After hitting #1, Glass Animals‘ song “Heat Waves” is still in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 after 34 weeks. But the story behind the song’s video is just as interesting.
In the latest installment of Vevo Footnotes, Glass Animals singer Dave Bayley and director Colin Read explain how they filmed the video during lockdown in England. Dave is seen walking down an empty street in London, hauling a wagon full of TV sets. Shots of him taken from several different angles and heights were all crowdsourced from the people who actually live on that street.
“We had put little slips of paper in all of my neighbors’ mailboxes asking them to film me walking down the street at 7pm on Wednesday, and then upload the video to our dropbox,” Dave explains in a caption on the video. “We had no idea if it was actually going to work!”
“I had to walk down the street a couple of times because my glasses exploded and one of my lenses kept falling out,” he recalls. “One of the neighbors had to throw me a cable tie to hold them together…If you look closely, you can just about see it.”
As for the “meaning” of the video, Dave explains in a caption, “The song is about missing someone, and we realized we could reinterpret the lyric to be about togetherness and community during the lockdown.”
The clip ends with Dave going into a theater and setting up the TVs onstage. Each member of Glass Animals appears on a different TV and they “perform” the song together.
Colin explains, “We knew we had to end up somewhere, for Dave to bring his bandmates ‘alive’ and play with them, since they couldn’t be together in person.”
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