Day 17: "We Are Your Friends" - Simian (2002)

Today's album actually has two stories associated.  One is a deeply personal one about a girl who broke my heart and left me depressed for over a year, exposes one of my biggest character flaws, and makes me look like an idiot.  The other one involves me talking about music videos.

Let's do that second one.

listen to me here

I'm a huge junkie for clever, well made music videos, as anyone who has been around me while I am drunk, have control of the TV and access to YouTube can attest.  As someone who loves film as well as music, the capacity to take a song and make a striking visual accompaniment to it is a real talent, especially when they can vary from telling a (very) short story using music as a backdrop (Like Bjork's "Bachellorette"), making a striking visual statement (like UNKLEs "Rabbit In Your Headlights"), doing something clever and subtle to link the visuals to the music (like the Chemical Brother's "Star Guitar"), or if you want to make a pastiche of Rap videos where everyone has your face (In which case, I'm very honoured to have Richard D. James reading this blog).

For a long time, I lived in a shared house with my sadly now departed friend Dave W, or Polite Dave as my parents dubbed him, and he shared my borderline obsession with music videos as a strangely distinct artform.  There was a now long-cancelled show late night on Channel 4 called "Mirrorball" which showed strange, cutting edge music videos in the 2am slot so no-one apart from real die-hards would stay up long enough to be offended by the content of some of them.  It was on this show that I first saw the video for Squarepusher's "Come on my Selector" and The Pharcyde's "Drop".

Flash forward a few years.

When I first moved in with the Girl Who Broke My Heart, this was the first time I'd had Satellite TV. Living with Dave, we had survived on the 5 terrestrial TV channels, but moving on to this more adult phase of our lives, me and said Girl thought getting Sky TV would somehow cement our status as proper grown ups.  And with that purchase, came access to hundreds of music channels.

I don't remember the first time I saw the video for "La Breeze" on one of the music channels, but I was instantly struck by it.  It was weird, and dark, and funny, and juxtaposed strangely with the song it was representing.  

For the record, I still think this is a great video.

But those days before YouTube meant that I saw it once, and it vanished, never to be seen again.  For six months it became my white whale, as I surfed, late at night, on the tides of MTV, hoping to catch a glimpse of it again.

The album was equally elusive.  By then, our friendly independent music shop in Chesterfield had been superseded by a mid-sized HMV with staff who couldn't care less what people wanted.  Gone were the days of getting obscure albums ordered in for me - instead I'd just check the alternative music racks, occasionally asking the staff only to be met with a dismissive "never heard of it, mate".

It was just after Christmas, at the start of 2003 that I took The Girl to Edinburgh for the weekend.  It was the first time either of us had visited, and I instantly fell in love with it;  it remains to this day my favourite city in all of Europe to visit.  Walking along Princes Street, I saw a small CD shop, a little independent dwarfed by the retail giants which surrounded it.  A strange resolve gripped me.

With no evidence to suggest I was right, I diverted from our walk and veered into the shop, heading for the alphabetised "S" section, and there it was.  I've never seen another copy of this album in the wild since.

On its face, this is a strange album, definitely ahead of its time in 2002, with most of the tracks on here not feeling out of place in today's indie/alternative music pantheon.  Several of these songs had a revival of sorts when their far more successful spin-off band, Simian Mobile Disco, remixed them. Strangely, this is one of those albums for me where the chase was far more compelling than the actual album - even with today's play-through, I've still probably listened to this whole album only a handful of times.  I'd definitely recommend giving it a try, its kooky and interesting and there's something compelling about it, but somehow it just never got its hooks in me enough to make it into my regular music rotation.

But the video for La Breeze will live on forever as one of my strange, strange music video favourites.