Conventions of a Music Video: The 1975- Girls

I thought this was a really interesting interview with the lead singer Matthew Healy from The 1975. He talks about the expectations and conventions of an indie/ alternative video and how he and his band decided to subvert the stereotypes and create a quirky and bold video. This music video for their latest song 'Girls' is very unlike their previous work such as 'Chocolate and 'Sex' as it uses very bold colouring throughout, whereas they fall into the conventional norms of an indie video with a very simplistic atmosphere and the use of black and white throughout. Healy makes an interesting point about how the audience react to the change and it suggests that we as an audience expect these conventions and it is perhaps more enticing if these conventions are subverted.

"When we released our last video (Sex), people really reacted to the fact that it was in colour. There was a lot of conjecture and talk surrounding it - due to the fact that it was an unexpected stylistic change. It was brought to our attention that certain people thought we were 'conforming to a record companies wishes' along with other expected and unexpected clichés. Obviously this couldn't be further from the truth, we are lucky enough to be surrounded by a group of individuals whose mantra centers on facilitating our creative wishes, we found the whole idea of us being told what to do fascinating. The story of the band who suffer at the hands of a record label shortly after a delirious rise is a tale as old as time. So we kinda wanted to make a tongue in cheek video about it. Twinned with our love of 80's pop, its innocence, grandiosity and conceptual ideas in music videos - we wanted to make a video about a record label’s attempt at enforced conformity. We got our mate Adam down to a studio in Los Angeles at the start of our USA tour, got 4 models and made a video about us not wanting to make a video." Matthew Healy – The 1975