Political Science

On The Making Of A Devilishly Good Music Video

I’m excited to present the music video for ‘Political Science’ by my dad, Peter Head, who has been performing Randy Newman songs in his extensive repertoire alongside his own originals, jazz standards and an eclectic variety of songs by Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Nina Simone, Billy Joel and Gram Parsons in piano bars and nightclubs and dive bars and cocktail lounges etc since the early 70s, and has just completed a fantastic Randy Newman tribute album, Randyman.

He will turn 80 one day after Dolly Parton next year, and although he’s done just about everything else, this is actually his first solo music video, and I’m pretty proud of our combined efforts to create it, with nothing but an iPhone, imagination and determination.

One of the venues where he plays regularly has this great tinselly backdrop and allowed us to film there over a couple of sessions - the first time we filmed while the venue was open and we didn’t want to get in anyone’s way so Peter was lip-syncing the song while hardly being able to hear it over the pulsing dance music playing through the venue speakers - its a testament to his knowledge of the song inside out that he was able to manage that! The second session we filmed when the venue was still setting up and nice and quiet.

I had gathered up a huge selection of seemingly random but relevant props from around the house; copies of ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’ and ‘Dante’s Inferno’, a box set of World of War records, a Nerf bullet that cunningly resembled a cigar, an old world globe, my mum’s Japanese fan, a ukulele, cold weather gear, binoculars and various tools that looked like they might be used to set a bomb off, including a bike pump and a vintage film light meter. We stopped on the way to pick up a Devil costume from the Dollar Shop and filmed a variety of scenes and setups with me yelling orders at Peter to dance, smile evilly and jump like a kangaroo til we figured we’d covered all angles, then Peter had a stiff drink and I had a big slice of honey cake and we both collapsed.

Editing was a slow and challenging journey for me as I had pretty wobbly basic skills to begin with, but with some guidance and assistance from my very experienced and helpful husband Aden, I finally got to a place where I was pretty free flowing and I’m very happy with the end result - the overall vision/theme/mood board was ‘nightclub in hell, starring the Devil’, which serves the uncannily timely lyrics perfectly. I am truly astonished by Newman’s prescience with this subversive, satirical song that he wrote in 1972, but could just as easily have been written yesterday - a real testament to timeless songwriting and a deep understanding of the ways of the world and its all too human leaders.

We give them money, but are they grateful?
No, they’re spiteful and they’re hateful
They don’t respect us, so let’s surprise them
We’ll drop the big one and pulverize them

lyrics from Political Science (Randy Newman)

I was also very impressed by Peter’s darkly comic performance, his deep knowledge of the dark side of politics meant he was really able to inhabit his role!

We’d love to hear your comments on YouTube!

I’m excited to make more music videos now; I can’t help feeling the more skills I get, the more unstoppable I become! I love making things more than anything.

Bombs away!

Lo x