Dancing in the moonlight?

Pop misadventures, part 1

I've made two pop videos in my life, which is a source of eternal shame because all I ever wanted to do was make pop videos. I wanted to drown the Cure in a wardrobe (still do), animate the impossibly handsome Morton Harket (ditto), and explode a tramp in a Bermondsey underpass (Unkle, Thom Yorke, I'm over it).

I got signed to a pop production company and spent a fruitless twelve months writing concepts for crappy tunes but not a single record company liked my ideas. I still have a huge yellow ringbinder on my shelf from that year titled: JOBS GONE AWAY, and there must be at least thirty video treatments in there. Each of them has got my producer's handwritten notes on the cover page- "Too wordy!" or "You're not writing fucking War & Peace" and - more often than not - "This does NOT make sense!". She refrained from actually marking them out of ten in red biro, thank god. The handwriting gets spikier as you progress through the pages, and the total volume of 30 three-page treatments delineates a normally reasonable woman's descent into madness.

I loved the conceptual pop work of Tim Pope, Michel Gondry, Jonathan Glazer and Chris Cunningham, but by the time I got a chance to make music videos the charts had become saccharine and all anybody wanted was pretty-boy/pretty-girl pictures. Clothes, colour and camera were the watchwords of the day, and concepts and cleverness were forgotten, a thing of the past. With hindsight it's no wonder that my dancing Mickey Mouse telephones (Craig David), giant fighting sponge monsters (Brigitte Nielson) or spidery hands with giant eyeballs (The Waterboys) didn't go down well with the music commissioners.

I knew I was bottom of the pile, making up the numbers. Most weeks I'd find a grubby envelope on my desk containing a C30 audio cassette with maybe (but not always) a handwritten note suggesting the style of the video they wanted. I'd listen to the track and despair: 99% of those new releases were utter shite, never going to sell in a million years. The top directors got the big money gigs - the Michael Jacksons, the REMs, the Spice Girls - and we got the low-tier signings that record companies didn't know what to do with and didn't want to spend money on. I say "we", because - just like in commercials - music video briefs were farmed out to multiple directors in the hope that someone, somewhere, might have an idea that would flog this crap. It was a passion killer: fact is, if you like music, don't get into the music industry.

I'd play these white label cassettes in the car, driving around south London waiting for inspiration to strike. I got so used to listening to the latest teeth-chewing beats or (conversely) washed-up last-gasp old-timers that I ended up with cloth ears, I couldn't tell what was good or bad anymore. On one of these audio drives my long suffering partner / psychologist / sounding board Cath told me to shut up moaning and turned up the volume. You know, she said, this one is quite good. And it was.

Not my cup of tea, you understand, but the track was going to be a hit, you could just tell (or rather, Cath could). The band was from Eastbourne with the unmemorable moniker Toploader, and the song was called Dancing In the Moonlight. And I wrote a banging treatment for it. I mean, scorchio! I was cooking on gas. I poured heart and soul into that treatment. Maybe it's because I was in love and all fired up or maybe Uranus was rising in my seventh house or something but the words and images just poured out and both Cath and I agreed, this one THIS ONE was going to be THE ONE.

-- the boys ride in on their dukes and guzzis leaning and weaving all speed and sunflares no helmets long hair streaming heads turning girls ignoring in the square by the church and the timeworn pavement and the virgin smiling down on the lovers and losers and the cocks and the preeners and their children and the waltzers and the walkers all life is there under the cascades of lights slung from saint to saint and--

My frustrated pop video producer had a point, right? But you see, me and Cath, we'd just come back from the south of Italy, next town down from Positano, and we had been in this world and we had witnessed a whole community truly dancing in the moonlight simply because that's what they did of a summer evening and I knew I could recreate it authentically and when these Eastbourne lads were framed in this context they'd look not only cool but loveable by young and old alike and I figured that's exactly what they needed for success.

The record company didn't agree and they didn’t buy it. What they bought - and you can see if you google the official video - is the band pretending to play music in someone's Everest double-glazed extension decked out with Argos fairy lights. I offered them romance, I offered them LOVE in all its uncertainty and in its multiplicity of guises, but they chose a bloody suburban semi in Surbiton.

But then they went on to sell a trillion records, so what do I know?

