Vincent Haycock dropped Spiritualized’s latest semi-expurgated video — true to form and just as raw as their last video. The video follows a young girl running away from home to escape the dead-end reality of her moribund, post-Soviet town. She meets all the pitfalls of a young girl running from home: questionable choices clouded by the prospects of danger, seduction and violence.
Vince told us that inspiration for the video came from Sam Shepard’s Cruising Paradise. “He writes soliloquies of people out in desert lands, lonely people,” Vince explained, “Spiritualized really work with a similar language of loneliness, and it made sense to apply that feeling when I heard the track.”
Vince and crew decided to shoot the video in Iron City, Germany (sounds like an awesome place to vay-k), which is right on the border Poland. He also casted this ridiculous twenty year-old stunt rider Chesca Miles as the lead — which to us, was amazing choice for both her performance and inexplainable prowess on a Ducati Monster.
“The casting process took a really long time,” Vince said. “But eventually we found Chesca, who is best female stunt drivers in the world. We had her on riding with no hands, running red lights, flying down the Autobahn, and doing huge wheelies. There were even these huge crashes that she just walked away from. She’s twenty-years old and she pushes this bike around like a toy, it’s insane.”
In three full shoot days there were two full-on crashes, twelve burnt-out tires, one wrecked bike, a broken whipped cream charger, and a near arrest after police caught the crew filming a high-speed tracking shot on the Autobahn heading towards Berlin at 4am.
“Chesca was doing a full inverted wheelie and was going past 90-degres — basically upside down – with the back of the bike scraping on the road,” said Vince, describing one of the near crashes. “On car commercials there are all these union regulations, and so much money put into safety. We went to Germany so we could get away with things like not having paramedics.”