5000 Ways to Love You – Page 45 – Exploring the world of NZ On Air music video funding

Lucid 3 “Paradigm”

If you go to a regional museum in New Zealand, chances are there’ll be an old manual telephone switchboard on display. The “Paradigm” video makes use of such a switchboard. It’s obvious that Victoria is in a such museum (MOTAT, I’m guessing) as she operates the old switchboard, but we’ll just ignore the display case on the wall behind her.

More important is how she’s connecting calls without using a headset to hear which numbers the callers want. Maybe she’s just randomly connecting people. At one point she totally neglects her operator duties and pulls out her guitar.

The song is all about communication. The other band members (one in a workshop, the other in a butcher shop) each have old hand-crank phones and seem to be puzzled by who they’re getting connected with.

We also see a contemporary couple chatting on the phone, each lying on their beds like teens. The guy is even talking on a wired landline phone, which now almost seems as old-fashioned as the antique telephony in the museum.

But yet no matter whether it’s made wood, Bakelite, metal or glass, people have been using technology to communicate for decades now. Let’s just be grateful that technology today isn’t interrupted by a guitar-playing telephone operator.

Best bit: the male caller’s “I see dumb people” t-shirt – so 2000s.

Director: Nic Finlayson
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… guitars and the real girl.

Ill Semantics feat. Betty-Anne “Watching You”

Part of the Dawn Raid family, Ill Semantics were a hip hop trio who had some pretty good singles. “Watching You” was based around a sample of Ardijah’s 1988 single “Watchin’ U”. (It tickles me that Ill Semantics ironed out the Princely spelling for the remake.)

The Ill Semantics video seems to take a little inspiration from Ardijah’s original, which saw the band playing in a smoky bar. But director Sophie Findlay take things further into a film noir world, with celeb cameos galore.

The video starts with a femme fatale (played by K’Lee!) hiring a private investigator Patriarch to find something in a safety deposit box. At the club, the detective’s partner, Nemesis, is on the case, as Betty-Anne is introduced on stage by Oscar Kightley.

And there begins a world of sideways glances, gunshots, fainting, car chases, tussles, snogs, and an undercover cop played by Robbie Magasiva.

In the end, K’Lee is arrested, Nemesis goes home with the hot cop leaving bar man DJ CXL and detective Patriarch at the bar. It’s way too much of a happy ending to make a satisfying ending, but for a music video, it’s ok.

Best bit: the role of the safety deposit box is played by a post office box.

Director: Sophie Findlay
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… vintage telephony.

Goodshirt “Monotone”

While Joe Lonie’s music videos have a really strong association with Goodshirt, he only directed five videos for the group. “Monotone” was the final, and while it follows the Lonie/Goodshirt style of being a one-take wonder, it’s a lot more surreal than previous Goodshirt videos.

In a gloomy forest clearing, good and evil are having a doubles game of badminton, only they seem to be using a ping pong ball, rather than a shuttle cock. The players are dressed in beekeeping outfits with their player numbers on the back – good are 23 and 42, evil are 13 and 69, of course.

The beekeeper outfits also mean that the players’ faces are obscured, which makes me wonder if the band wasn’t available for the video. Maybe they used pro badminton players instead.

While the game goes on, the camera continuously circles their makeshift court. By the court there’s a table set up to record their scores, with enough room to track up to 999999 points per side.

But there’s not a lot of winning happening. The players are just too good. They effortlessly bat the ball to and fro, with little sign of either team missing. So, four badminton players who never miss, combined with a music video filmed in one take. Well, it’s probably a CGI ball, yeah. Either that or those really are pro badminton players in the costumes.

It’s nowhere near as much fun as the earlier Goodshirt videos. In fact, it seems more like a video art project than a music video. Slow it down by 75%, play it on an old CRT television and there’s your exhibition.

Perhaps this was just the Goodshirt/Lonie partnership coming to its natural conclusion. The next video by the group took a very different approach.

Best bit: the disappearance of the ball after a particularly mighty hit.

Director: Joe Lonie
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… a dame and a private dick.

Fou Nature “It’s Our Party”

This is a very Polynesian sounding pop song. I went to Samoa around the time this song came out and this style of music could be heard everywhere – cheesy synth brass, South Seas guitar and sunny harmonies. While Fou Nature’s earlier single “Love Come Down” had a more mainstream pop sound, “It’s Our Party” is more niche.

The “It’s Our Party” video takes places at a backyard party. And unlike the Feelers’ crammed party in their “Anniversary” vid, Fou Nature’s shindig has a lot more room to move. I mean, if you’re going to dance, you want room to dance, right?

It’s an all-ages function, with kids chugging back cans of Coca-Cola, basketball tricks, dancing (of course) and sepia-tone group portraits. Feleti from Nesian Mystik shows up to perform a rap, which nicely brings in the sound of New Zealand-Polynesian pop and hip hop.

