I was going to do my fortnightly ‘recent chart catchup’ today, but due to most of the artists responsible for recent hits being nice and timely with their videos, there are none to catch up with!
Instead, as Geth and I have been enjoying lots of synthwave YouTube playlists in the house recently, enjoy this fun claymation video by synthwave act Gunship. Spoiler: the bad guys are defeated by the power of VHS tapes!
Geth is not happy about my lack of knowledge when it comes to ’80s movies (my specialist subject is the music and fashion of the decade – I’m a bit behind on the films because it was only the slasher horror ones that I used to obsess over in my younger days!). As such, we are going to try and rectify this gap by watching lots and lots of ’80s films this year.
However, when it comes to the films and TV on the seven VHS tapes featured in this video, I’ve seen four out of seven, which is not bad going!
(Our own VHS collection is not what it used to be – I chucked most of it when we moved from Southampton, although we still have a good few that can’t be replaced on DVD at the moment. We also have a working VHS player, although it’s not attached to any of our TVs at the moment. It’s there if we need it!)
Anyway, I digress. I really appreciate this video because not only does it remind me of the claymation in classic ’80s videos like Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite and Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, but there has also been much more work put into it than for most synthwave videos, which are usually just clips of ’80s films and TV shows. Not that I don’t love them, but it’s nice to see something totally original!
More music videos next week.