After 8 months of endless work, here it is!
Directed and edited by John Beck Hofmann
(Side note: John Beck Hofmann is the videographer and cinematographer for NASA/JPL and directed the viral hit "7 Minutes of Terror" Mars Rover landing video last month which was millions of views on youtube. He's recently been featured on all major television networks.)
For those of you who had forgotten, I spoke to Mimi months ago about the video:
Jon: I have seen some stills from your ‘Black Valentine’ video and you’re standing on top of a castle looking very gothic. So tell me about the video, what’s the story? I want to know how come the girl who sings ‘The Starving Artist’ ends up standing on top of a castle looking gothic. It’s just a bit far out for me. I just want to see how it works.
Mimi: Well, like I said every one of my songs has a life of its own, and ‘Black Valentine’ probably is my second favourite on the album if not maybe my favourite....it depends on my mood really, but ‘Black Valentine’ is about the darkness that lives in all of us.
You know, all of us I feel are a balance between light and dark, and that kind of struggle within, biblically and everywhere, you know from the beginning of time, like light and dark are equal.
‘Black Valentine’, it’s kind of like, it’s the video’s struggle that darkness that takes over me and me fighting it off and, I don’t know, it’s ... I wrote the song in my apartment, but in my mind I had an alternate reality and it’s like, you know, this girl, the story of this girl who lives in this castle and has this huge kind of Edward Scissorhands-like studio with keyboards, and synthesisers and knobs. As you’ll see in the video, it’s this huge room of equipment where I’m creating the noises and the sounds , and it’s very industrial sounding. And then, like she writes it and then she goes and she’s fighting off the darkness. It’s like a whole battle so you kinda just see within her mind what’s going on and you don’t really know where she is exactly, you just see she is in this castle and she’s creating all these noises and stuff, and what’s going on.
The late great Douglas Adams once said that the invention of time travel changed the human language. Although I haven't invented time travel (despite the fact that last night in Southampton was 1968 all round) I know precisely what he meant. For example, the day before yesterday, Mimi Page sent me this talking about tomorrow (which was yesterday) and now it is the day after, which isn't tomorrow, but today. Confused? Hell yes. But the track in question is eminently groovy...
I don't know what it is about this artwork which I pinched quite unashamedly from her Facebook page, but there is something elegantly Joy Divisionesque about it/
