On Keane's official message board, fans will discuss Tim's lyrics, Tom's vocals or that odd changing drum line on Atlantic until kingdom come. Whether the band needs a fourth member or if guitars are a good thing. Tom's latest non-black shirt, the pretty lights at gigs and the photos that have been taken. Yet one thing is rarely discussed in depth, and that's the band's videos. Aside from being turned into screen-grabs, they don't often inspire the desire to talk about them in their own right.
Maybe a lot of people don't think it's that important. After all, if it gets people listening to the song and buying the album, what does it matter if the pictures on the screen are any good? Problem is, a song by itself won't convince people who've already decided they don't like the artist to go out and buy it. But music videos are increasingly being viewed as a standalone art form, and a great one might - just might - convince that same person to look at the band again through fresh eyes.
Music videos as a genre are now attaining such status that there are even places for like-minded music video geeks to meet one another: BUG, at the BFI every couple of months, screens a selection of videos from around the world. On a big screen. Hosted by Adam Buxton, possibly the original music video geek. It's sound and vision nirvana. The fact it even exists, never mind sells out weeks in advance, shows that more and more people are interested in celebrating the music video as art for its own sake, which is what a great video will always be.
In the Youtube age, videos are king, but the competition for attention has never been fiercer. It's no longer good enough for a video to be merely 'good' to sell a song. A great video will get repeat views, and good old word of mouth working to the artists' advantage. Whereas an average video... well, you might see it once on MTV, but unless you're already a fan of the artist, you probably won't pay too much attention to it. If music videos are regarded as adverts for the albums, the benefits of getting a really interesting video becomes obvious: you only have to look at how the drumming gorilla advert got so many people talking that one newspaper even tracked down the man in the gorilla suit. If a great advert can get people talking in an era of ever-decreasing attention spans, then why shouldn't we expect music videos to be great? Why shouldn't Keane make videos that get people talking?
The opposite opinion is that something geared towards commerce cannot possibly be considered art. On the face of it, Keane seem to be treating their videos as not much more than functional, record-selling high gloss, and not recognising the potential to expand their own creativity. Yes, music videos ultimately sell records, but this should not mean that they cannot be art at the same time. If they're allowed to exist on their own terms, they're possibly more likely to help sell records than anything else the label's marketing department can throw at an album. Look at the video for Stress by Justice, which it is fair to say may have upset a few people in France. It was simultaneously accused of both presenting the French police as racist and of being racist in itself, the French government banned it, it was put online and in a day it got more views than it ever would have had it been allowed to run on TV, from people who'd never heard of the band before. Elsewhere, the decidedly more mainstream Boyzone's Better made the news because a boy band member had a male partner in the video. Now I'm not suggesting that Keane should release a video where they go around beating up grannies, or have Tom and Tim hooking up - although I'm sure both of those would get people talking! - but they're both good examples of how music videos can get attention irrespective of the song they accompany. And every time the video gets discussed, the song gets mentioned, and people go to find the album...
Courting controversy isn't the only way of getting attention, though. The recent video for Wiley's Cash In My Pocket is practically custom-made for sending around in emails saying 'oi, check out this cool vid I found innit', looking like a bunch of soon-to-be-laid-off City workers got bored one evening. It's possible to be inventive, and make videos that get people talking, without having gigantic budgets or setting out to offend Daily Mail readers. So long as it has a point. But who can definitely say what the point is to any of the three videos from the Perfect Symmetry campaign so far? Keane themselves don't seem able to answer that question half the time. So either they don't know or they don't care, neither of which would be surprising as video and photo shoots are notoriously the parts of the job music artists hate most. But if it's the latter, they can't claim to be any better than the X Factor winners they're so fond of slagging off, if they disregard a fundamentally creative aspect of their 'product' when it should be rewarding for both band and filmmaker.
Yet, despite the videos themselves appearing to not look like a lot of thought has gone into them, it's worth pointing out that their current video commissioner, Dilly Gent, is best known for working with Radiohead, which is presumably not coincidental. Grant Gee, he of Meeting People is Easy fame, directed the Perfect Symmetry video. Tim spoke with pride on the band's website about the Spiralling video, and a deeper look into the murky world of blogs shows that they actually pushed their label into making that specific video. Certainly, that's the video that relies the least on that old tactic of 'if you don't understand it then it's too intelligent for you' that so many creative types use to disguise mediocrity. A bit like the video for Perfect Symmetry, if we're being honest.
