- Music
- 11 Aug 20
Forget The Wire, Peaky Blinders and Game Of Thrones, Aidan Gillen's IMDB page will forever declare that he got to play the reptilian chat show host in the 'A Hero's Death' video. He tells us why he took the gig.
“The main thing was that the track and the script were good – overambitious of course for a day’s shoot, including a melting face, but those kind of impossible tasks are always attractive.
“We weren’t on a Duran Duran-type budget, but it was still pulled off with a real panache I thought. Everyone did their job right – and who doesn’t want to wear a claret coloured polo neck with a blue suit and have a voodoo doll version of yourself get pecked apart by a papier-mâché crow?
“There was a good bit of necessary messing around going on, trying to make the fellas laugh or look pissed off or whatever. Bryan Quinn who plays the puppermaster was great at riffing and improvising stuff and really kept the engine going that day. We probably could have made a feature-length video out of all the stuff we had in the end… and thank god we didn't! Director Hugh Mulhern kept it slick and uncluttered. I was offered the doll of myself as a going home present but I declined. It vibed me out too much.
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“While ‘A Hero’s Death’ has some real defining subtlety buried in it, the one that excites me most sonically is ‘Televised Mind’. It feels different to what came before and while I hate to make the easy jump to referring to other bands – it happens probably too much with Fontaines – I’m going to do it anyway just because I want to say the name ‘Killing Joke’ and note how listening to this track flicked a switch in my head that had been untouched for a while. A clean sheer sound like that isn’t as easy to pull off as it might seem. This band really know what they’re doing.”