – or, more fun still, press play on the video above and shout out what you know. Answers as ever will be in the comments.

1. (1968)

 

 

2. (1985)

 

3. (1959)

 

4. (1988)

 

 

5. (1990)

 

6. (1987)

 

 

7. (1958)

 

8. (1993)

 

9. (1977)

 

10. (1984)

But-Who-Ever-Heard-of-a-"Radio-Star"-Anyway Round

 

Possibly the most Music Video-y Music Video ever.

(Ugh! Letterboxing! Ugh!)

 

 Welcome to this week's fortnightly quiz! That is correct, I am still pretending not to be a week behind on my posts. As a gang we decided this Friday's (last Friday's) rounds should all be television-based, but at the last minute I decided to abandon my "What connects these nine shows whose stars all died this year?" idea as a bit too much of a buzzkill, so here instead are ten images from classic music videos, but can you match them to the artist? The artists are Aphex Twin, Bjork, Blind Melon, Cardi B, the Chemical Brothers, Peter Gabriel, Michael Jackson, Nirvana, Radiohead, and the Wu-Tang Clan, one of whom I had to look up and are only included because of just how great their video is. Instead of posting the answers in the comments as usual, I'll link to the videos themselves just beneath the image. So enjoy. And rockety roo!

1.

Answer.

 2.

 

Answer.

3.

 Answer.

 

4.

Answer.

 5.

Answer.

 

6. 

Answer.

 

7.

 Answer.

 

8.

Answer.

 9.

Answer.

 

10.

Answer.

 

 And for a bonus point, name this band:

 

Answer... Okay, the word Answer looks really weird to me now.

Tight Lipped of Troy

 Helen, whose abduction famously precipitated the Trojan War, was one of two daughters born to the mortal Leda after Zeus came onto her in the form of a swan, a heritage subtly alluded to by the feathers round Helen's neck in the above still from Troy: Fall of a City, and less subtly alluded to in this illustration from Larry Gonick's far less trashy Cartoon History of the Universe:

 

 

 One thing I didn't know about Helen though, until I read the Odyssey, was that she had known all along about the Greeks' plans to conquer her adopted city with an army hidden in a huge wooden horse. According to her account to Odysseus' son Telemachus a decade later, she had bumped into Odysseus when he sneaked into Troy disguised as a beggar, immediately recognised him, gave him a bath and then, somehow, managed to get him to tell her the whole plan. But then she let him go and didn't tell anyone because she was sick of this now ten-year-long siege and just wanted to be taken back to Greece. Wait, I thought, why had I not heard his before? Was this the normal story? If this was the case, why didn't Helen just sneak out of Troy with Odysseus and end the war there? Happily I was able to ask Natalie Haynes all this, and here is Natalie's reply:

 "Ten points for reading the Odyssey, but you lose a point for thinking there is any such thing as the normal story. So, net gain: nine points... The version of Helen in the Odyssey does say/do that (there is a much madder bit, at least to my eyes, in some versions where, when the Trojan Horse is found and the Greek soldiers are suspected of being inside, Helen does a sort of Mike Yarwood thing and impersonates the voices of the wives of the Greeks. She's so convincing she reduces several horse occupants to tears... HOW MAD IS THAT?) I think the important thing to bear in mind with Helen is that you can't necessarily believe what she says – I think she probably did want to go back to Greece, but the insult of her kidnap/abduction/adultery wouldn't be removed if she just snuck off with Odysseus – the Greeks would still want revenge on Paris and they'd still want to loot Troy, which is the only reason a lot of them are there... So she might as well wait it out in the city than in the Greek camp. But that's just my reading... Also, Homer's Helen is a real plaything of the gods, esp Aphrodite, so she may not have had the option of bailing with Odysseus – Aphrodite threatens her quite pointedly in Iliad 3, when she says she's not that into Paris anymore..."

 So there you go! I now need to find out exactly what Helen did that made Odysseus talk. Might it have been her Mike Yarwood bit? If you have any mythology-based questions of your own, you can ask Natalie here.

