NZ On Screen – Page 8 – 5000 Ways to Love You

50Hz featuring Ladi6 “Seek Know More”

Ladi6 appears in this video as a sort of career seer, narrating the tale of a man conflicted about his role in the high-flying corporate world.

The man in question emerges from Wellington railway station one morning and has an odd moment. A life-changing thought seems to have hit him. But maybe he was just glad to be out of Lower Hutt.

At work, he’s at a meeting, sitting at the head of the table in front of a decorative kimono on the wall. Channelling Tom Cruise, he leaps up on the table and gives a spirited speech, which gets an enthusiastic reaction from his colleagues. This move gets him the keys to a very fancy car (licence plate: I) and he has a hoon around Lambton Quay. Life made.

But strange things are afoot. Suddenly the man is on a rattly old city bus, a gold coin in hand. He stops off at Zambesi and gets a new suit, kindly giving the empty Zambesi bag to a homeless man. Here you go, chap, here’s an empty paper bag 4 u.

Back at work, things are different in the boardroom – there’s a different person sitting at the head of the table. The man pulls out a folder and slides it to the new head. This guy is not impressed by the folder’s contents and throws it back. The hunter has become the hunted.

I like that things are a bit surreal. If it had gone for a more literal depiction of the song’s lyrics, the video would risk seeming cheesy. But weirdness is very forgiving.

Best bit: that the homeless man is literally across the road from the Zambesi store.

Director: Mike Bridgman
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… twice as nice.

Salmonella Dub “Problems”

I like a good animated video and this one works really well. It’s a good looking video and it tells a story.

We meet the hero of the story waking up in the desert. He’s just survived a plane crash and discovers a briefcase full of money. Not that it will do him much good when he’s alone in a hot, barren landscape.

He thinks he spies a lush, wet oasis, but, yes, it turns out to be a mirage, complete with an ominous skeleton hanging from a dead tree. This sparks off a hallucination where he plays skulls like a glockenspiel, but he comes back to reality and trudges on. It reminds me a bit of the Sola Rosa video for “Don’t Leave Home”, another slightly surreal desert adventure, only it’s from the skeleton’s perspective.

Eventually the traveller comes across a detention camp, so he carefully removes his fake moustache and replaces it with a “summer moustache” which looks exactly the same as the previous one (a winter moustache?).

A tank rumbles past, but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of the detention camp. Instead he ends up in a place with giant Easter Island-like statues, where upon it rains. The waters rise fast and high, sweeping him away and scattering his money to the tides. Is this the end of our antihero? No, he wakes up on a pleasant beach, being pecked by a pukeko.

The video was directed by James Littlemore and Steve Scott and it looks so good. Many of Salmonella Dub’s videos had a low-budget look to them, like the sort of thing that was quickly filmed in the middle of a tour. But this one feels like a lot of time and effort has gone into it. And as a result, it’s simple, clear and very stylish video.

Best bit: the hallucinated skull solo, where the higher floating skulls make higher notes.

Directors: James Littlemore, Steve Scott
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… f’n oats.

Nesian Mystik “For the People”

It’s all very well for a new technology to exist, but before it can become commonplace, ordinary people have to know what to do with it. The “For the People” music video uses the Silver Scroll-winning song as a primer to the exciting new world of sending photos via mobile phone. From memory, this was done via sponsorship with Vodafone, who recognised Nesian Mystik’s youth appeal.

The concept of the video sees Nesian Mystik preparing for a big party. In getting ready for the party, they keep coming across a whole lot of interesting things around Auckland to take photos of, to then send to their friends. There’s Awa stocking up on corned beef and bread, getting a pixt outside the dairy of a cute kid singing.

It becomes like a game of tag. Someone receives a pixt, they take another one and sent it on to someone else. And it’s not just cellphones – the pixts can come in on a home computer too. Most importantly, whenever one of the group gets a pixt, he looks at it and smiles. See, pixts bring joy. Regular reader Vicki remembers these early days of pixts. She says they cost 40 cents to send and the process was very fiddly – it even looks like the band are having to muck around a bit before the pixt is sent.

It’s interesting to compare the pixts of 2002 with the sort of things people photograph today. While the camera pans across the delicious spread of barbecued party food, no one takes pixts of it. It’s all cute little kids or band members. They’re using their camera phones the way people used to use film camera – with great economy. On the other hand, the song is “For the People” not “For the Corned Beef”.

