(I can’t believe I’m typing this, but) here’s the debut of “Don’t Cha Know” by Andy Bell from Erasure! This pretty song is from his forthcoming solo album. (The legendary Erasure are also celebrating their 40th year together this year and will be releasing a 20th studio album in the next 12 months to celebrate. Big year!).
I had to completely disconnect my brain from my heart and my soul to work with Andy, being the biggest Erasure fan since childhood. How do you just hang out and direct the voice that is the soundtrack to every era of your life and act normally? Your body goes into shock autopilot, then it wears off and you realise this is just a beautiful, creative, loving soul. I feel so blessed to know Andy and his incredibly wonderful and generous partner Stephen; I feel like family now. They beam with light. A massive thanks goes out to the incredible Richard for everything he’s done to help make this happen. What a great friend for years.
When I first heard the song, it had a spiritual feeling for me. I felt like it was about needing to connect with something much larger than life. When you experienced so much that the world has to offer, you yearn for a bigger meaning than what you can tangibly feel.
So, I thought maybe Andy is searching for something in this video. I had him walking through a bleak, post apocalyptic world where everyone is gone, but I wanted it to look beautiful still; much like some natural disasters like forest fires have an odd, stark beauty to them inadvertently. A tragic beauty. From the start I wanted to see Andy in all white, juxtaposed within these tall, wintery trees like frozen black fingers. It was like the art of children’s books I’d escape into when I was a child. Andy looked almost innocently baptismal and protected within this mangle of lines and shapes.
The constantly obscuring “fog” also was symbolic, like walking through mysterious clouds, not unlike faith itself. Faith isn’t an appointment or a formula. It’s the courage to walk into something you can’t see and something that normally shouldn’t be real in order for it to reveal itself in discovery. It’s that faith to place your foot into the cloud and let go.
Andy then finds a church at an abandoned village by a lake, so he feels it could be a place for some sort of enlightenment. Much to his surprise, the church is even stripped of its pews, with only sun beams and vines as its decor; and a cross on its side.
Andy falls down at the cross, perhaps feeling its the end of a fruitless journey, but he looks up and begins to realise that spirituality was never dead in him. He sees other dimensions and universes. He finds what he was looking for and has a transformative metamorphosis. An enlightenment.
When I personally think of spirituality or creation, I feel it goes hand in hand with science. We were designed to get to this point through evolution. One “God day” could be 4 billion human years, etc. Molecules in the gulf of space are programmed to coalesce towards forming life in ideal conditions and also have that same programming to eschew negative, non-life outcomes. There’s weird and uniquely different life here on Earth under every rock, in every bound of atmosphere and every droplet of water a microcosm of magic. And it’s all designed to somehow keep going, not designed to destroy itself by default but the miraculous opposite. But I digress; this isn’t really about any organised religion or particular world faith or even proselytising. It’s just about peering outside of our imperfect reality and gazing deep into another dimension to find value, purpose and meaning in it all.
So Andy dances. The cross turns into a glimmering nightclub beacon of glittering light like a lighthouse of hope; the mundane crystallises into the transmundane. Then he walks out into the now-night with full confidence as a new person with absolute no fear.
I wanted to show a new, mature side of Andy but I also wanted to extract the Andy we all know: the dazzling showman with that unmistakably versatile voice; the dancing, the emotion, the drama. I wanted it there in spades, bound up in the bows of introspection. I made Andy dance for hours (great cardiovascular health!) in the cold. As I tortured him, I kept asking for “Bjork on cocaine” to I give him some sort of guidance within the smoke and triple-sped-up song. It was a frantic dream.
Anyway, that’s how I saw the song through the lens of my reality. I wanted it to speak to each viewer universally individually in a deeper way. I wanted it to be pretty and cinematic. And I wanted to give Andy’s beautiful soul a red carpet to dance and be featured on.
You can quietly hear the bells of this ghost church in the opening shot of the video where Andy is walking through the forest. An eerie but portent beckoning from another dimension.
Director: Stephano Barberis
Producer: David Angelski
Field Producer: Arden Marow Ross
Production Co-ordinator: Dawne-Ginger Schabler
Executive Producer: David Angelski
Production Company: Selini Films
Director of Photography: Cliff Hokanson
1st Camera Assistant: Jesse Davidson
2nd Camera Assistant: Emily Manley
Gaffer: Dallas Groening
Cam/LX: Tyler Brett Newman
Cam/LX: Shahrokh Goudarzi
Editor: Stephano Barberis
Colourist: Stephano Barberis
A.I. Graphics: Stan Borysenko
Additional Graphics: Stephano Barberis
Hair/Makeup Stylist: Shelly Ford Baxter
Production Designer: Arden Ross
Lead Set Dresser: Greg Logaridis
Assistant Set Dresser: Graham Heathfield
BTS: Gilbert Murere
Stephano Barberis is represented by Al Rosen at TrePalm.
Shot on location in Langley, BC (Vancouver) at Jamestown Movie Set with huge thanks to Kevin MacInnes
Special thanks to D Stephen Moss, Richard Eis, Andy Bell, Dave Audé, God for the gorgeous weather and Dr Martens.