THREE COLOURS: GREEN

call me naive, but I never realised music video location was so hard. I m not talking about camera angles, and ensuring that the lighting is perfect or that no-one steps into shot. The bit I had difficulty with is locating where the bloody thing is being shot in the first place.

Having coerced (nay, bribed) one of my friends into driving me to Galway in the first place, he was then on chauffeur duty all day as we tried to locate anything resembling a camera crew or band. I should probably put the residents minds at rest in Galway, Barna and Spiddal if anyone noticed two suspicious-looking young men travelling around in a red mini, fear not, it was just us searching for a video shoot. Many phone calls later and we finally made it to the beautiful Connemara Coast Hotel, where we were to meet up with Ocean Colour Scene.
Arriving early, a quiet bite to eat was the order of the hour, sitting at a window where we could spy anything remotely like a camera crew on arrival. Half an hour later we decided to wait in reception, where we were greeted by the band s manager Chris Cradock and video producer, Angie Daniell, who had been waiting for us to appear. In the immortal words of Homer (Simpson), Doh! We walked out of the hotel and around to the bus-park at the rear, facing onto the magnificent Galway Bay, where, lo and behold, there were two fucking huge trucks, along with the band and the film crew.
Doh and double Doh !
Everyone seemed in fine form, with Blackstreet s No Diggity pumping from a ghettoblaster and everyone lounging on the grass sipping beer and rolling what looked to be extremely large spliffs. In fact the ghettoblaster was to play a vital role in the day s filming, as the band chilled out between takes to the sounds of everyone from Aretha Franklin to Muddy Waters.
It has to be said that Ocean Colour Scene exude star quality. It s not that they re arrogant or pretentious; they just give off a sense of cool confidence which visibly sets them apart from everybody else present.
Steve Cradock (guitarist, and son of manager Chris) has changed a lot from the fresh-faced youth on the cover of the Moseley Shoals LP. His hair is longer, and is covered with a Fisherman s Blues-era Mike Scott cap. Shirtless and frighteningly skinny, he laughs and jokes with everyone in the immediate vicinity.
Damon Minchella (bassist) is the epitome of cool, sitting by the truck in what look suspiciously like designer threads and shades.
Oscar Harrison (drummer) lounges in silence, giving the distinct impression that he does not wish to be disturbed.
Simon Fowler (singer) is the comedian. A livewire bundle of energy, he is constantly dancing, singing or mimicking all and sundry, his latest phase being to recite sketches verbatim from Brass Eye and The Day Today.
It has been a busy year so far for the four Brummies. Between touring Europe and putting the finishing touches to their new album, Marchin Already, the quartet have hardly been idle. They took a break from mixing the new album (which should be in the shops in September) to come to Ireland, playing Dublin s Olympia and Galway s Big Top before heading further west to record the video for Traveller s Tune .
It eventually transpired that Barna Woods was our destination, where the band were to be the subjects of some moody-bastards-in-a-forest scenes. The filming of this took approximately three hours.
In actual fact, most of these three hours was spend sitting on a log chatting and trying to relieve the boredom while the camera crew set up, dragging a motherfucker of a spotlamp along the path to try to recreate a sort of dappled light, streaming through the trees effect.
Patience is a virtue one wouldn t normally associate with rock bands, but I have to admit that throughout the entire 180 minutes, the quartet are extremely good-natured, without a temper tantrum or over-inflated ego in sight.
Damon is the butt of many jibes about his (allegedly) Gucci jacket. Steve and Simon are their usual effervescent selves, laughing and joking all the time, while smoking copious amounts of weed. Oscar displays his normal coolness, although his calm demeanour left him on one occasion. When some sort of nasty creepy-crawly bug landed on Simon s leg, the usually unflappable skin-thumper screamed like a demented Penelope Pitstop and darted about 25 yards to safety, away from the evil beast.
One question was bothering me, though. How come four Brummies ended up recording their brand new video on the highways and byways of Connemara (not that there are too many highways in the region)?
I ve no idea, answers Simon honestly. It s probably got something to do with the fact that it needed to be done by a certain date and this was the best time to do it. And also because we knew the scenery would be nice.
The singer admits that recording videos is not his favourite pastime, but that it s not the worst thing in the world. He also confesses that he s not really sure what the video for Traveller s Tune is about, just that it won t take too long .
Producer Angie Daniell is more forthcoming: As the song is called Traveller s Tune , we wanted a bit of road movie stuff, so we shot some footage from the bonnet of a car. We also wanted a bit of mystery in it, so we shot in the forest at night and during the day.
