Robyn – Page 87 – 5000 Ways to Love You

Head Like A Hole “Hootenanny”

HLAH knew how to make people dance. “Hootenanny” is a hootenanny, a boistrous rockstravaganza that got crowds moving. The video works with this energy, using footage of the band playing in various live situations.

There’s a reminder of Bands in the Square, the annual Wellington alternative rock series, sponsored by the much loved radio station Channel Z. It seems quite outrageous to see bands packing out the area between the town hall and the library. These days the Homegrown festival sprawls over most of the downtown waterfront area.

As well as the live footage, we also see the band mucking around in various situations – in guitar studio, jumping into a lake, teeing off, and in front of an old concrete building.

The pace of the video gets a little slack at times, missing opportunities to really kick arse with the music, but it fits right in with the crazy universe of HLAH.

Best bit: mini golf!

Director: Ian McCarroll
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… chatter rings.

D-Faction “Pride”

D-Faction is a group that I’ve discovered through 5000 Ways and every song of theirs delights me. “Pride” is a positive, uplifting song with a solid line-up. As the YouTube description notes, there’s Tony T and Maryanne on vocals, Ron La Praed of the Commodores on bass, Dave Talea doing some ragga rap, as well as Cook Island drummers.

The video places the band against overlapping tapa cloth backdrops. The band members are always seen individually, which might be a way to disguise the band not all being available on the same day for the video shoot.

After watching the Bressa Creeting Cake and Cicada videos get all conceptual and surreal, it’s really refreshing to watch a video that’s just about the band performing the song, looking like they’re enjoying themselves. It feels rather old-fashioned and conservative to say this, but sometimes it’s nice to see a video with no plot, no actors, just music.

Best bit: the little kid drummer. He’s having a good time.

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… it’s a hootenanny, y’all!

Cicada “Get Up”

Cicada’s third video is again directed by Paul Swadel, and continues with strong visuals and minimal involvement with the band.

A man wakes up. He is covered in tattoos. It’s not moko or like that dude in the Lady Gaga video. Rather it looks like he’s just had a bunch of stuff tattooed over the years.

As he slowly stretches, we catch glimpses of the band sneaking around behind him, crawling up the walls. Tattoo man gets dressed, putting on a business suit and tie. Whoa, he’s a businessman. Have your preconceived notions just been shattered?

We discover the band are lurking on tattoo man’s ceiling. Are they vampires, hiding ready to strike? Or are they his good morning wake-up band, bringing some motivational music? There’s probably an iPhone app that could take the place of a morning ceiling band.

Best bit: the tattoo man’s eyeball acting, with many dramatic sideways glances.

Director: Paul Swadel
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… pride goes before the soul.

Che Fu “Scene III”

After his previous collaboration with DLT, Che Fu is back with his first solo single, far removed from the funk pop of Supergroove. This time it’s a moody love song, with hints of Oriental tones and the odd sea shanty.

It’s late at night. Che is walking along Hobson Street, outside Wah Lee. Except I don’t think it’s meant to be grotty old Hobson Street, but rather an exotic Chinatown location.

Gazing through the window of this most interesting shop, he spies an attractive mixed-race girl. She bids her grandfather good night and heads off with her box of records, for she is a DJ. And so begins Che’s night of unrequited infatuation.

Directed by Alicia Williams, this is a very stylish video. We see Che in two solo locations. In one, he’s stressed like a cool magician, looking like he’s going to take us on a journey into the world of illusions. In the other, he’s wearing a pink Mandarin shirt, busting out some kung fu moves. After sharing the screen with six other dudes in his Supergroove days, it must have been very liberating for Che to have it all to himself.

Che also visits a nightclub, where he gazes across the room at the beautiful exotic DJing. He also is seen singing at a nightclub, while the woman gazes at him. We also catch a glimpse of the grandfather praying out the back, in a stock room surrounded by cartons of Red Bull, back when Red Bull was that weird drink that Asian grocers sold.

After such a strong narrative start, the video seems to end without a conclusion, unless the conclusion is that Che Fu dances and the exotic DJ looks exotic.

Best bit: Che Fu’s “aw shucks” expression after gramps catches him perving at his granddaughter.

Director: Alicia Williams
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… an alternative to a clock radio.

Bressa Creeting Cake “Papa People”

Bressa Creeting Cake knew how to make good crazy videos. We meet a young woman having a tearful conversation with her lover, a giant weta. Actually, not a giant weta as in the 10cm species of weta; this weta is as big as a man.

Mr Weta has ditched her and she is utterly heartbroken. She thinks back to the good times they spent together. Days at the beach, dining on lobster at a fancy restaurant. Oh, such wonderful times.

She figures the only way she can win back her insectoid lover is to become like him. So she heads off to her local mad scientist and is injected with a strange green liquid, which turns her into a human-weta hybrid. What weta wouldn’t want a piece of that, etc.

Is a happy reunion on the cards? No, it turns out the weta has actually been rooting a pig while a horse watches. What an arsehole. We don’t see the woman discover this, but – in human form – she wanders a strange room where the walls are covered with projections of maggots.

