Jonas Bjerre On Music Videos

We had a little computer failure recently and lost quite a bit of valuable stuff with it. Here’s only a short part of the interview we had with Jonas Bjerre (who just turned 33 today). The following read is quite dated for it was made in Copenhagen on June 24th (Mew themselves experienced some computer problems on that day, and they had to play their first show in two years without backdrops)…

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MewX: You’re not completely in charge with the visuals anymore, are you?

Jonas Bjerre: No. I thought, you know, when we finished the album we were all quite exhausted and we knew that we were going to tour soon and at the same time I’ve been talking a lot to Martin de Thurah about doing music videos and we wanted to do something where everything would fit together, because in the past, my visuals, they were quite different from the music videos, so we kind of… I still do a little bit.

MX: What can we expect from your show tonight?

JB: Well, I’m not entirely sure, because I think that, you know… I don’t know if they’ll fix the problem for tonight, so we may have to play without them (backdrops). I’m hoping they’ll fix it. There’s been some problems with the computers.

MX: So what did Martin do?

JB: We’ve done three music videos with him. They’re quite interesting, very different, you know. I haven’t seen anything finished yet, but they’re very sort of… they’re not like music videos, more like little films and there’s real sound in some of them, I think. We had these weird experiences making them, you know, we went to this castle and there was this hypnotist who put us in a trance and all these weird things. And the other one is… one where we’re not even in it. Like nature versus something very geometrical.

MX: And they are going to be aired on television?

JB: Yeah, I guess so… and maybe the internet. The internet is very important now for music videos because MTV don’t really play music videos anymore, they just play reality-tv. So actually, YouTube is probably the biggest media for music videos now.

MX: There were two names – which I can’t remember now – were also attached to these videos?

JB: Yes. Adam Hashemi and Lasse Martinussen, they are also directing. They each had like an idea they really burned for, so they’re all directing together everything, but I think the one with nature is mostly Martin’s passion and the one with the hypnosis is more Adam’s thing, so they’re kind of all working together.

MX: Is Introducing Palace Players going to be the first music video?

JB: I think so. I think that one is almost finished. Repeaterbeater is definitely going to be a video, and Beach, so those three. That’s gonna happen.

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The videos for Repeaterbeater and Beach are to be released online very soon. It’s about time.