2013 – Page 17 – 5000 Ways to Love You

Che Fu “Misty Frequencies”

In the beginning there was Che Fu’s head. It pops up in a black void, before it’s suddenly revealed that Che and the nine members of his band are standing atop a strange brown platform. They discover that, oddly enough, they all have cables trailing from their backs and they can make musical sounds from their mouths. No one seems alarmed by this situation, and they excitedly plug their biocables into jacks.

Plugged in, the song starts with the sound graphing itself on the wall below the platform. Such is the power of the song that even unplugging it keeps the visual tricks going, with frequency graphics bouncing around the posse’s shirts.

The location is slowly revealing itself to be like a real-life video game, though with no apparent challenges, enemy to fight or princess to save. The gang throw Tetris blocks off the wall, then the wall turns into a Mario-inspired universe, with mushrooms and coins flying around. A flower pot appears and – obviously – Che plugs a cable into it. This transports the group to a real-life outdoor scene, some proper New Zealand bush.

The guys groove on, and are visited by one of the giant mushrooms from the earlier location. There’s no sign of Princess Peach. The video ends with the bush scene falling away in Tetris-like pieces, suggesting it’s no more real than the video game location.

The video feels like Che Fu, at the top of his game, making the music video he wants to make – and it was nominated for Best Video at the 2003 New Zealand Music Awards. It’s him and his mates reliving an ultimate childhood fantasy of exploring a video game for real. And maybe that’s the videos weakness – it feels a bit too much of “Hey, check out this cool shizz!” with little more to it. Unless I’ve overlooked a metaphorical commentary on the nature of the music industry.

Best bit: the pounamu piece smashing the Tetris blocks.

Director: Che Fu
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… it’s great when you’re straight.

Eye TV “Worse For Wear”

It’s Eye TV’s final NZ On Air-funded video. They had 15 funded videos, which puts them on par with Garageland and Tadpole. It’s kind of nice that their final video was directed by Greg Page, whose music-video-directing career developed alongside Eye TV’s music career.

Greg previously directed “One Day Ahead” for the band, a stylish performance-based video. He takes a different tack with “Worse For Wear” going back to his roots in animation. He’d previously done claymation music videos (Shihad’s “Yr Head is a Rock”, Throw’s “Honeyblonde”), but those were done with a dash of humour.

“Worse For Wear” has the darker side of Greg’s creative vision, previously seen in the gothic mad-scientistic story in Throw’s “All Different Things”. It tells the story of a lowly cleaner (who works for the Worse For Wear cleaning company). In fact, with a title card reading “The Cleaner”, the narrative-heavy music video also effectively works as a short film.

It’s a scribbly grey world, with the animation done as simple black pen drawings on cardboard cut-outs, with slightly more detailed cityscapes and backgrounds. Wielding his mop like a paintbrush, Clive the cleaner gets to work on the murky grey walls, but they seem to dirty themselves almost as quickly as he can clean them.

Finally he gets the wall clean and it glistens with pristine whiteness. But now that everything is clean, what will Clive do for work? He cries dark grey tears and the teardrops plop on the floor and soon turn everything else grey. “All is well” appears on the wall. Clive leaves, content in the knowledge that there’ll be more work for him tomorrow.

“Worse For Wear” is a sweet, uplifting song but the lyrics are specifically a man addressing a messed-up woman. The video sticks with the same theme but moves it to the far more interesting scenario of Clive the cleaner and his tears of eternal employment.

Best bit: Clive’s work ID card – his ticket to happiness.

Next… bonus power round.

En Masse “Break My Heart”

The En Masse story goes a little something like this. A couple of Christchurch businessmen noticed the success of overseas boybands and their successful managers. They fancied themselves to be the Lou Perlmans of the South Pacific so they put together a boyband called En Masse.

There’s an amazing promo video of the group, that seems to have been created for potential investors, rather than music media. We meet Whaaka, Reuben, Howie, Rychalo and Matt (as well as managers Brynley and Peter) and hear of their big dreams for the future. “We truly believe that we’ve got something unique here,” enthuses Brynley. “Quincey Jones said the next big thing is going to be Polynesian music,” asserts Peter, seemingly oblivious to the existence and successes of Te Vaka and Moana and the Moahunters on the world music circuit and the need for such a group to have more than just Polynesian members.

