Marvey King – 5000 Ways to Love You

“Perfect Lullaby” was the second and final funded video for a Marvey King song, after “Rosary” from 2000. The video was shot in Sydney and made by the Australian director and animator Simon Rippingdale.

The video is shot as a serious of still images, all animated together. So there’s a jerkiness to the video, but it also means being able to include cool timelapse effects that a video camera wouldn’t be able to capture.

There’s a bit of fun had with the stop-motion. At one point Marvey is sitting on a chair, she gets up, takes a few steps and the chair is suddenly ablaze. She’s also shot standing in the middle of a metro station concourse while a blur of commuters rushes either side of her.

But the video spends most of its time in a windowless room, which contains some fancy furniture, a rocking horse and two cabaret girls. While Marvey is in this room, most of the time her hair is crawling all over her face, which makes me wants to comb her hair back in a ponytail until it can learn to keep still.

Because of the stop-motion production, there’s no lip synching, so Marvey feels a bit distant. This is compounded by the video being set in Sydney. It’s like instead of Marvey being the singer, the song is being sung about her.

Best bit: the clock on the wall in the windowless room – time passes!

Director: Simon Rippingale
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… underground, overacting.

Marvey King was the former stage name of singer-songwriter Tanya Horo, but in the ’00s she was arguably better known for her ongoing role as “Miss Lucy” the know-it-all travel nerd star of a series of ads for a local travel agent.

Back in the world of Marvy, “Rosary” is a sweet acoustic pop song, and the video is exactly what you’d expect from an up-and-coming young singer being launched upon the world. We meet Marvey in bed, clad in classic striped pyjamas. She wakes up with thick eyeliner, still perfectly applied. If this were the real world and not a music video, she’d actually look like Alice Cooper after sleeping in that much eye makeup.

There seems to be someone missing from the bed as Marvey runs her hand over the satin sheets. But she’s only been sleeping with one pillow, so whoever is missing isn’t a regular in that bed.

Suddenly things get a little surreal. Marvey still in bed but appears to be naked. Her duvet is pulled back to reveal she’s wearing a glamourous red strapless gown. And, with a reference to “American Beauty”, she’s surrounded by red rose petals (but just a few).

This saucy Marvey gets the choruses, while the pyajama-clad Marvey has the verses. It comes across as a kind of duel, with Saucy Marvey making things difficult for Pyjama Marvey. The end of the video sees Pyjama Marvey demurely singing the chorus, as if she’s realised – in a “Fight Club” style twist – that she is both Pyjama Marvey and Saucy Marvey.

In a way the video is a bit more fun than the song, but as YouTube commenter Pendarves1 says, it was “a great song that never made it big. Underated.”

Best bit: the strangely erotic shot of a knife slicing through a strawberry.

Director: Tom Fowlie
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Next… love on tour.

Tag: Marvey King

Marvey King “Perfect Lullaby”

Marvey King “Rosary”