 

 

 How many things can YOU name that have nothing to do with either horses or Troy?

Perhaps you'll see them in this video.

Love and Maths and Mess (I know you've all seen Ok Go, but let's watch more Ok Go)

 Now let's have something wonderful and lots of it. In the following talk, Damian Kulash presents the beautiful calculation that an Ok Go video composed of a hundred and thirty interactions, each with a ninety percent probability of going right first time, still has only a one-in-ten-thousand chance of being successfully filmed in a single take...

 With that in mind, let's watch some of the band's best takes, opening with the video that closed the talk and whose slow-motion aesthetic means it had to be filmed in five seconds (and here's how):

 Since the slow-mo rabbit hole's adjacent to the Zero-G, here's the band hitting their marks in a cosmonaut's vomit comet (and here's record of their last day of filming):

 And speaking of hitting their marks, here's some fun with parralax (and a lot of quick changes):

 And here, far more simply, are the elegant workings of the WTF? video from the band's dollar store days: 

 All of which makes the video that first made the band famous look now a bit like the Lumières' film of the Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, but it serves them right for getting even better.

"Thank you sir from 6 to God" - The Sound of the Summer with Auto-Generated Subtitles, plus Auto-Translation

 Four no-budget one-man productions of Shakespeare is all well and good, but nothing I make this year's going to top Je Suis Mermaid, so I thought I'd put that on youtube too, and am indebted to those who told me to check out the channel's auto-generated closed captions. (At least it got that I was speaking French). Here:

[Musique] À
Je suis ma m. J'habite à la merde. J'ai [Musique]
Laissé le temps au top. Je suis dans la merde.
À nous maintenant de six: Qu'est ce que c'est que tu fais aujourd'hui
À Cannes? De nos francs, dix marocain poisson à totino médecine gland.
Je suis ma m. J'habite à la mer.
Hays s'élève á tizi disquaire day one.
Approcher sakuma cheveaux gris mat à lieu à Kiev.
Merci Monsieur merci Monsieur mais il fait aussi fonction.
Merci Monsieur de six à dieu, c'est la mer et le
cadeau dinars mais Séguinaud lance
Marie vêtus de blanc. Merci monsieur [Musique]
Si ça dure [Musique]
Remercier monsieur vers ma chère.
Voilá merci monsieur français à dieu. [Musique]

 And for those who don't speak French, youtube also of course provide an auto-translation service:

[Music] At
I am my m. I live in shit. I have [Music]
Time left on top. I'm in shit.
To us now from six: What is it that you do today in Cannes?
Of our ten francs, Moroccan fish with totino medicine acorn.
I am my m. I live at the sea.
Hays amount to tizi record store day one.
Approach his mat gray hair sakuma takes place in Kiev.
Thank you sir thank you sir but it also works.
Thank you sir from 6 to God, it's the sea and the dinars gift
but séginuad launches
Marie dressed in white. Thank you sir [Music]
If it lasts [Music]
Thank you sir towards my dear.
Here is thank you French mister to God. [Music.]

Apparently Seginaud was a French cyclist. Obviously I love this.

Sometimes this blog will just be something like "Have you seen Crosseyed and Painless?"

 I first saw this video on Talking Heads' VHS compilation Storytelling Giant and I'm pretty sure I stopped sitting out dances soon after. Voluntarily walking onto a dancefloor and moving on the spot had never been something I'd associated with myself before, it seemed too serious and difficult, like sport. I'm not really sure what these dancers were doing that felt so different, but I loved the undercover melodrama of it, the Tex Averish sneakiness, and although I couldn't copy the moves I could happily overact to an improvised internal monlogue in time with some music, which is what I began doing after seeing this, and have been doing ever since. It's choreographed by Toni Basil.

 And like Toni, I've still got it.

