Hasta La Ideas

Placebo has released a sequel to its inventive ‘Unfortunate Details’ promo of last year. In the new video – for track Loud Like Love – viewers are given another curious scenario to examine, while Bret Easton Ellis provides the voiceover.

In this film, the story begins with a young, beautiful woman vomiting dramatically over a young man at a pool party. With Easton Ellis as our guide, we are shown how to read all the various clues that appear in the scene in order to work out what might have happened. As in the previous ‘Unfortunate Details’ video (for song Too Many Friends, shown below), the film is clever, unusual and very stylish.

Both films were written and directed by Saman Kesh, who reveals that there will also be a third video to come. “The band and I always had the notion of a cryptic trilogy that dealt with social interactions across three times,” he says. “Too Many Friends was about the isolationist future we could possibly live in. In Loud Like Love, we show a time that was almost the exact opposite. In the late 60s, it was a time of sexual revolution and almost ‘too much’ interaction.

“To keep the idea fresh from Too Many Friends, we wanted to focus deeper on our main characters and their relations to one another. On top of that, we wanted the video to be more invitational, poppy and overall ‘fun’, which would make sense with the time period.”

On working again with Easton Ellis, who also voiced the Too Many Friends promo, Kesh commented: “Bret is a champ. He has become the voice of these videos, and there isn’t a better person to really put the cherry on top our ice cream. The process was essentially like working with an actor, and Bret embodied the ‘unreliable narrator’ with flying ‘psychedelic’ colours!”

Credits:
Director: Saman Kesh
Production company: 890 Productions, in association with Skunk