Burn Baby Burn
Simple but brilliant video, the band rock out to the song, while cheerleaders dance around them, and basketball players play around them. The video is very fast moving and very cool.
Mark Hamilton on the concept of the video:
This is the first promo video we made with our now good friend Jeff Thomas. Shot in a Croydon high school gymnasium it features a troop of cheerleaders and The London Towers basketball team. High action performance, excellently cut with acrobatic cheerleaders, plenty of white panty shots and dribbling basketballers = hit video and high rotation. Hot!
Tim Wheeler on the concept of the video:
Basically, there’s no big idea behind the video, we just wanted something that was fast-moving and very visual to complement the song, it’s not some sort of arty video at all. So we kind of thought, Dancers, cheerleaders, this whole basketball vibe, something really fast. It didn’t make any sense but visually it works, I think it’s a really cool video.
Basically, it was just an excuse to hang out with cheerleaders, really. The way it’s shot, is kind of darkly shot like a nightclub. It’s really like a high school video, it looks like it was shot in the States but it was actually done in Croydon, in some school hall with a weird looking basketball court. The song’s like this cynical break-up song but at the same time it’s a high energy pop tune, I guess it complements the music more than the lyrics, really.
The treatment was sent in by the director, basically we just saw “CHEERLEADERS” in big letters and went “Oh right, that sounds good”. Quite a lot of the time we’ll come up with ideas for the videos ourselves, like “Shining Light”, but this time we didn’t really have any specific ideas.
The director was Jeff Thomas, he’d done the Toploader video before that but our manager didn’t tell us that because otherwise we probably wouldn’t have used him. He’s a real geezer, though.
We did it in one day, we arrived at two in the afternoon, watched the cheerleaders do their thing for a couple of hours and then just started playing and the London Leopards basketball team played around us. It was all done pretty quickly, it was probably one of the most enjoyable videos we’ve ever made. The cheerleaders were actually individual dancers. We went looking at a few cheerleader groups but they didn’t really have it, they didn’t have the look, which is surprising. I guess England doesn’t really specialise in cheerleaders.
On September 2nd 2020, Ash uploaded a HD version of the video to YouTube.
- Released:
- Director: Jeff Thomas
- Shoot location: Croydon, England
- Shoot date: February, 2001
- Production company: POP