mojoFURY frontman Mike Mormecha has a new project, Clown Parlour. It’s the acoustic yin to his main band’s rock yang, and ‘Rabbit (A Guilty Sweat)’ is his first video. And ambitious, extended affair, it finds Mike and friends apparently holed up in a remote Russian cottage in the darkest days of the Cold War. The video was directed by Rik Crothers, in conjunction with White Mountain Entertainment, and he took some time to tell us about how it was made.
BAND: CLOWN PARLOUR
TITLE: RABBIT (A GUILTY SWEAT)
DIRECTOR: RIK CROTHERS
Why make a full-length, 10-minute video as opposed to a straight music clip?
I made a video before with Mike and we put a big intro at the start of the video and every time we watched it, it made us laugh, even though it was very serious. I guess we just did it for ourselves. At the same time, we both love movies and we had a great set and costume, so it just would have been a waste to not show more of what was in front of us.
What was the concept behind the video? Did it come from Mike, yourself, or a combination?
When I first heard the song it made me think of a German sausage shop, as random as that sounds. When I told Mike what I had pictured he totally understood. From there we just chatted about what images the song brought into our heads. We both worked very closely on the video and if I were to pick anyone to work with on a video it would be Mike… or Michael as he likes to be called now.
Where was it filmed? It looks pretty miserable.
We filmed it up near Derry, basically in the middle of nowhere. The wee house was owned by Michael’s manager. It’s a complete wreck, but it was perfect for what we wanted. We actually had to tidy it up a bit even though we wanted it to look a mess.
How long did filming take?
I shot everything in one day. It was a very long day for everyone involved, but everyone stuck with it and put up with all my retakes etc. everyone was really excited about the project and I guess that gave them the energy to keep things together.
It sounds like the people eating are speaking Russian, or something like it. Are they, or is it just gibberish?
Haha yeah, well, they aren’t speaking Russian, I basically asked if they could speak gibberish. I think Zarah asked a friend to write some real Russian down for us, just so we’d have something to go by. I think the gibberish turned out pretty well.
The characters have bizarre names – do they mean anything?
Yeah, I picked different names for the characters, my wee niece even got a mention even though she had nothing to do with it. Other characters were named after Mike’s cat, Monty. One character was Tesco spelt backwards and one was Zarah’s internet name backwards – zarahmascara. I actually enjoyed making them up. It was nice to do after such a long edit.
The food doesn’t look very appetising – can you tell us about that?
The food was gross, they all ate it when they had to. I think it was cold peas and cold potatoes. I remember someone spitting them back out, but we’d run out of food so they had to eat their spat out food. Bad times.
Did any of the vodka get drunk during filming?
Yeah, there was actually vodka there from like 40 years ago and Mike drank some and I think Thomas did too, but we mostly used water.
Where did the background music come from?
I really wish Mike was here for this question. He brought an old reel to reel to the shoot with him and it had that tape on it. I know nothing about the piece of music other than it was old enough for us to legally use for the video.
Who is Mike talking to on the phone?
Your ma.
Did it turn out how you wanted it to?
It gives me so much pride in saying that it did. It turned out exactly how I pictured it. It took me a while to get there and I probably wouldn’t have been as happy with it if it wasn’t for Mike pushing me. It’s tough when you are doing everything for a shoot. Stress levels rise! Coming to the final edit I was finding it very hard to make some big decisions and without wee Michael there by my side I might have made the wrong choices.
The Introducing Clown Parlour EP is out now on White Mountain Entertainment, and is available from Clown Parlour’s Myspace page.
www.myspace.com/clownparlour
www.myspace.com/richardwcrothers
www.wmm.ie
Posted on: 27th January 2010
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