Over on NZ On Screen, Geoff Creeting is quoted as saying, “In the end I don’t think anyone really gets the story.” Well, the ending puzzles me a little, but as a whole, the video is like a surreal chapter from “He’s Just Not Into You”. There’s a valuable lesson in there about being yourself.

Best bit: the mad scientist enjoying a fish and chips meal before he starts on his new assignment.

Director: Steve Morrison
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… the mysteries of the Orient.

Cicada “Future Folds”

There are some very strange goings-on happening in some public toilets. Shot at the very photogenic loos at Hotel DeBrett, a man at the urinal turns to face the camera. He starts singing but his mouth appears to be a superimposed other mouth. It’s a bit like that weird Eskimo cartoon in Pulp Fiction with the real mouth on a cartoon, only in this video it’s all human.

If there’s another Tarantino influence it’s in the toilet setting. Like in “Reservoir Dogs”, a woman puts her hands under a hand dryer and dries them in a very slow, deliberate way.

Again directed by Paul Swadel, the video is mostly black and white, with dramatic lighting. The video is a lot more sedate than the more upbeat song, with lots of long, still shots. But the video captures the song’s tension. In this strange world inside a public toilet, with all the lingering glances, something is going to kick off.

Best bit: the old man who puts on a party wig.

Director: Paul Swadel
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… something spooky.

Shihad “La La Land”

It is the future. A lone cyber warrior roams the barren wastelands. She puts on her virtual reality helmet. Text flashed up on her cyber screen, “Serial port: SHIHAD”. She has accessed La La Land.

Hey, do you know what a serial port is? It’s a kind of plug on a computer. But obviously in this dystopian cyber future, a serial port is a virtual reality state where Shihad rock out.

Once the sci-fi intro is out of the way, most of the video is based around a live Shihad performance, featuring Jon’s new rock bob hair cut. The cyber warrior enjoys her virtual reality experience, losing her metal armour and blending in with the audience.

There’s also some dodgy goings on in the toilets, making the powerful statement that drugs = la la land = not kewl. Hollywood is also shown to be a la la land.

I know that the concept of virtual reality was quite cool in the ’90s, so this video probably seemed quite edgy (although the Dribbling Darts did it four years earlier). But now it’s just seems a bit silly and naive. It turns out that in the future people didn’t seen complex cyber helmets to experience Shihad live; they could do it on the bus using their phones.

Best bit: the brief glimpse of an Air New Zealand plane in Los Angeles. Go New Zealand!

Director: Kevin Spring
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… something strange in the toilets.

King Loser “Troubled Land”

“Troubled Loser” was Chris and Celia doing their best Lee and Nancy. Not so much a duet as a man and a woman who both had something to say.

The band are absent from the video. With one food firmly planted in the 1960s, the it instead follows a black-clad cowboy as he stumbles around a vast desert. Sometimes it seems like the hot desert heat has got the better of him, but other times he seems as staunch as ever. But perhaps he’s hallucinating that he’s back on the range.

The video was shot on the sand dunes at Te Henga / Bethells Beach. It doesn’t quite feel like the Wild West, but the wild west coast location gives it a charming lookalike feeling, like the sort of place that might be used in a low-budget Western.

By removing the band from the video and keeping the visuals stark and minimal, it puts the emphasis on the song, letting every squelch and snarl come through loud and clear.

Best bit: the cowboy’s stick; his woody companion.

Director: Daniel Mancini
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… a virtual reality trip.

Maree Sheehan “You Can’t Hide Love”

Oh, there are some kitschy delights in this video. Maree gets four different looks in this video, not unlike a pop version of Teremoana’s very serious “Four Women” video. There’s a ’60s chick with a heavy fringe and a mini dress, a long-haired hippy chick from the ’70s, a staunch ’90s chick with hair in Bjork minibuns, and a fabulous poolside diva.

The song has echoes of Cheryl Lynn’s disco classic “Got to be Real”, so the video wisely plays to that fun dance side. But I’m not sure if it’s entirely sucessful. Maree has a soft, sultry voice that doesn’t quite work with the bold diva ideals of the song. The video just underscores this, making it seem like a slowed-down version of a disco classic.

The poolside scenes are the best, with Maree lounges fabulously while various young men hang out in speedos. These scenes work well because the lazier pace matches the song better than the faster studio bits, and it looks like a fun place to be.

Best bit: the pool cleaner, wandering back and forth, doing his job.

Director: Mark Tierney
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Head Like a Hole “Cornbag”

For their third album, “Double Your Strength, Improve Your Health and Lengthen Your Life”, HLAH had evolved to a country inspired sound. The “Cornbag” video goes with that, placing the band in a mysterious old country shack.

Inside the shack, we discover the band are dressed as astronauts, like some hillbillies who figured out the fundamentals of rocket science. The shackship takes off, wobbles around the solar system for a bit before crashing back on Earth…. or is it?

We find the band in their civilian gear playing on a stage. Either the procenium arch is low or the band have actually landed in a planet of little people. The second option is more likely, given the logic of this video.

The raw days of “Fish Across Face” are long gone. This is a good introduction to the new HLAH sound but ensures the essential HLAHness is still there.

Best bit: the giant phallic joystick.

Director: Andrew Beattie
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… alone in the desert of alienation.