The group also say they want to “portray high-class music with a high-class look.” And “we wanna wear suits and look real styley when we get up there and perform.” So, a classy New Zealand boyband aiming for global success. What could go wrong? Hey, it kind of worked for Purest Form.

The video begins with the boys dressed in nice suits (a quality product; not street) in the gardens of a palatial home. While they hang out with the topiary, a pretty blond woman arrives home. She doesn’t notice the boyband on her front porch, and after they suddenly disappear, I can only conclude that they are ghosts.

The boys spend a lot of time performing the song in the house’s living room. But they’re very stiff and awkward. They can’t really dance and they all have different performance styles – some are highly expressive and camp, others are understated.

For a group with ambitions of having a high-class look, the video actually looks really cheap, like they’ve just showed up at this house wearing fancy suits, set up a tripod and swayed around in front of the camera for a bit.

Even though the house appears to be very large and posh, its blandly decorated, so anything other than a wide shot looks like the band are just standing in front of a blank, anonymous wall.

The heartbreaking conclusion of the video sees their dream girl going off on a hot date with a middle-aged businessman in a fancy car. If that’s the kind of guy she’s into, how can these young guys possibly compete?

It’s like a metaphor for En Masse’s career. They showed up on the doorstep of the music industry with their fancy suits, but audiences weren’t having it. The New Zealand public wanted to drive off with cool dudes like Craig David, Afroman and Uncle Kracker.

En Masse had funding for a second video in February 2002, but the follow-up single and video “Crazy Baby” never eventuated. Boybands weren’t cool anymore. It wasn’t until 2012 that a manufactured New Zealand non-comedy boy band actually made it to the top of the charts, with Titanium’s #1 single “Come on Home”. And in the world of the X Factor, Moorhouse (also from Christchurch) are making the girls scream – something the ordinary boys of En Masse never quite managed.

Best bit: the creepy family portraits in the billiard room.

Director: Paul Sparkes

Next… a two dimensional farewell.

Damien Binder “Turn Me Round”

There are plenty of music videos that are set in classrooms, but the learning facility of “Turn Me Around” is delightfully surreal. Damien enters a classrom where all the students are men his age, all neatly dressed in the same suit.

Teaching the class is a young woman, who has drawn some diagrams on the blackboard that look like a cross between American football play diagrams and dance step diagrams, only weirder. She’s a suitably prim-looking teacher, so part of me expects the video to get all Van Halen and have the teacher let down her hair and start dancing in her undies. But no. It’s very well behaved.

Damien joins the class and soon assimilates in this strange school. The teacher rubs a stick all over Damien’s suit (?) and the men do a tapping and listening thing with dinner forks, the same thing you’d normally do with a tuning fork. Damien struggles with this task. He just can’t get that tap-and-listen technique right.

There’s also a bit of biffo, with Damien and one of this classmates engaging in some civilised fisticuffs. Finally he’s ready to graduate. The classmates and teacher disappear and Damien is left sitting alone, repeatedly singing “I’m ready now,” like someone who’s having trouble ordering a taxi with a voice-reconigition phone system.

Filmed in such murky colours that it almost looks black and white, the video has a stylish, slightly surreal feeling, this strange school of cutlery, suits and fists.

Best bit: the artful fanning of spoons.

Director: Jonathan King

Next… a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

Satellite Spies “It Must Be Love”

Satellite Spies had one good song – their 1985 hit “Destiny in Motion”. But it turns out their “It Must Be Love” was an ever bigger hit. While the video funding was given in 1992, the single was first released in 1994, then re-released in 1999, where it peaked at #9 and hung around the charts for almost five months. Take that, synthpop Spies!

The Satellite Spies of the “It Must Be Love” era were led by Deane Sutherland, one half of the original Spies. There’s been a lot of drama between Sutherland and the other original member Mark Loveys, resulting in the great Satellite Spies Wikipedia edit war of ’12, summarised over at Public Address.

But back to 1992. The synthpop is gone. “It Must Be Love” is a middle-of-the-road pop number. Everyone in the band has mullets – thick, lustrous fluffy mullets. We see the band playing at night, outside in a spooky location, with liberal use of smoke machine. Adding to the spooky is a vampire. He’s of the traditional Dracula variety – no Twilight glitter here – and he’s chasing after a dusky maiden.

