One doesn’t like to condone violence – but in this case we’ll make an exception.

Because even though the guest vocalist in the new BPA video is actually a near-lifesize puppet manipulated in-plain-sight by Bunraku puppet-masters, he’s still Iggy Pop. And you don’t mess with The Ig.

This delightful video is directed by Nick Ball – who also directed the previous BPA video for Seattle, for his brother-in-law Norman ‘Fatboy BPA Slim’ Cook . Darkvast made the brilliant puppet who is, let’s face it, arguably more Iggy-like than the guy currently fronting the Swiftcover ads.

And Norman supplies another Fatboy Slim-class cameo, coming off a bad second against the still-reigning bad boy of rock.

The BPA featuring Iggy Pop
He’s Frank (Southern Fried)
Prod co: Draw Pictures
Director: Nick Ball
Producer: Camilla Klich
DoP: Daniel Bronks
Puppet masters: Jonny Sabbagh, Will Harper, Joel Cadbury, Rod Woodruff
Fight and stunt coordinator: Rod Woodruff
Editor: Marek Budzynski
Grade: Kenny Gibb
Watch: here

Nick Ball on making the video for The BPA feat. Iggy’s He’s Frank

“The first video I ever did was for the BPA track ‘Seattle’ featuring Emmy The Great. It showed Emmy’s head broken up into cubes which turned and slowly morphed Emmy’s face from one look to another. Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim aka the brains behind the BPA – Brighton Port Authority – loved the ‘Seattle’ video so much that he asked me to do his next one too.

“I decided I wanted to use a puppet or puppets in the video as soon as I heard the track. Having already worked with the puppet masters at Darkvast on a much smaller project I was hungry for more puppet action. This was the perfect opportunity to go one step further and the builders of the Iggy Puppet – Jonny Sabbagh and Will Harper – were really excited about creating a twisted Iggy doppelganger.

“Norman’s main concerns from the beginning were that we didn’t make a happy or twee puppet video as he was keen to exploit the dark edge the Iggy vocals had brought to the music. Together we developed the concept from puppet Iggy dancing into puppet Iggy fighting with his own Bunraku puppet masters. We were given carte blanche to make our puppet look as scary, demented and deranged as possible.

“Before the shoot we watched as much footage of Iggy performing as possible and then tried to replicate it as best we could. The real Iggy loves a mic stand when he’s on stage so we used one too as the base for our performance. The rest of the moves were created by simply assessing what it was possible for our puppeteers to do and what wasn’t. We had a stunt coordinator choreograph the fight sequence and perform the stunt.

“The last shot of the day was the last shot of the video. Everyone was really tired and we nearly ran out of bottles to smash over Norman’s head, he was really relaxed about the high number of takes we did even though we’d cut his head open. It’s not as easy as you might think to be bottled by a puppet Iggy Pop.”