Leicestershire electro quartet Late of the Pier return this month with their new single "Focker", and they've made a surreal video to go with it. Below, exclusive to Dazed Digital, you can find the video itself, a behind-the-scenes film, and an interview with 26-year-old director Daniel Brereton, who was born in the Lake District and now lives in Bethnal Green.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Dazed Digital: What's your background?
Daniel Brereton: I've been doing videos for about a year. Before that I was doing graphic design. I got asked by the guys from Moshi Moshi if I wanted to do a video for Best Fwends, then I did one for Late of the Pier's "Bathroom Gurgle" based on the hall of mirrors from Enter the Dragon, then one for Metronomy where we made them into airbrushed record covers, then one for These New Puritans, and now this one for Late of the Pier again.
DD: So what's the concept of the video?DB: Well, the song "Fokker" is really energetic and quite tense, and the band wanted to do a performance video, but also not. So it was a performance video in which they visualise how they perform in their own minds. There's lots of steam and keyboards break, and then the room cracks in half, and out of it comes this keyboard monster/totem pole, and he's taking vengeance for their breaking their instruments, so he starts beating them up with giant drumsticks, and they get melted by the sound of him. My friend Helen, who's a really good prop designer, made the keyboard monolith out of cardboard. It looks really good. We shot it all with an old camera because we wanted it to look timeless - like Top of the Pops from the 70s or 80s.
DD: Do you think you'll carry on working with LOTP?
DD: I'd love to because they're fun to work with, they're really inspiring, they're really good performers, and they come up with half the ideas themselves.
DD: What are you working on next?
DB: A video for "Holiday" by Metronomy. It's a spacey song so we wanted to make something spacey and psychedelic and inspired by early Pink Floyd videos, where they do everything with lights and really nice cameras. We're making psychedelic props out of stuff that you get on holiday.
DD: So you're carrying on with the DIY theme?
DB: Definitely. I think I want to make stuff that's tangible in a human way, so you can relate to it because you can feel it.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.