Away back in October 2008 we interviewed a super talented Indie pop group called, Six Red Carpets. Hailing from Milan in Italy they’ve have now produced a video of one of their songs on their Nightmares + Lullabies Album and we’ve invited them to tell us about it.
“How many days, how many dates and all you get is still the same”… I wrote these verses in a particular moment of my life. It was about my need of change, however I’m not going to talk about that!
Thanks to Liz, this time I’m going to write about the Six Red Carpets’ impressions about the making of their first video-clip.
In that period, all the songs for “Nightmares + Lullabies” (our album, that is still free to download from our website www.sixredcarpets.com) were written and most of them were recorded; however, I thought that something was missing in the concept of the work: to be as I meant it to be, the album needed a brilliant, fast, straight-2-minutes song.
Therefore I wrote “Fall Asleep”; Majlco and Leaf liked it from the very first listening, so we decided to work together on that song to put it in the album.
Then, after few months from the release of “Nightmares + Lullabies”, we began to talk about making a video to promote our work and to give something different to the ones who downloaded the album and who used to write about us on the web, the same ones who used to email me just to write the “hey dude, good work…keep it up” sort of things.
Six Red Carpets is a very creative band, composed by brilliant people; I’m writing this as I feel the need to underline that it’s not just something about me. And Six Red Carpets is not just a matter of music.
It’s a matter of Beauty and Love and Emotions, thus we don’t have to talk that much before creating something together… we just make it. “Fall Asleep” video is a perfect example: Leaf came to me one day in November to explain his idea:
“… Mills, you have to die. But don’t mind… it will be funny… the song is about your duplicity, it’s a dialogue between you and yourself. So, you’ll have to kill yourself. Because all the times you make a hard decision, all the times you feel so strong and you decide to change… you kill a part of yourself. You kill the part that didn’t want to change, the side that just didn’t want to give up to a new lifestyle, to a new way of thinking…”. That’s what Leaf said to me, drinking a black Irish beer. “God, he got it” I thought “this is what I really meant when I wrote the song”.
When Liz asked me to write an article about the making of the “Fall Asleep” video, I decided to interview Leaf, Majlco and Fly: The Six Red Carpets.
As I said before, Leaf wrote the main idea of the video, and when I told him about this article he said:
“When we decided to make the video of a song from “Nightmares + Lullabies”, I told the band I had the right idea for “Fall Asleep”. It took me some time to write down the right things on paper, but the general idea was there and it was ready to be explored by my subconscious. It was something about the ambivalence of music in our lives, mixed with the darkness of the guitar riffs and the nervous attitude of the whole song. The double voice of the song’s choruses reminds me of the Borgesian atmosphere of the Argentinean’s ‘Ficciones’, that’s why I opted for the duality that is inside everyone, a sort of doppelganger that describes the relation between the Six Red Carpets and the importance of Music for us all.
I wrote down my ideas, then I talked with Mills and we discussed a lot about the subject. He liked my idea from the very first time, and he tried to work on my subject suggesting new elements and making a lot of questions about every single detail. Once ready, we submitted the idea to Majlco, the video’s director. He started to work on it and after some days he was ready to use his camera.
The video of “Fall Asleep” is the result of hours of discussions, litres of Guinness and tons of emails between the four of us. I’m so happy for the result because the subject was not easy to represent; moreover, we had to do everything by ourselves and Majlco could find the best solutions in the simplest way”.
Fly had a different role: he joined the band after the songs writing and recording, but he was the guy that doubled me in the video. He told me that “all I can say about the production of this video is mainly about some funny things I did to help the guys; for example, I went to several sexy-shops to buy that sado-masochistic stuff (the sado mouth gag and handcuffs) you can see at the beginning of the video. Then, during the video, I had to double Mills as the ‘patient’: that was the scariest moment of my life because I thought the other Mills would have cut me for real”!
Majlco is the video director (and cameraman). He told me that “Even though it is a low-cost video, I think we have done a great job! I had to work as a director and as a cameraman as well; it was not easy to do both things at the same time, however I had a lot of fun. We had to use our cleverness to reinvent objects from everyday-life into film’s tools: for example, we used microphone’s and speaker‘s supports to replace the supports for the lights used on a regular set. The only semi-professional device we could use is a Sony HDV Camera. Thanks to that camera we could obtain a good video quality, even if the lights were few. The funniest thing is that I stayed still on a ladder in a not-so-safety position for at least two hours to shoot a part of the video from the top of the table… but during the final editing we decided to use only five seconds from that shot…”
There’s nothing more to say. If you want to see the video , you just have to get on the Six Red Carpets’ You Tube web page and see our video. And feel free, whoever you are, to contact us from our website Sixredcarpets.com or on our MySpace web pages to write what do you think about it.
