GREATEST HITS & ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL

The Greatest Hits video had many false starts and tangled beginnings. What began as a proposed guerilla shoot in California’s Disneyland, turned into an idea about recreating all the Roxy Music album sleeves with real life models sprawled around abandoned theme park rides. The excitement from our director Jem Goulding was such that she would keep spinning out these shoot-for-the-moon ideas, all of which were brilliant but just a little beyond our grasp. In fact, had Disneyland failed to work out what an Arab Strap was, you’d be watching Mickey and Minnie singing “the best of me and you”.
Eventually what we settled on turned out to be better than anything we could have hoped for. Jem found an old funfair in the North of Wales that would let us shoot all through the night and give us the freedom to use all their rides, and to add to this we also brought in the very lovely Clara Paget of St Trinian’s fame.

Maintaining the saturated colours and warmth from our Someone Purer video, Greatest Hits was shot on the Paillard Bolex camera. What’s great about these old cameras is their unpredictable nature, the footage is captured straight onto 16mm film and with that all kinds of light flares and visual hiss come into the equation. Its important for our videos to have a feel, a visual thread that can link them and denote them as part of a family, with Radlands the 1970’s Bolex is the key.

So, our night in the funfair flew by! Despite the lateness of the hour and the rain, Clara pulled off some incredibly sassy moves under the glare of the neons and the film crew did an amazing job of running the show and keeping us all awake. Gryff the ride operator was very generous with the amount of dodgem rides we had and Jem did her best at teaching us the dosey doe (decide for yourselves circa 2.45 ). It was a pleasure to make, i hope its a pleasure to watch.

William.

x

We are also very proud to announce that we’ll be playing the Royal Festival Hall in London on Thursday 29th November 2012!!

Tickets are available from here here and here!