And there are no selfies. All the things that curmudgeons complain about with digital photography today are absent in this video. Instead it’s nice little fuzzy snaps of people smiling, photos that don’t interfere with real life. Everyone’s at the party, having a good time. No one’s slumped in a corner, deep in a FOMO check of their Twitter or Facebook feeds. No hilarious Snapchat annotations. And no one’s figured out yet that in the future, an entire music video will be able to be shot on a phone camera.

Best bit: the surprise spycam pixt.

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Love Soup “You”

Well, this is an interesting video. Love Soup was Bic Runga’s high school band, a duo with Kelly Horgan, later of the Heavy Jones Trio. The Cashmere High pair came in third place in the 1993 Smokefreerockquest and part of the prize was a single and video to be released through Pagan Records. Only at around the same time, Sony had began to take an interest in Bic, signed her and bought her recordings from Pagan.

This left the tricky question of what to do with the “You” video. It had been funded and produced and therefore had to be broadcast. This was the old Bic and it wasn’t what she or Sony wanted to present as her New Zealand debut. So in order to tick the boxes, the video screened once, on a lazy afternoon, as a between-programme filler. No one noticed. But when it came time for Bic to properly launch her solo career later in 1995, plenty of people noticed.

The video itself focuses solely on Bic. Kelly doesn’t feature in the video at all, other than his guitar playing on the track. Bic dances around an empty house and on a rocky beach, while wearing long dresses and a garland of flowers. It’s different from the more stylish urban look she took for her solo videos. Because of this, while it’s a great song and Bic is already a skilled performer, it doesn’t quite feel like Bic Runga.

Bic is sometimes joined by a spooky figure, like a CGI shop mannequin. This CGI creature manages to make the video feel really weird. It ends with the figure attached to a wooden frame, in a crucifixion-like pose, floating off into the sky. This might actually be the most unsettling scene I’ve seen in all these videos.

The “You” video is an interesting glimpse into the early days of Bic Runga’s career. And it makes me glad that Sony were prepared to put a bit more money into her later videos.

Best bit: the weird winged creature that swoops past Bic as she emotes on the rocky shore.

Bonus: Watch the 1993 Canterbury final of the Smokefreerockquest. Love Soup start at 5:45.

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… some yuletide beats.

Rubicon “Yeah Yeah (Rockstar)”

“Yeah yeah! Just another rock star,” sing Rubicon. Are they singing about themselves? About their place in the fickle world of popular music? Despite having 10 funded videos, it was pretty much downhill after video number three, Bruce. But our three heroes still rock on with the colourfully explosive “Rock Star” video.

It’s a very similar concept to Nurture’s “Did You Do It All For Love” video – the band, dressed in white, perform in front of a white background where they become covered with paint. But while Nurture were the victims of the sadistic music video character, Rubicon are masters of their own splattering.

The video starts with a young woman giving the pristine white set a final check before giving the camera a pout of approval. Then the band turn up and start playing in what looks like a living room where everything – including their musical instruments – is white.

But all is not what it seems. The bass player takes a white pear out of the fridge but he doesn’t like it (probably because it’s been stored in the fridge and couldn’t ripen) so he hurls it at a wall where – whoa! – it explodes in a burst of blue paint.

Ah, so it seems everything in this white world is secretly full of red, blue or yellow paint (the band’s album was called Primary). The lads engage in stereotypical rock star behaviour, which involves throwing things around because, raaaargh, that’s what rock starz do.

While things get pretty messy by the end of the video, there is a lot of restraint so for most of the video there’s more white than colour, with large splats of paint, rather than lots of messy dribbles. I really appreciate that a lot of thought has gone into the execution of the paintstravaganza. It’s not just a random freak-out and the video looks good for that.

Best bit: the appearance of green after some extreme blue-and-yellowing.

Director: Gareth Edwards
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… lessons in slack.

Rhombus “Clav Dub”

The “Clav Dub” video plays tribute to the legendary New Zealand film “Goodbye Pork Pie”. With the group filing out of a local WINZ office, they spy a familiar yellow Mini that the original Blondini (Kelly Johnson) has left while he pops in to a dairy. Enticed by a big-arse speaker in the back, the trio take off in it. Blondini seems a but miffed, but, well, he’s experienced worse.