Lead singer Deane seems to never blink in the video, giving him an eerie zombie-like appearance. Eventually ol’ Vlad sinks his teeth into the girl, vampirising her. She in turn sneaks up behind Deane and bits his neck, with his mullet conveniently swept to one side. Why, it’s almost as if he wanted to be bitten. But maybe he’s poisoned her with his pop zombie juice. I hope the group’s next video “Please Never Leave” explores this.

Best bit: Deane Sutherland’s cross earring, another remnant of the “Destiny in Motion” era Spies.

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… a lesson to be learned.

World Gone Wild “Touch”

Researching World Gone Wild got me sucked right down a google hole while finding out about the career of Stanley Manthyng, one half of the goth-pop duo. Firstly: best name ever. Since the end of World Gone Wild he’s gone on to other projects, including co-writing four songs for Double J and Twice the T. He also formed his own group, dance-pop duo Manthyng (again, best name ever). If you’re going to watch one Manthyng video, I recommend the official “Nek Minute” song, with vocals by Levi Hawken himself and a cameo from MC OJ and Rhythm Slave. It’s actually quite good, and a far better catchphrase song than Suzanne Paul’s “Blue Monkey”.

Anyway, back to World Gone Wild. Mr Manthyng and co-goth Michael Caulfield had modest hits with “Shy Shy Jenny” and “Standback” in the early ’90s. “Touch” didn’t chart but the group took advantage of the brand-new music video funding scheme.

The video starts with a man furiously running through the back streets of downtown Auckland, taking care only to run town the coolest looking lanes. We then find the band in a studio, lit with deep shadows. Lightbulbs dangle dramatically.

Both the song and the video feel like a remnant of the ’80s, about to be washed away by the tsunami of grunge. But the chorus, with its gravelly cry of “touch me and set me free!” has a glorious creepy fun.

The video concludes with the running man still running, sprinting past graffiti-covered buildings that are probably now hip boutiques. Maybe this is the horrific end result of being touched and set free.

Best bit: the man’s panicked sprint up the Exchange Lane spiral stairs.

Director: Tony Johns

Next… spies, lies and vampi(r)es.

Total Magenta “Kamikaze”

The YouTube description for this video notes, “I don’t really know anything about them, just found it on an old VHS tape.” That’s what I like to see. Get those old videos online, especially if they seem obscure.

Total Magenta were an Auckland four-piece, at the centre of which was blonde bombshell Lorna Storm, a “frontal weapon”, claims their Amplifier bio. They sound a bit like the Sneaker Pimps, with chopped up guitar and beat mixed with fragile vocals.

In the video Lorna plays a hip young woman living in a rundown house with a large, old-fashioned working-class family. She refuses to help pregnant Mum look after her six younger brothers and sisters, and instead packs her bag and hustles away, having a Maria Von Trapp moment on a hillside.

Free at last, she is then found playing with her band. Lorna has a guitar, but we hardly see her play it. Instead the camera mainly stays on her face and occasionally her handsome band.

The video shows this young woman running away from home (and flinging away her suitcase), but I can’t help but wonder what happens next. Does she show up at band rehearsal all, “Hey guys, does anyone has a couch I could crash on for a few days…?”

This was the only NZ On Air video funding that Total Magenta had. They quickly came and went, with Lorna Storm left doing some telly in the mid ’00s. But this video captures the band doing some good weirdness, like a less commercial version of the videos Goldenhorse ended up making.

Best bit: the family dog, who also runs away.

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… from the church to the palace.

The Ross Brothers “Yippie Ki Yay”

Sometimes the world of NZ On Air-funded music videos throws in some real gems. Presenting the Ross Brothers, a high school band from Oamaru. Their big break was from winning a song competition for a national Coke ad campaign, and soon after came a profile on the Holmes show. This got them the attention of Universal, and soon enough they had some NZ On Air funding to record their single and make a video.

“Yippie Ki Yay” is about Hollywood, with charmingly adolescent lyrics. As one of the brothers explained on the Holmes interview, “It’s kind of questioning Hollywood, and if it’s really all its cracked up to be.” But in this video the elegant Edwardian streets of Oamaru stand in for Hollywood.

The video centres around a red carpet event. We see Oamaru’s most glamorous A-listers piling out of fancy cars and making their way through hoardes of screaming fans into an old bank building. This is what they did for fun in Oamaru before the whole steampunk thing happened.

