Sound And Vision: John Carney
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we discuss two odd music videos by John Carney.
John Carney has made a name for himself as a director of films in which music is heavily featured. He broke through with the drama Once, which starred Glen Hansard, lead singer of The Frames, as a busker on the streets of Dublin, who falls in love with a Czech woman who is also a musician (played by Markéta Irglová), in a relationship that centers around music and miscommunication. You see them falling for each other, through playing songs together. Irglová and Hansard had such a natural chemistry, that they later started a relationship for a few years, and started the band The Swell Season together. Carney himself returned to the music well often, with films like Begin Again, Sing Street, Flora and Son and the recent Power Ballad.
The main reason that Carney seems to return to the theme of music as a unifying force, is that he started out as a musician himself. He was bassist for the aforementioned The Frames, before he went into another direction and started to make films, something he called an "almost religious calling". Combining his love for film and music in his work, he later wrote entries in the soundtracks to his own films Zonad, Begin Again, Flora and Son and the series Modern Love, for which he is the showrunner.
But has he directed music videos? Yes. He directed a few music videos for The Frames, although I found it impossible to confirm which ones for sure. That the current internet gets flooded with A.I. misinformation isn't helping. When people say online that Star Star by the Frames was directed by Carney, they are wrong (it was directed by Daragh McDonagh). The source of the misinformation? Grokipedia, the A.I.-generated alternative for Wikipedia. Which is never a credible source. Because when you click on the links it "sources" its information from, the music videos that Carney made for The Frames are never mentioned by name, even though the fucking A.I. machine will name names and numbers confidently and erroneously. A.I. is actively making the work of journalists like myself, who refuse to use it, harder, by misinforming people who take what it says at face value, who then will confidently spread false info.
Two music videos I could confirm where from Carney are two oddities that need some explanation. The first is a song called Orange by comedian David O'Doherty (see below). In an episode of The Modest Adventures of David O'Doherty, directed by Carney, O'Doherty decided to game the charts. It turns out that if you want to make it into the Irish top 30, at the time you needed to sell only about 312 singles. Doherty decided to make a fairly awful song, with a fairly awful, tongue in cheek music video (also directed by Carney), and only press 312 copies on his own laptop via CD-R. The back of the CD's package even had his phone number on them, that if you couldn't get the song to play, you could call him, so he would play the song for you over the phone. The song did eventually place #30 on the charts, a modest success.
The music video for the song in question is very tongue in cheek, and is a prime example of just playing out the lyrics on display (a pet peeve of mine), albeit done here in a deliberately cheesy way. The footage is interspliced with images of O'Doherty, singing off-key, in a white suit on a beach. A nod to famous boybands Boyzone and Westlife, who had done the same in several videos (as seen in the Richard Curtis Sound and Vision about Take That). The song and music video are both about miscommunication, and a mismatch between potential lovers, accidentally playing out like a bit of a precursor to Once, which has a famously downbeat ending.
The second very Irish oddity is a charity song by U2 and friends, called The Ballad for Ronnie Drew. The music video itself isn't that interesting, being a standard affair of many artists in a studio performing the song. More interesting is that again, this was for a song that was only distributed and promoted in Ireland, even going as far as never being released on CD outside of Ireland. It was a huge hit in the country, selling many copies, the benefits of which went to the Irish Cancer Society. The central theme of the song is an ode to Ronnie Drew, a performer for famed Irish band The Dubliners, who had cancer at the time. Many of the other Dubliners show up in the video, as does a huge roster of famous Irish musicians.
Ironically, Glen Hansard, although part of the roster, is nowhere to be seen in the music video, as he had to record his lines over the phone. The reason? The Frames-singer was in Los Angeles, to perform at the Oscars, for his song Falling Slowly, made for the film... Once. It is a delicious bit of trivia, that John Carney directed his former fellow bandmate to an Oscar, and then made a music video where that bandmate couldn't be present, because of said Oscar. Fate works in mysterious ways.
