Saturday 27 August 2022

Great moments in music video history #7: Just

I was reminded of this video recently by a post at the always-excellent No Badger Required, which described the video thus (I hope it's okay to quote verbatim):

"You of course will all recall the marvellous video to ‘Just’. A man can be seen lying on the ground in a street (actually shot behind Liverpool Street Station in London town). Slowly a bunch of people start talking to the man who lying on the pavement. Subtitles appear on the screen displaying the conversation that is taking place between the chap on the ground and the people around him. He refuses to tell them why he is lying on the ground. Meanwhile the band watch the proceedings out of a nearby window.

Eventually the man does explain, but cheekily the subtitles vanish at the same time, but what we do know is that all the other people all suddenly lie down on the ground with the original man and we never find out what was said and the band have never revealed it, in a Guardian interview about six years later, a journalist actually asked them and Thom Yorke said that if he told him “We would all have to lie down on the floor” with a smile and so the debate raged on (the real answer is of course that Piers Morgan was just around the corner, giving away free tickets for his telly programme and most people would rather be pretend to be dead that be on that)."
[Source]

I can't describe it any better (or even as well) as that. What's your theory on what makes everyone lie down?

6 comments:

  1. The problem I have with videos like this is they take your attention away from the song. Just is one of my favourite Radiohead songs, but the video completely distracts me and the song then just becomes background music. It's worthy of being more than that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ooh, intriguing, I hadn't seen it before. Something to do with aliens, I reckon. Or have I been watching too much UFO?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Aliens, maybe. Or climate reality, that makes me want to lie down sometimes.

      Delete
  3. What A fantastic post...swc.

    ReplyDelete