While all this is going on we find the Ross Brothers playing in an old building. They’re no Evermore. Lead singer Dylan sings with a strong American accent, putting a lot of effort into doing the gravelly grunge voice that was trendy in the ’90s. It’s odd hearing him sing “nice to see you, to see you nice” – the catchphrase of English variety king Bruce Forsyth – in that voice. The song also namechecks another Bruce (Willis) as well as Jim Carey, and is packed full of cinematic references.

The crowd and the A-listers are drawn to this young band of non-celebs, and abandon the red carpet to rock out with the boys. A tardy starlet, furious at the empty red carpet, storms in and scowls at the band who have stolen her thunder. She’s learning the hard way that being world famous in Oamaru is not all it’s cracked up to be.

I really like that this video exists. The Ross Brothers don’t seem to have done anything after “Yippie Ki Yay” – not even as individuals. But their short pop career was worth it for this video. Oamaru doesn’t usually feature in music video, especially not in ones where it seems like the whole town has been involved.

Best bit: the 13-year-old drummer giving the gladeye to a glamorous A-lister lady.

Also: Here’s the Holmes profile from 2000, and there’s a video for the demo version of the song made from the Holmes footage.

Director: Paul Sparkes

Next… she’s leaving home.

The D4 “Party”

After three missing videos, finally the D4 turn up with “Party” a song about partying. By this stage the group had a little chart success in the UK (something they never experienced in New Zealand) and were well regarded as part of the cool new rock ‘n’ roll scene that was shaking up the early ’00s. The Face magazine featured the band in their “40 messed up new bands” special, noting the group’s upcoming “rev-your-bike-up new single” called “Party”.

For a song about partying, the Greg Page-directed video stays well clear of any attempt to create a party scene. It’s really hard to do in a music video, mainly because it’s very hard to get a bunch of people to look like they’re having a really amazing time for hours on end, especially when they’re not getting paid.

Instead the band can be found playing inside an empty building. The rhythm section are in a back room, while Jimmy and Dion rock out next door. The video is black and white and red, something that now gets classed as a lame digital trick, but in the early ’00s is was kind of amazing and cool. The red wall, red lanterns and a red-shirt stand out amid the black and white.

The camera is like a drunken partygoer. It seems to stagger around, fading in and out of focus. It’s like a guy who’s showed up to his mates’ band practice and with nothing better to do, he’s just drunk a whole lot of beers until the urge to do some daggy dancing hits.

It’s a very basic video, but it works, making good use of the simple set up. The D4 comes across looking like cool musicians, hot guys, and probably quite fun to get on the piss with. No wonder they took over the world for a few months in the early 2000s.

Best bit: the drum breaks. Yes.

Director: Greg Page
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… a big night out in Oamaru.

Te Vaka “Pate Pate”

“Pate Pate” is an ode to having a good time dancing to the sweet rhythms of the pate log drum. Sung in Tokelauan (a rarity in the world of NZ On Air video funding), it’s an upbeat and highly danceable number. According to Wikipedia, the song was “number one in the South Pacific”, but, uh, citation required.

The video is on-the-road footage of Te Vaka touring Europe. There are even some shots of a WOMAD gig, so I’d guess this is life on the world-music circuit.

The group have made good use of their travels, fitting in a lot of sightseeing (and video making) in their downtime. We see them wobbling in comedy-size clogs in Amsterdam, checking out the sights in Glasgow, doing the tourist thing in Piccadilly Circus, strutting in front of the Eiffel tower, enjoying sunny European canals and dancing wearing a coconut bra.

And we also see them gigging, playing to large festival audiences. Everyone’s up and dancing to this exciting musical group from the other side of the world.

Phil Collins set the bar pretty high with his video for “Take Me Home”, shot in different locations around the world as he was touring. Te Vaka obviously have a much lower budget than ol’ Phil, and their video has more excitement to it. Rather than making a deep statement about travel, the video captures the thrill of a band who are touring Europe. Seeing the two Te Vaka girls dancing in front of Madame Tussauds, it has a sense of, “Can you believe it? We’re actually in London! This is awesome!”

Best bit: the alarming early shot of a festival performer with large fake boobs.

The video can’t be embedded, so head over to YouTube to watch it.

Director: Julie Foa’i
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… red light special.