Lil Chief's Best Unloved Music Videos

The artists on Lil Chief Records are a creative bunch and have produced some remarkable videos over the years. Obvious examples are the self-produced effort by Princess Chelsea, which made her song “The Cigarette Duet” into a viral hit. Equally effective was The Brunettes’ video for “Her Hairagami Set”, which also had a great run on YouTube. However, there have also been a number of great videos produced by bands on the label, which have sadly gone under the radar. Therefore I thought I’d take the time to put the spotlight onto some of them.

One of my personal favourites was Voom’s music video for “We’re So Lost.” It’s a beautifully haunting song and it was one reason why we as a label initially considered compiling two separate albums out of the material that the group brought to us – one album to capture their well-known fuzzed-out rock and another to capture their emotionally-direct slower numbers. The video was created by Trophy Wife, who also made the video for “Her Hairagami Set” and who are currently producing one for The Eversons. It’s a slow-paced piece, which is probably why it only achieved a couple of showings on television before disappearing off the radar. However, we see it as our version of “Watership Down” but with guinea pigs instead of rabbits…

Next up is “Bright Lights” by the Nudie Suits. It’s surely one of their finest efforts and is well-matched by the black-and-white video that was created for the song by their former bass player, John Paine (you might also know his name from his time in legendary Auckland group, Hallelujah Picassos). Unfortunately, Mr Pain was a little too talented and ended up being snapped up by a company in Singapore, but at least he left us with this great video…

It’s got to be said that producing black-and-white videos is pretty much suicidal if you want to get shown on music television (unless you’re Adele, that is). Though the Nudies Suits weren’t our only group to roll the dice. The Ruby Suns’ video for “Tane Mahuta” did manage a decent swag of views on YouTube (around 60,000 over the three uploaded versions), but it hardly got a look in on local television, despite having a couple of remarkable pieces of digital trickery. The director of the piece was Marco Viduarre, who has always been a great supporter of the group (and our label generally). He made this video while working long days helping create the weta-like creatures that populated the forests of King Kong (and his video for “There Are Birds” was done, despite days spent working on Avatar). But anyway, here’s the video … btw, I’m the one in the horsehead…

Moving forward to the present day, I’d also like to include “Hyacinth Girl” by one of our newer acts, The Eversons. This group has actually achieved a good deal of interest online and their career is only just getting started, so it’s probably not quite right to list the following video as “unloved.” What's more, their next video is being made by Trophy Wife (who did the Brunettes and Voom videos mentioned earlier in this piece) and the new Eversons album is due out very soon (more info next week!). In the meantime, hope you enjoy this great little piece of film-work...

So there you go. What a great set of videos, huh? Well, I like them a lot, anyways! And hopefully one of the other peeps from Lil Chief will post some of their favourites here soon. But while I still have control of the blog, I may as well take the chance to push one of the videos that I actually made myself … Funnily enough, it was actually during a trip as a member of The Ruby Suns that I made both two videos for my former band, The Tokey Tones - the video below and the one for "Juxtapose" (made at the Melbourne Aquarium, which I recommend if you’re ever down that way). If you look carefully at the start of this video, then you’ll see the sleeping forms of two members of the tour party - Mark Stebben (original Ruby Suns bass player) and soundguy extraordinaire, Bevan Smith (Signer)…