The theme is basically about travelling, based on the fact that they were in Ireland. What we wanted to do was to keep it relatively abstract, so you have a suggestion of Ireland with the coastline, the greenery and the roads, but we didn t go the tourist board route because that would just look so corny.
The weather also played a sizeable part in the recording of the video, with the elements dictating when they shot certain scenes. For example, the band intended to record some footage on Spiddal Pier on the Sunday evening, but the onset of heavy rain made that impossible, so it had to be delayed until the following day.
There was a lot of running around, trying to follow the weather, admits Angie, fighting tiredness after a manic two days of filming.
We got absolutely everything that we wanted, she enthuses, sounding relieved. It was just quite hectic and we had to reshuffle and reschedule quite a lot. Some of the crew were local and they were fantastic. Everyone seemed quite excited because, for a lot of the people, it was their first time working on a pop video. So it went really well.
Even if Simon s not sure why the video is being shot here, Ocean Colour Scene seem to genuinely like Ireland. Arriving on Friday for their Olympia gig (which was fuckin banging according to Damon), they made the three-hour trip to Galway immediately after the show.
That s the brilliant thing about this country, it takes three hours to get from one side to the other. We ve got some time off in August and I m hoping to bring the car over and just drive around, says Simon, who admits that Irish audiences seem to have really embraced OCS to their collective bosom. He attributes this to our Celtic blood: It s a good trait, singing and drinking.
Having just arrived in the City Of The Tribes, the band were back on the tourbus early on Saturday morning, this time to Ballinasloe for an in-store signing, where they ended up playing live on a stall in a market.
We did the signing session and then they took us over to a pub and made us feel really welcome, he says. We met this all-girl band, Barbarella, at the signing session and we went down to see them playing a gig in the local marketplace. The bloke who was organising the gig got up on stage and interrupted their set to introduce us.
We got up and used their instruments and played two songs, The Riverboat Song and Hundred Mile High City . They got up and started thanking us for ruining their set, and I just thought, Oh, you poor sods, you ve got to follow that , he says with a now-you-are-in-my-clutches-Mr-Bond maniacal laugh.
Then it was back to Galway for their show at the Big Top, which Simon laughingly describes as the circus show , with OCS as tonight s main attraction . For a band that can come to Galway and headline one of the city s major festivals, it is quite surprising that one of the most successful rock acts in Britain can walk down most main streets without being recognised.
That s pretty much deliberate, he says. We don t really talk to the press because, to be quite honest, we don t need to. We don t need to talk to the NME and we certainly don t need to talk to The Sun.
Maybe we re just not interesting enough, he smiles wryly. I ve noticed this year, though, that we are being recognised wherever we go, which is nice, but it s a bit strange, really.
So how does Simon find himself dealing with the idea of being a celebrity?
We re fortunate because we re still working with the same people we were working with before The Riverboat Song . Our friends are still the same. Before that, we were hanging out with Oasis and Paul (Weller), so we got to know a lot of people in media areas too.
I m a reasonably friendly person anyway, he says, so if people come up to me I will speak to them. Most people are nice. Some people are weird; they re obsessive and want to know every part of you. I had a bit of that last night at the bar because basically, everybody wants to shag you. I m not saying that to be boastful, but it s true. Actually, I was exceedingly drunk at the time and I wouldn t have been much use to anybody.
Simon sees excessive fan-idolatry, however, as merely one of the perks of the job.
Ultimately, there is an essence of that in what we do, in the relationship between fans and a band. Otherwise you wouldn t be talking to us, would you? he says. That is the nature of the thing. At the end of the day, we are entertainers, and I think that is something that is valued very highly by society. That is why they set you up as stars. We do what we do and a lot of people get off on that.
One of the most noticeable changes was that, when things kicked off with Riverboat , the average age of our audience halved. I didn t think that we d be a teeny band, a boy band. I though that we d appeal more to old blues people, but it s good, cos I can afford new shoes now.
Simon got the chance to prove his personable nature on set in the woods, when two teenage girls, terrible excited at having discovered their idols in the middle of a forest, waylaid the affable frontman for about 10 minutes. However, signing autographs for kids is one thing and fighting off obsessive nymphomaniacs who want to keep your pubic hairs as sexual trophies is quite another. I asked Simon how close he felt to settling down, or if he still enjoys the fact that everybody wants to shag him?
I m beginning to get a bit worried, actually, because . . . don t put that in that I said that everyone wants to shag you, it makes me sound a right twat, he laughs, but it is true, ridiculously true.