Rhombus are rather excited with their new wheels, and go for a good hoon around downtown Wellington. (And they even go past my old Wellington flat, which is the fifth video to feature a former abode of mine.) As they drive around, they drop off flyers to an event. Blondini finds one of these. He’s on their trail.

It’s a very Wellington video. As well having as cameos from Fat Freddys Drop and Trinity Roots, the video takes in scenes from central Wellington, including Courtenay Place, Cambridge and Kent Terraces and a bit of Wakefield Street. There’s no attempt to dress it up as New York or a random cool city. This is Wellington.

The group end up at the Centennial lookout atop Mt Victoria, ready to have their big party. Everyone shows up, even a few comedy policemen (and this is exactly the sort of adventure that has dancing cops). Blondini also shows up and take back what is rightfully his – the Mini; laughing in to the night.

This was Rhombus’ debut and the song made it to number 16 in the charts, with the video winning Best Music Video at the 2003 bNet awards. The video takes the cheeky humour of the original and plays off it, creating their own original adventure in Wellington. It’s a bold introduction to a group that would become a popular live band around New Zealand.

Best bit: the legendary Embassy cinema advertises a screening of Star Wars.

Director: Chris Graham
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… primary colours all over the place.

PanAm “Japanese Girls”

“Japanese Girls” uses the same trick as Garageland did for their “Gone” video – casting a group of random Auckland Asian extras as Japanese fans of the band. According to NZ On Screen, director Greg Page cast the video via “a notice at an Asian food hall”. Though in the case of this video, the extras do reasonably resemble the sort of young women who’d be fans of the band and who’d leave a video message for PanAm.

That’s the premise of the video – that in a padded pink booth, the titular Japanese girls can leave a message for Flying Nun’s young act. The messages are subtitled, and include such revelations as “I like the drummer”, “My phone number is…” and “Excuse me”. Disappointingly, no one is making like a One Direction fan and claiming that her cat died and wanting Paul to give her consolatory hugz.

While the video fan fest is happening, the band are rocking out in a cool looking warehouse. Except it’s not a real warehouse. As Greg Page explains, “we used a miniature warehouse for the background, made out of balsa and cardboard”. If you look very closely, you can tell the band have been green-screened in, but otherwise it gives the setting a slightly spooky feeling, like maybe the band are ghosts.

Now here’s the thing. When the band are rocking out in their shoebox warehouse, they look really cool. And the song’s a bit saucy with its allusions to BJs and girl-on-girl action. But at the end, when the boys finally get inside the pink video booth with the Japanese girls, they suddenly lose their swagger and become three geeky guys who aren’t quite sure how to act around all these girls, nervously shuffling off at the end. It feels like a really candid moment.

Update: Songlines Across New Zealand talked to Paul from the PanAm about the video. He describes it as the strangest video the band has made, crammed into the video booth with a bunch of non-professionals pulled off the street.

Best bit: that everyone in the video – male and female – pretty much has the same haircut.

Director: Greg Page
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next: wet, wet, wet.

Blindspott “S.U.I.T.”

I’m not entirely sure how it happened, but I used to really really like Blindspott, and I will offer three pieces of evidence:

I bought their first two CD singles (“Nil By Mouth” and “Room to Breathe”) at a time when I had otherwise long given up buying actual physical singles.
I went all the way out to a skate shop in Orewa, of all places, which was the only shop that stocked Blindspott merch. I bought an official Blindspott t-shirt.
I won tickets to the extreme sport games X-Air, when it was held in Hamilton, and only went because Blindspott were playing. I got Damian’s autograph.

Things were going well, and then Blindspott released “S.U.I.T.”. There’d been talk in NZmusic.com of the new Blindspott single that was changing things up by having rapped verses and a sung chorus (rather than vice versa on the other singles). But along came this really really angry-dude song, with a chorus that seemed entirely unaware of its contradictory lyrics as it yelled “Fuck you and all your negativity!”

And the video is just as much an angry-dude work. It’s set in a shady bunker type space, where the band are playing in a cage, surrounded by dozens of angry looking dudes. There are tattoos, shaved heads, dreadlocks, eyebrow piercings and scowls a plenty.

The band are all performing in matching boilersuits, and there are some graphics that imply they’ve prisoners in a futuristic prison system or at least have just been arrested. Perhaps they’re performing as part of some sort of futuristic community arts periodic detention programme to assist youth offenders. If so, I’m not sure it’s working.