Being fair, the Perfect Symmetry video has one major obstacle that it can't control, which is that awful radio edit. In cutting down the song's length, they've let the entire meaning be changed by the removal of certain lyrics. I wonder if the pitch for the video was based on the original album version, possibly those very lines that have been cut. Regardless, it's difficult to see how Joe Average, who probably doesn't watch music videos on a cinema screen, could work out what's going on in that video on a first, second or even third watch. For all its shiny mirrors and pretty lights, the video doesn't really draw the viewer in all that much to want to find out more. If the video's theme is supposed to be 'Hell is other people, and TV screens', showing lots of nice-looking images and expecting people to connect the dots isn't going to cut it, particularly if you want deep and meaningful. As it is, although Grant Gee's efforts are always going to be better than the average, I'm left feeling like the 'it's highbrow so of course you don't get it' excuse is being invoked to cover the fact that the people making it don't know what it's about either. And if they do know what it's about, they're doing a pretty good job of hiding it. With that in mind, is it any surprise that on the week of the song's release, the Perfect Symmetry video was nowhere to be found in the top 50 TV airplay charts, while months-old songs from The Killers and Kings of Leon featured in the top 10?
I'm slightly biased here, in that I am Plot Girl: that irritating movie buff everybody knows who prefers Indiana Jones' cheesy dialogue to Ingmar Bergman's indecipherable 'films'. I long for music videos that have beginnings and ends and actual stories to tell. Basically I want a new Thriller. That said, two of my favourite videos from 2008 had zero story, and most definitely were all about the looks. Paris by Friendly Fires is the epitome of shiny mirrors and pretty lights, but when that's the entire point there's nothing to do but gawp at the human kaleidoscope; Wild Beasts' Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants on the other hand takes Escher's Droste effect to its logical cinematic conclusion and literally hypnotises you. Both all about the pretty pictures and not at all about any kind of plot, but they get away with it because the entire point is to make you look at it and get sucked in. If Keane made a video where it was all about patterns on the screen, I would have no objections. They do seem to prefer videos with meaning though, which is fine, but the concepts aren't strong enough, so even the band can't say what's going on.
The problem isn't necessarily with complex plots: look at the movie Donnie Darko as an example. The original version gives absolutely no answers as to what's going on, but you want to watch to find out, because at the core is a very simple but watertight plot: Donnie has 28 days to try and save the world. It doesn't need anything else, and the worst thing anybody ever did with that movie was let Richard Kelly make a directors' cut where he explained it all. Stories don't need every detail spelled out, but what is shown needs to be hole-proof if you're going to get away with it. You can't expect major character development in a three minute pop video, but when you have a plot/meaning-based video, you expect it to go somewhere. These latest Keane videos, ultimately, go nowhere. The Spiralling video wanders off into random imagery so often that the point never hits home; Perfect Symmetry doesn't progress at all, even to say it's supposed to be stuck in limbo; and The Lovers Are Losing... well, a TV listings writer summed it up perfectly with 'Run super slim Tom, run!' If there's an additional purpose, it's indecipherable to the extent that I'm really paying attention to nothing else.
It should be said that all three videos, whatever their flaws, look stunning. And if that was the only point then that would be marvellous. But these videos want to be more than that, and they don't get there. They're unmemorable, and so the songs they accompany are too. Half the time, more attention is dedicated to the big name directing or appearing in the video than the video itself. Keane have had this problem before, with the Crystal Ball video and its poorly executed plot about estate agents losing their souls, that is really only about Giovanni Ribisi's star turn. Same goes for Atlantic's 'ground-breaking' video - did Irvine Welsh honestly think nobody would notice it was a straight rip-off of The Seventh Seal?!
How to fix all this? Well, aside from looking at other bands' videos, they could start by looking back at their own early videos. Everybody's Changing is all concept but makes sense on its own terms. Is It Any Wonder is all about feeling slightly sick on a rollercoaster you can't escape; A Bad Dream managed to play on the then-recent band troubles without once making a reference to fighting, drugs or general band chaos, and plays the minimalist cool card to boot; Somewhere Only We Know is cute while being decidedly odd; and Bedshaped not only looks gorgeous, the plot works beautifully on its own even in truncated form, as well as with the song. Only ever working with one director is a fools' game, but there are many lesser-known but still great directors out there. It IS possible to make a video that looks great and has something to say as well. Those earlier videos are great because they, like Keane themselves, are a bit quirky, a bit weird and all the more magical for it. Nowadays it's gone more shiny, more corporate and if we're being honest, more bland. There's benefits to occasionally going for the star director or actor and getting a guaranteed production, but as the Perfect Symmetry and Crystal Ball videos show, maybe that isn't always the way to go if you want a video that's less about someone else's fame and more about existing for the band and its own sake.
So long as I see a video I want to watch again, I'm happy. I just wish that Keane would make more videos that make people sit up and pay attention. And not just because they have Tom running in them.