We only briefly see the group performing the song. Most of the time it’s just shots of partygoers. And there’s no attempt to turn this humble backyard party into a massive rave to look good in the video. Mostly it’s just groups of people standing around, enjoying the company and the long table full of food.

Best bit: the kids who all chug down cans of Coke together.

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… a buzzy-as game of badminton.

Deep Obsession “Miracles”

It’s the long end of the Deep Obsession experience. Their remarkable run of three consecutive number one singles was a remnant of the late ’90s. Instead “Miracles” was a radio-only single and their lowest charting song at #34.

The video takes places in a hospital because, you know, miracles. The duo (Zara, with new-old member Charlie replacing Vanessa) and some dude with dreadlocks slowly, meaningfully walk along the cold blue corridor.

A young woman (whose long blonde hair makes her look like a Deep Obsession understudy) goes into a room where her grandfather is ill in a bed. She keeps a vigil over her poorly gramps, only for him to die while she’s taking a nap. A nurse come in to console the woman, and the story shifts to the nurse’s life.

The nurse, weak with compassion fatigue, comes home to find her slobby boyfriend lazing on the couch. She yells at him, he yells at her and they both end up feeling pretty crap.

Meanwhile, back in the hospital, new parents coo over their baby. The mother appears to be in the dead grandpa’s former room. But why was Gramps admitted to the maternity ward? Maybe that’s why he died.

The nurse looks on and the miracle of birth restores her faith in human nature, or some such. And then, just to make things even better, the granddaughter appears with a bunch of flowers. Oh, that’s nice. Again Deep Obsession and the dreadlocks guy slowly walk past, smiling benevolently.

“Miracles” is not the best death-bed video (that’s “Stay” by Shakespear’s Sister), it’s not the best hospital drama video (that’s “My Friend (So Long)” by DC Talk), and it’s not even the best video for a song called “Miracles” (flippin’ magnets – how do they work?). But it’s ok. It might be a bit cheesy, but it has a plot and a nice conclusion. And hey, the next time you’re visiting a loved one in hospital, if you see a fierce lookng woman wearing a leather bustier, don’t be afraid – it’s just one of Deep Obsession.

Best bit: that the loser boyfriend has already had three beers.

Next… family fun day.

Crumb “Nice to See You”

The song proclaims, “Nice to see you! Nice knowing you!”. At first I thought maybe the song was about a pick-up artist who’d got so obsessed with the technique that he’d forgotten about the human side of things (yeah, I’m currently reading “The Game”). But then the line “it’s just till December” makes me wonder if, in fact, this is the tale of a season fruit picker, bidding farewell to his Central Otago sweetie.

Well, either way, the video doesn’t go there. It’s all in the moment. The band are performing at a bar in front of an audience that – unlike your typical rock band audience – are 90% female. But given that Liv Tyler once declared Crumb were “my favourite band in the world”, perhaps this is an accurate demographic. (On the other hand, Liv was once married to that guy from Spacehog…)

The video hams it up, using star wipes and displaying the band’s name in a cheesy faux neon-sign font. There’s a lot of energy from the band’s performance, but the some of the fixed camera footage gives the video a feeling of a CCTV video, or scenes from a Big Brother house’s weekly task being rock stars.

“Nice to See You” was Crumb’s first single, a radio-only release. The video has a bit of a low-budget feel to it, but it’s a lot brighter and shinier than the low-budget offers of 10 years prior. Digital was continuing to change things, making that $5000 go even further.

Best bit: the mannequins hanging out at either side of the stage.

Director: James Barr
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… geriatric maternity.

Augustino “In and Out of Nowhere”

This video starts with a young woman, looking slightly more authentically dirty than Purest Form managed as mechanics in their “Lady” video. She wakes up and discovers she’s in a grim, empty corridor where the only exit appears to be locked doors at one end. The video is shot in black and white, so you know things are serious.

I’m not convinced by the quality of act0rizing. She seems completely puzzled by the way the corridor has walls, and that way there is a ceiling that exists. She’s not too fussed about the floor though.

I have just spent about 10 minutes engaged in an acting workshop, where I lay down in the hallway and pretended to be someone who had just woken up in a strange corridor, to see if could do a better job of acting. If it were me, I’d walk around a lot more, sussing out the situation, rather than just staring at the wall as if I’d never seen a wall before.

Fabulous cheekbones: the crazy makeup is revealed in positive

Augustino are also in this strange corridor, but their world is filmed in negative, so everything looks really weird. Actually, the weirdness is helped by the band wearing theatrical make-up to create areas of shadow and light. Sometimes it gives a positive effect with the negative footage other times it looks quite sinister looking. But because it’s shot in negative, it’s easy to think, oh, that’s just the negative effect.

Back to the lost girl. She yells, bangs at the doors, and eventually they open, turning her strange corridor into Augustino’s strange corridor in negative. Bummer.