One of these days I'll dig out that Big Yellow File and it'll be fun (fun?) to transcribe verbatim some of those Jobs Gone Away*, some of those unsold treatments, and you, dear reader, you can get out your red pen, you can be the judge and the jury.

The first pop video I actually got to carry all the way through to completion was an accident, or shall we say, a misunderstanding. Sony Ireland had a new signing and I was chosen by the lead singer of the band to do their video. Happy days! I was flown out to Dublin and taken to dinner with the record label boss, who seemed like a lovely woman and we talked about Christie Moore and Van Morrison and she inferred if I got this one right then, you know, things might go well for me, and then we went to a Dublin club to watch the band play a set and I got taken around to their dressing room afterwards and got a bit nervous and I’d never felt less like a director in my life but the band were all charming and lovely and the lead singer nudged me and bought me a pint and said "yeah but you'll be working your magic on us, won't you now?" and I laughed and we drank more beer and we had a good time.

And it was only when we were setting up in Ardmore Studios that I thought about that thing the lead singer had said about 'magic' and I wondered what kind of magic he was imagining for his first pop video. My first pop video.

The label wanted - and I had pitched - an "as live" performance. This was, after all a twelve-piece band with fiddle players and all that Irish how's-yer-father and they were making their name with their live performances, so it made sense to amplify that. We had Ardmore decked out with big amps and speaker stacks and foldbacks and all those iconic rock-gig boxes, and the plan was to film multiple takes of the band simply doing their thing from multiple angles. Authentic and relatively unadorned. But it seemed no-one had told the lead singer that. Much as he was impressed with Ardmore (so was I!) he looked rather crestfallen when he realised he was just going to sing. Where was the magic?

The boss at Sony, for whatever reason, hadn't shared my treatment with the band. It transpired that the singer had chosen me because of my showreel, and my showreel because of my car films (I didn't have any pop) and in particular one car film where I'd done a lot of reverse-action filming and camera trickery with people flying about and gravity being defied and what-have-you. That's what he wanted, that was the magic. The guy wanted a concept! He wanted cleverness! The last thing he wanted was another gig in a barn. Fair play to him, I'd have loved to have given him sponge monsters and exploding tramps, but I had my orders and now we were on stage with a full-blooded heavy metal rig set up and the meter was running.

Concept-less or not, it wasn't a car crash. And the main thing for me was I’d escaped my corporate straitjacket at last! The shoot went really well and the band were troopers: they must have done fifty takes that day and they were still up for partying once we'd wrapped. But the lead refrain in the song was "Don't let me down" and after hearing that line all day long at full blast, it felt like a personal message to me from the singer, and I wasn't looking forward to the final presentation to the band.

We went off to a hotel and drank Murphy's and they all told me their Bono stories. Everywhere you go in Dublin people have Bono stories. They tell you- "That's Bono's house" "That's Bono's Hotel" "You see that café? That's where Bono ate a jumbo sausage and cheesy chips and wrote I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For". There's more Bono places in Dublin than there are shards of the Holy Cross, and that's saying something. I won't share the particular stories I heard that night because they weren't exactly flattering, but I can tell you - it's unanimous - that the Edge is a truly lovely bloke.

The next day I tried to make up for the lack of magic by shooting moody shots of the band around Dublin, but the weather was bleak and the lead singer was lank and sullen in his raincoat and dreadfully hungover. The shots we made that day might have looked good in a Joy Division video, but they were never going to help Sony sell this band, and they ended up where they belonged, on the cutting room floor.

Sony set up a preview of the video for the band and their mates in Dublin and you know what? It went down alright. Doesn’t it always go alright in Ireland? The thing about the Irish - and I can say this because I claim descent by 100 steps removed - is that they’re always lovely and funny and charming, and it’s always a good time, but afterwards you come away and you have a sense that maybe all was not it seemed and you wonder if just maybe you’ve been taken for a roid, like. Sorry, Bono.

But I was pleased and rather smug about my first pop video. The performance was good, the photography, the lighting was good. The editing was good, everything was good. I proudly showed my brother - a music fan - back in London, and he said -
“Um, it’s really nice… it looks like one of your corporate videos”.

That crushed me, Dom, it really did.

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*Jobs Gone Away! - coming soon to a blog near you!

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