Fatboy Slim – ‘Champion Sound’ – Director Steve Glashier
We got asked to do this off the back of ‘That Old Pair of Jeans’. Assuming there’d be a budget we wrote a treatment that involved robots playing computer games: it involved flying to Japan, helicopters, that kind of stuff. We got it costed up and I think it came out at £70 grand, so obviously we never got a reply on that one. In reaction we thought, what’s the cheapest way to shoot a video? And we came up with the mobile phones, ‘cuz we’d seen the Nokia N93 and we liked the look of it but you couldn’t get them in the UK. We rang up Nokia, they sent some over, and we started working stuff out. The dominos needed a lot planning, because it had to run in time with the track, but once that was sorted it was just a case of choreographing the girls with the phones. I’m pretty sure this was the first music video to be shot on moblies ,The set up was painstaking: to give you an example, we had to file down the bottom of each of the biscuits so they stood up properly! Once it was all on place, which took the best part of the day, we had to leave it over knight: I remember closing the door as gently as I possibly could. It took a few attempts, but we got it done in one take the following day and we had a Fatboy Slim video under our belt. At the time, doing a video for Norman was a bit like the Holy Grail. Everything they say about doing a Fatboy Slim video is true: you do get offered everything, and we DID get offered everything, but everything was really, really shit! Be careful for what you wish for ‘cuz you might get it, that was the really big lesson we all learned form this.