“In and Out of Nowhere” is a defiant but upbeat song, but the video makes it about as bleak as the lyrics will allow. I like when Greg Page makes unusual, experimental-style videos, but I can’t help feel that this song would have been better served by a video treatment that was a bit less grim.

Best bit: the pleasingly punctuated subtitles for the girl’s cries of despair – “HELLO?! Anyone…?”

Director: Greg Page
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… the pick-up via rock-out.

Tim Finn “Say It Is So”

This is a Tim Finn video but the star ends up being Mareea Paterson, the bass player in his touring band, the Dirty Creatures. The video features around the band’s 2002 tour, and a performance of at the Civic Wintergarden (and the web tells me this gig took place on 19 October 2002). We see a lot of Tim and the band on stage, but there’s also lots of footage of them on the road, the glamorous life of loading up the station wagon with suitcases, before heading to the next airport.

Like a lot of recent Tim Finn videos, this focuses on Tim performing. It seems he’s most comfortable when he’s Tim Finn, the showman on a stage, rather than awkwardly trying to fit into a music video narrative. And like the last performance-based two videos (“I’ll Never Know” and “What You’ve Done”), this video is also shot in black and white. It’s a good style choice. It avoids the video falling into the “zany high jinks on the road” mould, and gives it a bit of style.

But yeah, the video totally hearts Mareea (who we’ll later come across in her solo project, Friends From Sweden). She’s easily the most exotic member of the Dirty Creatures, an otherwise unremarkable touring band of quality musos. So the video has latched onto this cool chick with cropped hair, tattoos and cigarettes.

She kinds of outshines him in the “on the road” segments, but when the band is on stage, there’s no risk of that. Tim is in his element, working the stage like the pro he is.

The video ends with a comedy postscript. Tim dances a merry jig on what looks like a solid stone ledge at the Wintergarden. But this is the Civic. It was built during the Depression. With the exception of modern strengthening, much of the solid-looking parts of the interior are just made of cheap plaster and cannot support the weight of a popstar. Tim’s foot goes through, damaging this Category I listed heritage building.

Best bit: the road sign pointing to Te Awamutu, just in case you’d forgotten.

Director: Andrew Morton

Next… the age of the winery tour continues.

The Have “Right On”

Straight outta Wanganui High School, the Have were the 2002 winners of the Smokefreerockquest, appearing at just the right time to ride the wave of the rock ‘n’ roll revival. Singer Brodie and guitarist Peter appeared as almost fully formed rock stars – rugged and hairy vs skinny and enigmatic. The pair are still playing today, in the Berlin-based psychedelic band the Sun and the Wolf. And they both look exactly the name.

But back in the early ’00s, the Have were ready to rock out. Their video, part of the SFRQ prize package, sees them playing in a most unexpected location – a warehouse filled with a mountain of golden sand.

The sand’s purpose soon becomes apparent – it’s there to crumble and quiver with the sheer magnitude of the band’s rockingness, helped out by the giant speakers suspended over the band, feeling a bit like a sword of Damocles. And of course the band get to run around a bit in it, kicking up dusty clouds. I bet they were finding sand everywhere for weeks after.

This is a really confident band. It’s one thing for a teen band to have a song with lyrics like “You should be kissing my ass!”. It’s another thing for its delivery to sound so self-assured that you forget all about the teen/rockquest thing. And when a band is playing on a giant mountain of sand, it takes presence to not be outshone by the epic location.

Directed by Greg Riwai (whose name has been popping up a lot in 2002), the video was a finalist in the Breakthrough Artist category at the 2003 Juice TV Awards.

Best bit: the remote control, a gift from the sands.

Note: This video was available at The Amplifier, but with the end of The Amplifier so went the video.

Director: Greg Riwai
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… outrageous damage to a Category I historic building.

The Feelers “Anniversary”

The “Anniversary” video is filmed at a backyard party, with the Feelers rocking out on a small suburban deck, next to the barbecue. But despite the modest setting, this is not a modest affair. The place is absolutely packed and there doesn’t really seem to be much room for people to move. It makes me wonder if this performance was the result of a competition to have the Feelers play at the lucky winner’s house, with the music video production being thrown in as a two-for-one.

So the video is packed full of lively 20-somethings, all decked out in plastic leis and holding cups of non-alcoholic punch. The huge crowd obviously made it hard for cameras to film the band, because much of the video footage shows the band as distant figures through a sea of partygoers.

In the middle of all the chaos, the Feelers seem to be having a great time. There are fire-breathers, drunk-girl dancing and even a moment where – super lol! – the Feelers’ drummer uses jandals to play the drums.

The of adventures the backyard gig give more life to the song. The lyrics are about a failed relationship, the sort of thing that would more traditionally get a video involving a girl in a cafe. But this video turns “Anniversary” in to a party anthem. And I think that’s part of the magic of the Feelers – they could turn all these straight MOR tunes into hugely popular drunken shoutalong experiences.

Best bit: the brief glimpse of the face of a chilled-out, eyebrow-ring-having party bro.

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision