Death in Vegas

Let me start this blog by stating for the record that ‘Death in Vegas’ did not sanction or have any knowledge of this video. Well that’s not strictly true. It was given to them in the strangest of ways but I’ll get to that later. Let me start where most stories start, at the beginning. Once upon a time I was given a song by a friend of mine, Colm McCann. He usually plays guitar and writes acoustic songs, but he had taken a sharp right turn into the world of Dance music. Well, not exactly dance music, more like beats and drums and rhythms and computerised voices and the like. These days, he’s more into the Salsa dancing but I hope one day he returns to his first love and starts writing more songs because I’d love him to release an album (yes his stuff is that good). So anyway, he hands me this drum and bass style song called ‘The Answer is No’ and asks me to listen to it. I play it in my car over and over and start to get this idea in my head that we could make a cool video for the song. Now, unlike the live performance stuff that I film, when I make a music video I tend to go for a video with a story. I don’t even usually think about the band being in the video. If the song is good enough and the story fits the words of the song then the video will work better than if it is just the band singing and dancing around. Nothing is worse than music videos where artists (and I use that term very loosely) just dance around like fucking monkeys. Music videos should have meaning and relate to the song, but then again, not every song has a point. The types of videos that I like are videos that you can watch over and over and see something different every time. My favourite music videos are the three videos that ‘Guns ‘n Roses’ made for their songs ‘Don’t Cry’, ‘November Rain’ and ‘Estranged’. A guy called ‘Del James’ realised that these songs all followed on from one another and wrote a story called ‘Without You’. The story starts with ‘Don’t Cry’ and is the story of a rock star (Axl Rose) who is having a hard time coping with his fame. It makes him suicidal and is affecting his relationship with his girlfriend (his real life wife at the time Stephanie Seymour). The video shows his breakdown and has some amazing imagery such as Axl on a psychology chair shaking and as he lies there another different Axl walks in (like an alter ego) and then another. Also, there is a scene where Axl is drowning and his girlfriend is holding onto him and dragging him further down. The video ends with Axl and his girlfriend having a picnic in the graveyard and the camera slides down below the ground where they are sitting and we see another beastlike Axl skulking around in the grave. The second part of the trilogy is ‘November Rain’ and is the same story progressed a year or so. Axl has become big-time famous and he and his girlfriend are getting married. Everything seems perfect and then at the wedding reception the rain starts and the tables are knocked over and the red wine is spilt and we find out that his new wife is dying. The wedding turns to a funeral and she has died and he is alone again. The video ends with Axl having horrible nightmares and a breakdown. The third part of the trilogy is ‘Estranged’. Again more time has passed and Axl has been through rehab and is back on tour. It is a sort of metaphorical release of his demons and his making peace with the situation he’s in. If you watch these videos together one after the other you will literally get chills up your spine (especially if have any knowledge of ‘Guns ‘n Roses’). So, as I was driving along and listening to this song that Colm had produced I had an idea for a video and a couple of days later the idea was on paper and ready to go. But because the song had no real lyrics, and because I’d never written a video for that type of music before, I had no idea if the music and the video would work together. I decided to go ahead and make the video anyway and worry about it later. To make the video as cheaply as possible I decided to shoot it in the street where I lived. I only needed two actors, one female and one male. The story was simple. A woman wakes up and gets dressed. It is night time. She leaves the house and walks down the street. As she walks down an alleyway, she is confronted by a man who is dressed in black. They stare at each other and the woman runs off. The man gives chase and traps her in a closed office building. He is looking around for her and cannot find her. Suddenly she is behind him and he is trapped. And let’s just say the woman is not as helpless as we may have believed. I don’t want to give the ending away but I thought the idea had a great twist on gender roles. For the male part I asked my future brother-in-law Dave to do it and he agreed once he knew he wouldn’t have to say anything. He had never acted before but was actually very good. For the female part I got a talented actress I met in Cardiff at University called Niamh (see my friends list for more details). She kindly donated a night for filming and we managed to shoot all the footage we needed quite quickly. So with all the footage in the bag, the job was to see if the music fitted the final edited video. It did, but unfortunately I just got the sense that it wasn’t right. I watched it over and over but something just wasn’t clicking. So I had a music video with no soundtrack. At this point I had been listening to a lot of different bands and one that stuck in my mind was ‘Death in Vegas’. They were an up and coming band doing some live shows around the country. The thing that was strange about them was that they didn’t seem to have any lead singer. Their songs would have random famous artists singing. The song I liked best was a song that had Iggy Pop singing on it called ‘Aisha’. It was dark and lucid and fucking hell…I discovered that it fitted on the video perfectly. I laid the track on and it worked. I tried to contact the band to see if they needed a video for the song and didn’t have much luck getting in touch with them, so I bought a ticket for their Belfast performance in the Limelight, a rock bar in my hometown (it’s an amazing bar. Colin Murray talks about it on Radio One. It’s not unusual to see ‘Snow Patrol’ down there having a pint and every week you’d see ‘Ash’ at the Pub Quiz). My plan was to burn a copy of the video to CD-Rom and give it to them after the show. And that’s exactly what I did. I went up to the stage at the end of the show and spoke to the guy who had been playing drums and quickly told him what it was and put it in his hand. I have no idea if they ever watched it or if it ended up in a gutter somewhere, but I like to think that one fine day when they were sitting around bored, they put it on and had a look. Who knows, maybe the phone might ring one day yet, or it might turn up on MTV out of the blue. Whatever happens (or more likely doesn’t) it is now available for all you good people to view here and on my myspace page. I hope you like it. Aaron.