 P.S. Full Shakespeare is still happening, but other than a link in my profile and maybe a weekly round-up I'm going to start letting the blog, youtube and instagram accounts do their own thing a bit more from now on. I'll still plug stuff here, I just don't want to get tunnel vision, and I want to let my eyes dart. So today's video is still uploading, but Sunday's can be watched here (controversially The Taming of the Shrew starts a hole act earlier than Act One). I hope like Ms. Basil you're all using it and not losing it out there.

But Obviously This Will Always Be The Greatest Celebrities-in-Isolation Beatles Cover Of All Time

 Hey, do you remember Gearge Wendt and Peter Falk were also in the Ghostbusters video? A number of surprising people turned up in that, but obviously nowhere near as many as turn up in this promo for Gylne Tider, God bless it forever. And God bless Roger Moore's impression of the virgin Mary. And of course God bless the guys who made all this happen: Stein...ay, Byvind and... Something-gar? I can't read it, sorry. Anyway, thank you guys. (And boy, the pipes on Larry Drake!) No Defoe today, because that's all finished, just this.

BAD BUG

 I have started a tip jar! Simply as information rather than a call to action, this is what it looks like:

 

 

 Literally a rattling cup. That's now up permanently on the profile on the right. Some people have already brilliantly "bought me a coffee", several coffees in fact, and I don't know if it's a bug or a feature of the site's terminology that the most instinctive way for me to say thank you to those people is to "buy them a coffee" back. But thank you, them, or you! Speaking of Bugs: the best thing about claiming online that something is the worst music video ever made is, in all sincerity, being corrected. F*c*book was a joy to wake up to today - Joel Morris started it, as he starts so much that is fun - and I thought I'd share some of these goodies with you now. I was too keen yesterday to lay the entire blame for Steam's rottenness on CGI because its ideas were also irredeemaby seedy, but there's no such contamination in Joel's first contribution. Rush's Time Stands Still is pure live footage doctored to absolute bollocks for three and a half minutes, at which point the video doesn't stop, we just get our first effect that doesn't look like a mistake...

 Far calmer is Yes' Leave It - which is possibly short for "Yes I know it's upside down but it creates tension, leave it" - described by Joel as "a similar video where hard working technicians are packing ice round the rendering towers to stop them burning down into the earth’s core"...

 Good song though! So thanks be to Jon Dryden Taylor for submitting a terrible song, this one from "the artist I insist on referring to as Zeppo Jackson" (Jon's words, although I reckon Rebbie might be the new Zeppo. Gummo even? I know Gummo Marx never got in front of a camera, but still.) What's hotter than a centipede metaphor? A "hot centipede" metaphor obviously...

 What a terrible museum. By this point Joel had started a new thread of "all those transparent attempts to have The Same Hit Again" and it was there I found this contribution from Will Maclean: Just For Money by Paul Hardcastle, starring Bob Hoskins and Laurence Olivier. Having never believed in the existence of any such thing as "a soul", I am at a loss to explain what it was I felt torn from me upon watching this video. All I can say is something is now gone for ever. But enjoy!

 And finally, here is today's Defoe, in which our travellers also receive some charity and Richard the carpenter rustles everyone up their own two-storey house, internet café and monorail.

You have forgotten how bad the video to "Steam" was, I guarantee it.

 So...

This is not the video to "Steam".

  Stephen R. Johnson's video for Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer is famously ground-breaking. It teamed the Brothers Quay with Nick Park, and seemed an impossible act to follow. But their next collaboration, Big Time, was even better, and made the Sledgehammer video look, if anything, a little one-note. At least, that's what I think, but maybe I just like songs about lonely supervillains (and it breaks my heart that I can't find anything higher definition)...

Hi there! This is also not the video to "Steam".

 Stephen R. Johnson made three videos for Peter Gabriel in total, and by the release of Steam he'd clearly decided to move on from puppetry, stop motion animation, practical effects and the like, and embrace the new technonology... CGI.... motion capture. But some ground is perhaps better left unbroken. I can't honestly tell if the ideas in this video are actually any worse than what Johnson had put on screen previously, but still, more than anything that has ever been made – more than even the Star Wars prequels – it provides blinding, petrifying evidence of the hitherto unachievable stupidity of a thing that, thanks to CGI, could now be made without anyone having to work out how. 