The video is a statement. The previous two videos were self-funded $800 jobs with the bigger budget and all the extras the band have made a bold statement about who are see themselves. But for me the biggest moment is the pre-chorus lyric “This is us and us is this”. The song and video is Blindspott laying down the law. This is who they are and if you don’t like it, you can get lost. Which is what I found myself doing. And I never wore that Blindspott t-shirt.

Best bit: the seething mass of dudes, barely contained by the fences.

Bonus: Here’s Shelton and Marcus from Blindspott giving high school music students a lesson in the structure of “S.U.I.T.” and somehow make it seem like the world’s most boring song.

Director: Nic Finlayson

Next… Miss Bliss’ wild ride.

Anika Moa “Falling In Love Again”

“Falling in Love Again” is Anika Moa’s highest-equal charting single, with both it and debut “Youthful” reaching number five. It’s not hard to see why. It’s a sweet romantic song about falling in love with an old boyfriend (or indeed a girlfriend)… after having previously been a bit of a ho. The song was cowritten with James Reid of the Feelers, and was included on the soundtrack of the John Cusack/Catherine Zeta Jones romantic comedy “America’s Sweethearts”.

The video sets Anika in a world populated with lots of cute boys. Everywhere she goes, even in remote coastal New Zealand, eventually there’s a model-like boy giving her the gladeye, and she him. There’s a taxi driver (as sharp-eyed reader Lisa points out, he’s played by Antony Starr), a fisherman, an outrigger canoeist, a cyclist, and a guy who just popped down to the shops for some milk.

And weirdly enough, this doesn’t seem too unrealistic. With the exception of the taxi driver, these occupations and pastimes are not uncommon in the lives of fit young dudes. In every case, there are slow glances and flirty smiles, with the milk boy also getting a kiss on the cheek.

While the taxi driver seems to be driving around a city street (and in a left-hand-drive car), most of the video takes place well away from urban areas, on a sun-drenched beach, a green river, a pleasingly damp rugby field and a small town. I feel like this is a trope in New Zealand music videos – the video as a travelogue, highlighting the parts of New Zealand that may appeal to tourists. But where, I wonder, would tourists find the part of New Zealand occupied by flirty girls and cute boys?

Note: In 2005 Anika talked about the making of this video in a C4 Homegrown profile. She says the American label was heavily involved and flew over a director to keep an eye on things, ensuring the video was full of the aforementioned hot guys. The American also demanded that Anika be filmed from angles to make her look as skinny as possible. Ugh. Watch it here, in part three. Cheers to to Vicky for finding this clip.

Best bit: the classic New Zealand dairy, complete with a wall of red post office boxes.

Director: Justin Pemberton
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… giz a chip.

Bic Runga “Get Some Sleep”

There’s the old maxim “write what you know”, which comes with a caution in the world of pop. As soon as an artist becomes successful, their ordinary life becomes that of a constantly travelling entertainer and soon bands start writing epic songs about “the road”.

With the first single off her second album, Bic Runga had also reached that point, with this ode to the tiring routine of a promo tour. Thankfully the video avoids the temptation of showing Bic having Groundhog Day moments in record shops around America. Instead the video sees her driving around New Zealand in a mobile radio station van. And radio is so much more romantic than sleep deprivation.

As she travels through picturesque New Zealand towns, picturesque young people listen to her broadcast. It makes everyone happy. It inspires people to dance. Life is sweet.

The mobile studio’s technology is interesting. Bic plays a CD, but there’s also an LP spinning (that van must have serious shock absorbers). And occasionally we see a tiny grainy, digital shot of Bic broadcasting, which I’m guessing is a webcam shot, back when webcams were tiny and grainy.

With the chorus wondering if Bic is having fun (she believes she might be), the video gives a more definitive answer. Yes, she is. She’s hooning around the country with a dog and a dude, playing records, meeting fans and enjoying herself. And the final shot of Bic finally taking the wheel of the van makes it clear that she’s in charge.

Best bit: the appearance of dudes with stretched earlobes.

Note: There’s an alternate version of the video, which I assume was made for international audiences. It takes a more literal and more glamorous angle, with Bic rolling around on a hotel bed, before running off into a limousine. It was directed by UK director Alexander Hemming, who around the same time had directed the slick-as “Just a Little” video for UK Popstars rejects Liberty X.

Directors: Ann Kim, Graham Sinclair
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… caught on camera.