In the five years before we had a deal, I did, what is termed, have it large . When you ve done something like that, it s not really important it s like your first fuck. I did a lot of drinking too . . . and I suppose it came with the confidence of becoming validated.
If you re a songwriter and you haven t got a record deal, you can tell people you re a songwriter and they say, Oh, that s a nice hobby . You start to worry about what the fuck you re doing in the world. But with success comes self-confidence, and I am now less inclined to go on a bender.
I suppose the only one down the rung is a poet. Can you imagine someone asking you what you do and having to say you re a poet? Yeah, but what do you do for a job? . I rhyme (laughs airily). I rhyme for a living .
What about the idea that songwriters are the poets and writers of the 90s then? If James Joyce was alive today, would he not be in a rock band?
He may still have been a writer, muses Simon, because the novel is a valid art form and a very popular one. People think of poetry as verse on a page when you re at school. I believe that poetry was never meant to be read it was meant to be heard. Without the actual rhythm of the speech, you lose the whole beauty of it.
In a sense, the most vibrant poetry is rap music. Especially if you take it back to Gil Scott Heron. He was a novelist and a poet. It s all down to the medium. Once you put it to record, then that medium entails all the rock business issues.
My favourite poem is by Bob Dylan, he continues. It s called Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie , an eight-minute poem from 1963, recorded at Carnegie Hall, and he finishes off by saying that You can go to Brooklyn State Hospital and see Woody Guthrie or you can go to a Church of your choice/It s only my opinion: I may be right, I may be wrong/But you can see them both in Grand Canyon at sundown .
Simon Fowler eats, drinks and breathes music, and always has done, from when he was a nipper. One of my earliest memories is from when I was four, he says. It was with The Beatles, and I am very proud to have been on the receiving end of their music. I spoke to a journalist the other day and he told me that he didn t like The Beatles or The Stones. I thought, well what the fuck are you a music journalist for? But I suppose, with some people, music starts with Kraftwerk.
Anyway, I remember when I was four, sitting listening to the radio. Strawberry Fields Forever was on, and I was pretending to play the piano. There was something about that record that, even then, instantly told me what I wanted to be, and I was right. It s nice to be right. Sometimes you think, this can t be real. Like in Scotland the other night, when we played at T In The Park, I was thinking, This is what we dreamed about, and it s real. How the fuck did that happen?
But do you actually realise just how lucky you are when you reach those heights?
You don t, because it s like everything else, it just becomes integrated into your everyday life, he admits. You re still the same person, it s just that your life gets busier and you go more places. It s a shame to say this, but having some money gives you the opportunity to not worry about being broke. There was a period, before Moseley Shoals became successful, when I spent about #100 a week on drink, and I only got #47 a week, so I thought, How the fuck am I affording this? . And that was just the drink.
With Simon s oft-reported love of smoking the odd hash carrot, I wondered how he felt about the issue of legalisation and decriminalisation. To his credit, he is very forthright on the matter: I personally believe that all drugs should be legal, because, first of all, I think it s personal choice, and secondly, the idea that by having them illegal means that people don t take them is patently untrue.
If all drugs were legal it would take them out of the hands of organised crime. And I think that is why it is illegal, because there is too much money to be made. What the fuck would happen to South America?
If you want to take heroin, then take heroin. I personally wouldn t. I would never advocate anyone to take it. I have never taken heroin and I don t plan to, but I don t really see that it s my position to tell someone else that they can t.
I don t think that we should be told by politicians the moral minority in parliament, the cream of the nation, giving out advice from beneath their plastic bags and through their oranges, he spits the words out, paying a less than glowing reference to the British MP, Stephen Milligan, who died in 1995 while acting out a bizarre sexual fantasy.
This being my first time at a video shoot, I was enthralled by the whole experience. But it has to be said that after an hour of sitting on a damp log, with an increasingly numb posterior, the excitement factor wanes considerably.
The one surreal moment which alleviated the entire afternoon came by way of a passer-by. A 20-something gentleman strolling by, pushing a baby in a pram, stopped, called over to Steve Cradock and asked him if he would like any hash.
What? was Steve s sceptical reply.
Y know, for a spliff? explained the gentleman, as he reached his hand down into his pocket, plucking forth a rock of hash the size of a small Zippo lighter. He then bit off half, handed it to the astonished guitarist, saying: You might as well enjoy it, mate. I have to babysit. Then, like the hero in an old western, he disappeared into the distance, still pushing the pram.
Everyone remained in stunned silence for about ten seconds before peals of laughter burst forth involuntarily from all present. I must confess that the only thought running through my mind at the time was why things like that never happen to me. But then I m not the guitarist in a million-selling rock band. n