For a band that had such a strong live reputation, it’s curious that the Black Seeds started off by making music videos that didn’t show the band playing. The video for the chilled-out “Coming Back Home” starts with time-lapse footage of the band setting upon stage, but that’s the last we see of them. The rest of the video is animated. Perhaps they were too busy gigging to appear in a video.
The animation is based on simple line drawing, mainly white lines on a black background, with the occasional bit of colour for emphasis. Going with the theme of the song, the video shows different situations involving a journey home. There’s a prisoner counting off the days till his release, a homeless man and his dog and an ant on an epic adventure, among others. And trains, planes, boats, cars and shopping trolleys all feature as modes of transport.
Wellington features in the video, with a skydiver falling down onto the familiar outline of the inner city coast, and a scene of cars streaming along the motorway, towards the city of hills, the spiritual home of barbecue reggae.
The animation has a nice rhythm to it, but the video itself is really low-key. It feels like neither the song nor the video really want to stand out. It seems like a video that’s content to play in the background while other things are happening. But for a listener who’s feeling a bit homesick, maybe that’s the best way to portray a New Zealand homecoming – a chilled-out place with a freshly grilled veggie sausage just waiting for you.
Best bit: the Cook Strait ferry’s feet.
Next… vacation, meant to be spent alone.
Hi Robyn, a surprise to see someone doing a run down on such an old video but cool to see it revisited, I still enjoy the simplicity of the video. The answer to why we were not in many of our early videos of our career is that we were touring so much back then and some of us also felt that videos were a bit of a pain to be involved in. Over the last three albums we have enjoyed being involved with our music videos and our last lot of vids for ‘Dust and Dirt’ really show we are right into collaborating on concepts for videos too, ahh oh how we have grown. Right onto the next album ! Cheers
Hey, this whole website is solely dedicated to reviews of old music videos! Thanks for the info about the video – it makes sense that y’all were busy touring, and it’s a much better way of dealing with that issue than doing a “life on the road” type of video. I look forward to seeing more old Black Seeds videos in the months and years to come.