The new edition of AirplayUK features another selection of the most creative and entertaining music videos produced in Britain over the past few months. These are for a combination of new artists, up-and-coming bands, and established acts that all have new material released in the UK recently.
As with the previous three programmes, this edition of AirplayUK also includes a director profile, in this case a music video director who has made a significant contribution to music video creativity in the UK over a considerable period. Rupert Jones has directed both acclaimed videos, and short films for more than a decade, and he tells us about his work.
But we begin AirplayUK 04 with a selection of new work from several promising young directors, starting with the new video from popular Sunderland band The Futureheads. Although the director James Appleton is a relative beginner as a video-maker, The Beginning Of The Twist is a big technical achievement. It’s a video within a video, and something of an in-joke on video-making itself: the band are seen performing on a film set, but also becoming stuck within the director’s storyboards, and then put in a series of exciting locations through the magic of green-screen.
By contrast, the next video, for the veteran Manchester outfit Elbow, has a dramatic and cinematic context. In this well-crafted piece of filmmaking directed by Dan Sully, Elbow perform the song Grounds For Divorce as the house band in a down-at-heel bar where the simmering tensions threaten to spill over into violence.
Then comes the Mystery Jets’ Young Love, directed by James Copeman, another promising new director and another performance with a difference. The band are lying flat out on the studio floor – they are shot from above – but still move around courtesy of a mysterious contraption underneath them, and some completely visible hidden helpers. Teenage folk singer Laura Marling – with whom James has made a couple of excellent low budget videos for her solo career – also joins the party halfway through.
That is followed by the latest video for Roisin Murphy, the singer formerly with successful band Moloko, now pursuing a solo career as a disco diva. Directed by London-based Canadian director Jaron Albertin, the video for You Know Me Better features Roisin as a woman who assumes several different personas and is seemingly unsure of her real identity. Furthermore the video, which was inspired by the work of American photographer/artist Cindy Sherman, permits the singer to indulge her love of high fashion by wearing a range of intriguing outfits.
Finally, in our first half of new videos we have the London rapper Example, and the story of his big night out with his friends, as directed by Henry Scholfield, who is another new director finding recognition after making several excellent low budget videos, including at least three for Example. Like his others, this one is brimming with ideas, energy and humour.
We then take a break from the rundown of new work to present our Director Profile of Rupert Jones, a director who has made an eclectic range of work – sometimes dramatic, sometimes comedic and sometimes simply conceptual – since the mid-1990s.
Rupert has acting in the blood – his father Freddie and his brothers Toby and Casper are all actors. Having started out studying fine art Rupert also gravitated towards the performing arts, but as he explains in our interview with him – conducted on a rooftop in London’s Soho district – his strong interest in both writing and film led him towards directing.
He had an auspicious start, directing an acclaimed short film Triphony (starring his father Freddie) which brought him to the attention of UK record companies who began commissioning him to make videos for dance acts in the Nineties. His video for Fluke’s Absurd in particular – shown in full here – revealed his budding talent with comedic performance, which has been one of the strong features of his work ever since, for artists such as Gomez, Supernaturals, Cooper Temple Clause and The Streets.
The second video here features that talent for comedy, in this case it’s the low-budget manic variety of 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster’s Chicken – where the band play re-animated corpses. But the third also shows how, as he explains in the interview, a video can based on a single idea. In the beautifully constructed video for El Presidente’s 100 MPH it is the single idea of squares, and in particular square slide puzzles, which Rupert explores for all its worth.
Since working on a video for UK charity project Comic Relief, Rupert has gravitated towards television, recently directing the BBC comedy series The Life And Times Of Vivienne Vyle with top British comedienne Jennifer Saunders. He has also continued to make short films throughout his career – like The Sickie, a comedy starring his brother Toby.
His most recent short, made last year, is another charity project, this time for Live Earth – where he uses comedy again to make a serious point about recycling and the threat of climate change. It’s both funny and thought-provoking, so we are showing this film, Think, in full – even though it isn’t actually a video.
We finish the feature on Rupert Jones with his latest video for singer-songwriter Tom Baxter, which demonstrates his considerable filmmaking craft: it’s an object lesson of building a dramatic tension around a musical performance.
Then we return to the AirplayUK playlist with a new video from one of the UK’s most sought-after music videos directors. Saam Farahmand has recently worked with superstar Janet Jackson in the US, but he then directed this video for cult DJ outfit Hercules And Love Affair, featuring Antony Hegarty of Antony & the Johnsons on vocals. He has created an iconoclastic and suggestive interpretation of the ancient classical world, starring Jaime Winston – daughter of top British actor Ray Winstone.
Then it’s a riveting and well-shot performance, embellished with a highly impactful use of visual effects for the new band The Corrections by directing team Duckeye. That’s followed by the first video for new artist Santogold, directed by Nima Nourizadeh, another leading British music video director, who was profiled in our first programme. His surreal video for the young American singer is strongly influenced by the work of cult Sixties director Alejandro Jodorowsky.
The work of Corin Hardy has also appeared in a previous AirplayUK programme: his video for The Horrors She Is the New Thing was a powerful and gory affair created completely from animated drawings. By contrast Hardy’s video for British mellow-rock/pop outfit The Feeling is a well-crafted live action one shot, which features lead singer Dan Gillespie Sells as a Cosmonaut, about to launch into space in Sixties Soviet Union.
And finally, rounding off this episode of AirplayUK we celebrate a great British institution. In fact, rock band Kula Shaker recorded the song Drink Tea in commemoration of International Tea Drinking Day, late last year. But London-based animation team Model Robot have cheekily appropriated the image of great British author George Orwell to explain the joys of tea-drinking and employed an animation style reminiscent of another great British institution, Monty Python.
And that brings another programme of AirplayUK to a close.
AirplayUK 04 Tracklisting
1. The Futureheads - The Beginning Of The Twist
Director: James Appleton
Prod co: Grasshopper Films
Record co: Nul Recordings
2. Elbow - Grounds For Divorce
Director: Dan Sully
Prod co: Flynn Productions
Record co: Polydor
3. Mystery Jets (feat. Laura Marling) - Young Love
Director: James Copeman
Prod co: N/A
Record co: Atlantic Records
4. Roisin Murphy - You Know Me Better
Director: Jaron Albertin
Prod co: Rokkit
Record co: EMI
5. Example - Me And Mandy
Director: Henry Scholfield
Prod co: Partizan
Record co: All The Chat
Interview with RUPERT JONES
6. Fluke - Absurd
Record co: Virgin
7. 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster - Chicken
Record co: Island
8. El Presidente - 100 MPH
Record co: One Records/Sony BMG
9. Live Earth - “Think”
10. Tom Baxter - Tell Her Today
Record co: Charisma/Virgin
11. Hercules and Love Affair - Blind
Director: Saam Farahmand
Prod co: Partizan
Record co: EMI/DFA
12. The Corrections - Barcode
Director: Duckeye
Prod co: Rokkit
Record co: EMI
13. Santogold - L.E.S. Artistes
Director: Nima Nourizadeh
Prod co: Partizan
Record co: Atlantic Records
14. The Feeling - Without You
Director: Corin Hardy
Prod co: Academy Films
Record co: Island
15. Kula Shaker - Drink Tea
Director: Model Robot
Prod co: Model Robot
Record co: N/A
Please click here to read more about AirplayUK Reel 3.
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