Cat Velez - 20th Aug 2015

Rollo Jackson's promo for Hot Chip's Started Right sees a girl in an empty bar singing the tune on a little karaoke set-up, with some characteristically random karaoke-style videos playing alongside the lyrics, featuring old cartoons, footage of sea-life, surfers and beach babes.

As bits of her audition tape start to creep in to the mix, the boundaries between genres, and the relationship between interacting and viewing blur and fall away.  A karaoke/lyric video that becomes something else altogether. 

ROLLO JACKSON:

"The brief from the label was pretty simple. The video should be about something going wrong somehow. I really liked that premise and wanted to make a video that had things going wrong within it but also went wrong itself.

"That said I wanted to keep it as vivid and musical as possible with a slickness that the song deserves. Hence getting a beautiful girl to sing with a guy's voice, cutting in very rhythmical cartoons that have slightly desperate characters and using quite silly macho archive that then reverses or goes wrong (the guy falling off his surfboard etc.) like the relationship in the song going wrong.

"I also liked the idea of a music video turning into karaoke video, everything is so blurred now online, yet people on YouTube are so obsessed by what everything should mean, "WTF am I watching dude?", so I wanted to play with that and the genres of things and just leave it a bit open ended as to what this even is. Accidents on purpose basically.

"Ironically the only thing that went wrong for me was that I was counting on using outtakes and mistakes from Rebeca, the model singing in the video, but she nailed the song on every take so she's the only thing that starts and finishes right."