 Readers, this is the video to "Steam". It might be the worst video ever made. Stand back:

 Forgive me, Peter.

 And feel free to tell me your favourite bits in the comments below. Here's today's Defoe, a tale containing both craft and craftiness: 

CERRONE Virus, More Like!

 Welcome to my Space Disco! I've been looking for an excuse to post the video to Supernature up here for ages, so a world-wide pandemic that sounds a bit like the name of the artist seems as good an excuse as any. Every cloud... Cerrone is actually the name of the drummer, which you'll glean when you watch this video.

 But why stop with just the one video? Jean-Marc Cerrone has a whole youtube channel! Here then is another floor-filler, featuring a more traditional promo that shows us the real Cerrone. Look at him go!

 In Call Me Tonight we see the orginal daft punk get out from behind his drums and invent a brand new dance using just his knees. Jean-Marc really uses the space here. Very "Jamiroquai".

 Then there's Je Suis Music, (of course there is), its lyrics a terrifying litany from a civilisation in freefall, but whose video takes a quite different approach to the subject than the similarly apocalyptic Supernature, although both feature limousines:

 And finally, from the eighties, Cerrone's still on his apocalyptic kick, but has lost the moustache and is now just throwing every idea he can into the mix. See how many you can spot! Also, bums.

That's it. Remember to keep dancing, gang!

Len Lye Anticipates the Music Video and Mel Brooks Anticipates Beavis and Butt-Head.

 A Tennis Court A Mile Long. 
(Apologies this isn't the whole thing. It keeps getting taken down.)

 With certain incredibly obvious exceptions, I love the promise of the nineteen-thirties. That first decade of talking pictures feels ever so slightly like the internet in the noughties pre-twitter, a mixing bowl of idea-sharing, slang-altering, new-sounding voices before factional coalescing weaponised the medium. And even after that, like the internet more recently, the propaganda could be fun too. I walked in on some Len Lye shorts at the Tate Britain recently, completely forgotting that these fore-runners of the music video would turn out to be adverts for the General Post Office. Without that extraordinarily incongruous voice-over at the end, I'd be surprised if most people coming new to them could guess when these films had been made.

 I've no idea how contemporary film audiences behaved to Rupert Doone busting these moves back in 1936, but we have Mel Brooks to thank for giving us a glimpse of how audiences reacted thirty years later (there are some excellent lines in this):

"See? Even if they don't wanna, they get dirty."

EXCITING SPACE ADVENTURE 23 (with musical guest Howard Jones!)

 Each of them held a clicker. They could count down from nine thousand in perfect unison without looking, but they liked the noise the clickers made. "Fiiiive." Click. Entirely still, their green eyes fixed on the stripey horizon. Countdown nearly done. "Fooooour". Click. No horizons more stripey than the unmatched horizons of Zuu-cakeymoon. No plains more bare. "Threee." Louder now their high voices. Click. "TWOOOO!" No matter how much they puffed out their chests, their voices were just high. Click! "ONE!" Click! And as one, they turned clockwise: "COOOOOOMINNNNNG! READY OR N-...... Tt."

Illustration by Bruce Pennington.

Max Cooper's Further Globules

 I really recommend Max Cooper's youtube channel. I'd never heard of his music before, but the videos to it are glorious, identifiable not by any single director or trademark avatar, but by unifying scientific ideas and principle. (I've no idea how the commissioning works.) Here are three of the most cellular, honouring yesterday's xenobot. Ideally, they should be viewed on as big a screen as possible to appreciate their detail and scale, but you could also just press play on all of these suckers simultaneously and have yourself a ball.

Order From Chaos directed by Maxime Causeret

Seething directed by Andy Lomas

Let There Be directed by Thomas Vanz

"Simple laws can give rise to unexpected outcomes."